Category: Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award

Thomas Peters

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2014

Thomas Peters, a recent masters graduate in landscape architecture, has extensively researched three species of the genus Arundinaria, commonly known as rivercane. The only member of the bamboo family native to North America, rivercane once formed vast thickets, or canebrakes, across the southeastern floodplain, but development and agriculture have significantly impacted its habitat. These canebrakes support a variety of wildlife, including several endangered species, and the cane is an irreplaceable resource to American Indian Tribes that use it for traditional basketry and other cultural applications. Peters conducted field propagation trials in order to find ways of growing rivercane in a nursery setting, thereby safeguarding the future of sustainable canebrake restoration. He has found applications for his research on actual sites throughout the southeast, including several restoration plantings in Athens. He has also distributed rivercane to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina and the Cherokee National in northeastern Oklahoma.

Jay Agarwal

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2014

Jay Agarwal, a recent doctoral graduate in chemistry, is an extraodinary researcher. At UGA, he published 10 peer-reviewed articles in top scientific journals in his field, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chemie. Moreover, he earned his doctoral degree in two years and nine months, approximately three years sooner than the average student. Much of his research focuses on converting the carbon dioxide released as a byproduct of large-scale combustion into useful products. Specifically, Agarwal creates catalysts to mediate this conversion — his first papers describe mechanisms of well-known rhenium-based catalysts, while later papers detail the synthesis and characterization of new, inexpensive manganese-centered catalysts. This and other projects are producing the requisite innovation for realizing clean combustion.

Katherine Verbist

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2013

Katherine Verbist, a recent doctoral graduate in cellular biology, made significant contributions to the field during her time at UGA, publishing a total of five papers during her graduate career. Much of her work focuses on questions related to immunology. For her doctoral thesis, Verbist worked on understanding how the immune system mediates long-term protection to the influenza virus. She examined a group of cells known as CD8 T, which, once exposed to an infection, begin to “remember” previous infections and respond more rapidly and vigorously when they encounter the same infectious agents again. Verbist worked to discover how CD8 T cells are generated, maintained and how they find the sites of infection inside the body. Her work promises to inform the development of more effective vaccines against influenza viruses and many other agents that have evolved ways of avoiding the immune system. Verbist is working currently as a postdoctoral fellow at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

William Thomas Okie

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2013

William Thomas Okie, a recent doctoral graduate in history, has already made significant contributions to the field. His dissertation, “Everything Is Peaches Down in Georgia: Culture and Agriculture in the American South,” is a history of the state’s peach industry. Having grown up in middle Georgia, Okie was well-acquainted with the peach’s iconic status in the region, and his research sought to uncover the environmental, economic and cultural history of this all important commodity. He details the history of peach horticulture and the way the peach fit within the larger history of horticulture as an environmental ideal. But Okie’s work also highlights the impact of the peach industry on labor, urbanization and rural farming. His work is an excellent account not only of agricultural modernization in the South, but also the much broader trends in rural life in an era of globalization. His dissertation has already yielded an award-winning publication in a top journal in his field, and he hopes to publish it as a book.

Lincoln Larson

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2013

Lincoln Larson, a recent doctoral graduate in forest resources, was an outstanding graduate student during his time at UGA. Larson worked with his advisors and other researchers on projects involving a central theme: the application of a social science research to address natural resource problems. In both his master’s thesis and dissertation, he explored the human-environment relationship and identified factors that encourage environmental stewardship and positive relationships between people and the natural world. His dissertation project, “State Park Use and Outdoor Recreation Benefits Across Demographically Diverse Populations in Georgia,” which represents one of the largest studies of state park users and non-users ever conducted in the U.S., highlighted multiple ways that public parks contribute to active, healthy lifestyles. His conclusions have been used by federal and state agencies to inform resource management and policy, and his work is celebrated by many in the field as an excellent example of evidence-based resource management. Larson is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University.

NaJuana Lee

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2012

NaJuana Lee, a recent doctoral graduate in art, researches art education pedagogy as a means of addressing implicit and explicit racism. For her dissertation, Lee used a mixed-methods approach with both quantitative and qualitative methodology to develop a transformative pedagogy through which students’ implicit and explicit attitudes about race and racism were positively impacted. She designed a taught a studio-based course, which was structured to include critical readings on racial issues and class discussions to explore racial attitudes, and she concluded through testing, interviews, observation and analysis of student visual responses that it is possible to positively change student attitudes about race and racism. Her research has great significance, as the participants in her class are studying to become teachers of art in K-12 schools, and they will be teaching children of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. Lee has presented her research in a variety of professional venues, and she has one article based on this work published, two in press and two more in process.

Austin Lacy

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2012

Austin Lacy, a recent doctoral graduate of the Institute of Higher Education, researched and wrote a dissertation that uses Bayesian analysis to further the understanding of state-level higher education governance systems. By arraying states along a continuum of governance centralization, Lacy’s analysis will lead to a more precise measure of state higher education governance that may be included in examinations of various state policy adoptions and funding trends. Beyond this methodological technique that incorporates historical information into the measure, this work stands to deepen the general understanding of governance arrangements by providing a measure that more closely represents the state governance structures. Lacy has also conducted research related to state- and campus-level policy innovations. For example, he uses duration analysis and other longitudinal techniques to examine state policy adoption and universities as multi-product firms. Lacy regularly publishes and presents conference papers in the leading outlets for both higher education and public policy.

Qing Liu

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2012

Qing Liu, a recent doctoral graduate in psychology, studies wild capuchin monkeys and their skilled use of stone tools to crack tough palm nuts, a phenomenon that was discovered just seven years ago and has been studied by Liu’s team since 2005. She used a laborious manual coding procedure to track points on the monkeys’ bodies through time, coding points on each field of video in stop-motion playback. Her kinematic analysis is the first such study of manual actions in wild primates, and she has continued her work through a series of field experiments, the results of which were published in “Animal Behavior,” the premier journal in the field. Her research is broadly relevant to the more general topic of how primates explore affordances of objects in problem-solving situations using their limbs and hands, particularly in tool-using situations where indirect relations between tool and the target of action must be noticed and managed.

Swati Agrawal

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2012

Swati Agrawal, a recent doctoral graduate in cellular biology, researched and wrote her dissertation onToxoplasma gondii, a unicellular parasite and cause of toxoplasmosis. Specifically, Agrawal used a combination of genetics and biochemistry to discover how proteins travel across four membranes to support the function of an organelle that is essential to the parasite’s viability. She identified the molecular machinery involved in transporting proteins across the innermost membrane, and showed that a different complex was involved in the transport across the third membrane. She also engineered a mutation in which the absence of a particular protein resulted in death of the parasite, and these proteins are attractive targets for the development of new drugs for many parasitic diseases. Argawal authored four papers during her graduate career, and she has been invited to present her work in both national and international forums.

Denita Williams

on February 19, 2016

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2011

Denita Williams, a recent postdoctoral graduate in toxicology, researched the problem of spontaneous abortion in women who unknowingly consume food contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. She developed an animal model, the guinea pig, to simulate human listeriosis during pregnancy, and then used that model to predict the risk of stillbirths in humans. Her work showed that the pregnant guinea pig, like human women, is susceptible to L. monocytogenes, which can and often does lead to stillbirths. Her research focused on using this animal model for three purposes: to develop a dose response curve, to conduct a risk assessment for L. monocytogenes, and to investigate the mechanisms by which L. monocytogenes exposure results in stillbirths. She also investigated the immunological effects of infection on the fetus and also the invasive capabilities of L. monocytogenes. Her work will likely result in a revision of the federal L. monocytogenes risk assessment — and recommendations of the Food and Drug Administration for pregnant women.