Research Awards: Velma McBride Murry

Affiliate Professor Velma McBride Murry was recently honored at the University of Georgia's 26th Annual Research Awards Banquet on March 30, 2005. Dr. Murry received a creative research medal recognizing outstanding research projects and creative activities with a single theme carried out at UGA.

Dr. Murry, a professor of child and family development and co-director of UGA’s Center for Family Research, studies African-American families and how parents help their children become confident, self-regulating and resilient in the face of societal pressures, including racism. To further study and foster strong parenting skills, she and her colleagues developed the Strong African American Families (SAAF) project, an intervention program that implements many of her methods and discoveries. Murry currently has $14.8 million in NIH funding and has been a lead researcher on grants totaling more than $26 million. The National Council on Family Relations awarded her the 1999 Ernest Osborne National Teaching Excellence Award and, with her colleagues, the 2003 Reuben Hill Award for outstanding family research.

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