Creative Research Medals
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These medals recognize outstanding research or creative activity within the past five years that is focused on a single theme carried out at UGA. The 2007 recipients are: Jennifer Monahan, Daniel Nakano, Pamela Orpinas, Pejman Rohani and Boris Striepen.
Monahan, associate professor of speech communication and Fellow of the Institute for Behavioral Research, designed and implemented a unique research program examining how communication and social perceptions change when people are under the influence of alcohol. Her work culminated in a new model of alcohol and strategic communication behavior. The Alcohol and Communication Choices Model does away with the simple-minded view of alcohol as a social lubricant. Through her work, researchers now understand that, relative to being sober, inebriated people tend to focus more on themselves—and to overestimate their ability to achieve their goals while underestimating social cues relative to power and dominance. Monahan’s work has important implications for public health issues such as date rape, drunk driving, marital fidelity, shyness and social stress, aggression and spousal abuse, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
Nakano, professor of mathematics, is a world-renowned authority and a leading force in the representation theory of algebraic groups. This important branch of mathematics benefits many fields, including chemistry and physics, especially as it developed from attempts to understand symmetry in nature. Nakano’s groundbreaking work on the computation of support varieties for Lie algebras led to three important papers that have brought distinction to the University of Georgia. In the first paper the support varieties for Weyl modules were determined for good prime numbers, which proved a conjecture made by J. Jantzen in 1987. In the second paper the validity of the Jantzen Conjecture was used to describe the restricted nullcone for good primes. This work culminated in the third paper in which these computations were extended to all prime numbers. Nakano’s research provided vital links between the cohomology theory, representation theory and the structure of nilpotent orbits, greatly advancing this field of inquiry.
Orpinas, professor of health promotion and behavior, is recognized internationally as an expert on bullying and violence among school-aged children and adolescents. Drawing upon health promotion and psychological theories, Orpinas examined the determinants of violent behavior and developed evaluation programs to prevent and reduce aggression in this age group. She also translated her basic research into specific strategies to help educators and school administrators prevent bullying. The American Psychological Association invited Orpinas and co-author and UGA colleague Arthur Horne to write a book on the subject. Bullying prevention: Creating a positive school climate and developing social competence is the only APA book on this topic.
Rohani, associate professor of ecology, studies the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. His work has led to a greater understanding of how pathogens spread through their host population and has addressed questions of interest to the public health community. His studies of the past decade culminated in development of a novel mathematical framework to explore interactions between unrelated infectious diseases or strains of the same pathogen within a host population. Rohani applied this model to explain recent epidemics of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease, which has re-emerged in outbreaks of increasing size and severity. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offered an approach for elucidating the relative contributions of immunological and ecological mechanisms in determining how dengue fever spreads—and also the pattern of sequential serotype replacement over successive epidemics. Rohani’s innovative work paves the way for understanding how pathogen strains or unrelated infectious diseases may interact.
Striepen, associate professor of cellular biology, has established himself as a world leader in the field of molecular parasitology using a blend of genetic, cellular and computational tools. Building on his outstanding work as a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania, Striepen made new discoveries at UGA’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases about the cell biology and biochemistry of Toxoplasma and Cryptosporidium, two human parasites that can cause disease and fatalities in immunocompromised patients and small children. Striepen demonstrated that if parasite chloroplast replication was disrupted, the parasite would die. Yet scientists still didn’t understand the role that the chloroplast played in keeping the organism alive. However, in 2006, Striepen published a landmark paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences detailing the apicoplast’s essential role of providing fatty acid synthesis for the parasite. His work offers the possibility of new therapeutic agents in the treatment of a host of infectious diseases in humans as well as livestock
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Graduate Student Winners
• Chih-Horng Kuo, a doctoral candidate in genetics, received the James L. Carmon Honorarium for his use of computers in studying the mathematical modeling of host-parasite interactions and the co-evolution and genome evolution of protozoan parasites.
• Emily Pritchett, a doctoral candidate in physics and astronomy, received the James L. Carmon Scholarship Award for her work on the physical implementation of a functional quantum computer.
• Jolly Mazumdar, a recent doctoral graduate in cellular biology, received the Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award for her research in which she designed, performed and published experiments of exceptional clarity that led to a breakthrough in understanding the fatty acid metabolism of Toxoplasma, an important human parasite.
• Mariana Souto-Manning, a recent doctoral graduate in language education, received the Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award for establishing critical narrative analysis as a novel and creative methodology that unites critical discourse and narrative analyses in a mutually beneficial union.
Recipients of the 2007 Graduate Student Excellence in Research Awards include Pamela Jane Bonner, Giuseppe Lupis and Tonya Westbrook. |
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Josiah Meigs Award for Excellence in Teaching
Creative Research Awards
Inventor's Award
Distinguished Research Professors
Richard B. Russell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching |
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