Category: Postdoctoral Research Award

Postdoctoral Research Award 2025

Raíssa Nogueira de Brito, postdoctoral research associate in the Franklin College Department of Anthropology, conducts groundbreaking research on vector-borne disease ecology and zoonotic disease transmission under the mentorship of Associate Professor Susan Tanner in anthropology and Professor Julie Velásquez Runk of Wake Forest University, in collaboration with Professor Nicole Gottdenker in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Brito’s interdisciplinary work bridges anthropology, ecology, and public health to investigate the biological, social, and environmental factors shaping disease emergence. She has a central role in an NSF-funded project on multi-host, vector-borne infections in tropical landscapes, conducting field research in rural Panama and leading a genetic sequencing study on Chagas disease vectors. Brito has published in top journals, including Acta Tropica, and co-developed TriatoKey, a mobile app for disease vector identification and citizen education. A 2023 SEC Emerging Scholar, she has secured research funding and presented internationally. Brito’s work is advancing understanding of how environmental and social factors drive disease transmission, with significant implications for global health and policy.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2025

Stephanie Halmo, postdoctoral research associate in the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, studies metacognition and STEM education under the mentorship of Associate Professor Julie Stanton. Halmo’s work examines how undergraduate life science students develop metacognitive skills, providing key insights into improving science education. She leads the College Learning Study, a large-scale longitudinal project tracking students’ metacognitive skill use and development across four years of college. She has advanced qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, including discourse analysis, to assess how students regulate their thinking during problem-solving. Her research has resulted in multiple first-author publications in CBE–Life Sciences Education and attracted nearly $350,000 in NSF funding as a sole principal investigator—an extraordinary achievement for a postdoctoral scholar. With a growing national and international reputation, Halmo’s research is shaping how educators understand and support student learning in STEM, positioning her as a leader in discipline-based education research.

Postdoctoral Research Awards 2023

Vicente Kenyi Saito-Diaz is on the cusp of establishing himself as an independent investigator pursuing essential questions related to neural development and dysfunction. He is an outstanding scientist who demonstrates great productivity, creativity and insightfulness in his postdoctoral work. Since joining the UGA Center for Molecular Medicine (CMM) in 2018, Saito-Diaz has complemented his previously developed skills in cell biology and biochemistry with cutting-edge human pluripotent stem cell technology to study the cellular basis of development of the peripheral nervous system (PNS). His research has resulted in 10 peer-reviewed articles in top journals and additional ones in review or preparation. He aims to gain a deep understanding of developmental processes and molecular mechanisms of PNS at a time when few other researchers worldwide are focusing on any aspect of this system. His exciting interdisciplinary research could answer fundamental biological questions that are key to designing new treatments for PNS diseases and other yet-to-be-developed neural contexts.

Postdoctoral Research Awards 2023

The research of Ellen Haynes, a wildlife veterinarian and epidemiologist, is conducted under a One Health framework, examining infectious diseases that threaten human, domestic animal and wildlife health. As a postdoctoral research associate at the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in the College of Veterinary Medicine since June 2021, she has seamlessly integrated into a multi-disciplinary, collaborative research environment. Haynes is a talented and versatile investigator, undertaking microbiological laboratory investigations, live animal research and field epidemiological studies. Equally impressive is the diversity of project topics, including international research efforts involving the Guinea Worm Eradication Program, coordination of regional pathogen surveillance in wild snakes, and contributions to numerous additional research projects involving viral and parasitic diseases of wild mammals. A forward-thinking, meticulous researcher with a strong publication record and a gifted educator, she is a popular invited speaker for numerous student and professional groups as well as prestigious scientific meetings.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2024

Brent Simpson, postdoctoral fellow in the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Infectious Diseases, focuses on cell envelope physiology of gram-negative bacteria such as Acinetobacter baumannii, the most multi-drug resistant “superbug” to date. These studies reveal how different layers—including an outer membrane that surrounds the cell wall—function and how they protect the bacteria from harmful substances in their environment. Simpson has revealed new facets of how gram-negative bacteria build and maintain these different layers of the cell envelope, each performing a crucial role such as stabilizing the cell, allowing growth in various environments, and responding to such threats as the entry of noxious compounds and antibiotics. His findings represent a fundamental change in thinking about cell envelope biology and antibiotic resistance, with implications for developing new antibiotics and uncovering new details on how bacteria living in the human gut can hide from the immune system.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2024

Ahva Potticary, a postdoctoral scientist in the Department of Entomology, explores how complex behaviors evolve and how behavior influences evolution, using the parental care behavior of the burying beetle Nicrophorus orbicollis as a study system. The evolution of parental care is expected to proceed through the co-option of existing behaviors, which indicates the use of genes that influence those behaviors in the first place. Potticary tested this idea by determining whether the genes that express inotocin—the insect equivalent of the “bonding hormone” oxytocin/vasopressin—are also used for parenting, publishing her results in the journals Royal Society Open Science and Evolution. Potticary also investigated how behavior may influence evolution by studying how poor parental care influences subsequent generations, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Lastly, Potticary conducted field research at Whitehall Forest, publishing these findings in Ecology and Evolution, which she has joined as associate editor.

Postdoctoral Research Award

Alexandre Marand, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Genetics, has amassed impressive accomplishments while at UGA. He has published 14 peer-reviewed articles including a first-author paper in the prestigious journal Cell, won a National Science Foundation fellowship, and was recently awarded the Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health. His Cell article was a landmark contribution to plant genomics. A major question in biology is how cellular diversity arises from an invariant DNA sequence. Marand applied single-cell sequencing technology to identify variable regulatory DNA sequences across thousands of individual cells. His work will help scientists rapidly find the crucial parts of DNA that control when and where a gene is expressed, accelerating understanding of the molecular events that underlie the development of plant structures. By establishing the first regulatory DNA blueprints of a major crop, Marand’s research lays the foundation for fine-tuning crop traits.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2021

Tobias Brett, postdoctoral researcher in the Odum School of Ecology and the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases, develops new approaches for predicting and mitigating threats from emerging infectious diseases. He designed a detection algorithm that combines early-warning signals into a single measure of emergence risk, successfully applying it to four emerging disease outbreaks, and developed a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics that demonstrated the infeasibility of achieving herd immunity by allowing the virus to spread, producing a paper that was downloaded 80,000 times in about six months.