Category: Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2025

Trevor Tuma, recent Ph.D. graduate in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, conducts interdisciplinary research in two distinct fields—forest biotechnology and biology education—under the mentorship of professors Chung-Jui “C.J.” Tsai and Erin Dolan. His biology research is aimed at enhancing biofuel production and developing more resilient trees with higher biomass yields. Tuma combined greenhouse experiments and field studies to uncover key mechanisms in carbohydrate allocation affecting biomass yield and climate resilience in trees. His education research examined the negative aspects of mentoring relationships, including how these relationships can go awry and cause harm for students. His research contributions have been published in multiple journals and presented at national and international conferences and universities. Now an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at UGA, Tuma continues to advance STEM education and is poised to make significant contributions to the field.

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2025

Ava Reck, recent Ph.D. graduate in human development and family science from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, conducts research on the sociocultural and neurobehavioral mechanisms of mental health in children and adolescents. Under the mentorship of professors Steve Kogan and Assaf Oshri, she has examined how poverty, neglect, and racial discrimination influence mental health through family and neurocognitive pathways. Reck has published 12 peer-reviewed articles, with six as first author. Her research on internalized racism and conduct problems in Black adolescents and food insecurity’s impact on adolescent brain development has received national attention. During her time at UGA, she was awarded a Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance grant and multiple university-wide fellowships. Now a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Translational Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, Reck continues to advance interdisciplinary research on developmental risk and resilience.

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award

Justin Stilwell completed a rigorous five-year combined anatomic pathology residency/Ph.D. program at the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine in 2021. In addition to the multi-species aspect of his residency, he sought specialized training in the pathology of aquatic animal diseases. His research spanned infectious diseases and cancer biology in a variety of exotic and aquatic animal species. Stilwell’s dissertation work elucidating the pathogenesis of myxozoan infections in catfish could lead to significantly lower fish losses through the development of management strategies to mitigate and prevent outbreaks. Now a clinical assistant professor of veterinary pathology in the Department of Pathobiology and Population Medicine at Mississippi State University, Stilwell is applying his UGA training to investigate disease processes in marine mammals and sea turtles dying on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He is poised to make many further contributions to the knowledge of aquatic animal health and advance the role of veterinarians in science, agriculture and translational medicine.

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award

Huimin Cheng, assistant professor of biostatistics at Boston University, has established an early-career record of high-impact research at the intersection of network science, machine learning, and biomedicine, firmly establishing her potential to become an esteemed scholar. She works closely with biophysicists, engineers, computer scientists, political scientists, public health scientists, and sociologists to solve practical problems and guide scientific development. She has created new methods for network data analysis, a burgeoning area given the proliferation of relational datasets in the scientific community. Cheng’s groundbreaking methods for statistical network modeling cater to the domain’s pressing theoretical and computational needs. She has built collaborations within Boston University, developing novel machine learning methods to accelerate ultrafast spectroscopy experiments, as well as network-transfer-learning methods to enhance data integration and analysis.

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award

Hoang Luong, who completed his Ph.D. in physics in 2021, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He consistently shows creativity in solving problems, mastering multiple technical and analytical/computational skills and developing theoretical and simulation insights. At UGA, he made three outstanding contributions to the metallurgical coating and thin-film community. He explored fabricating nanostructures of composite noble metals and magnetic materials as magneto-plasmonic systems. He investigated the design and apprehension of active chiral metamaterials. And he made a breakthrough in hydrogen sensor applications using a similar approach. He contributed as the first/co-author for more than 20 published research papers over nearly five years at UGA, some with high-impact factor journals in cutting-edge research topics. In his postdoctoral position at UCSB, he has been working on an entirely new research direction, studying long-term stability of organic photodetectors and organic photovoltaics..

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award

Grace Cushman, who completed her Ph.D. in 2021 in the Department of Psychology, is a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Child Mental Health T32 Program, a competitive research-focused, NIH-funded program. As a pediatric psychologist, she collaborates with medical providers in children’s hospitals. Cushman’s research focuses on understanding the interplay between psychology and medicine to find modifiable factors that could improve health outcomes and the lives of chronically ill children and their families. She investigates factors that facilitate or impede adherence to medical and treatment regimens in youth, including parent functioning and their perspectives on their children’s well-being. She has successfully transferred her skills from patients with solid organ transplants and inflammatory bowel disease during her Ph.D. research to those at Brown University with food allergy and asthma. Publishing 30 peer-reviewed articles in top journals, she is on a trajectory to be one of the leading researchers in her field.