Category: Past News

Dr. Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn is an Associate Professor in Advertising at Grady College. She teaches undergraduate-level research methods, graduate-level user experience research, communication theory, and advertising and society. Her research examines how social media, video/internet games, and immersive virtual environments influence user attitudes and behaviors. Dr. Ahn is also the founding director of the Games and Virtual Environments Lab in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, and is exploring how digital technology can be used to encourage better food choices, more physical activity and better STEM learning in children. We are so proud of you Dr. Ahn!

Dr. Denise Lewis is an Associate Professor in the Human Development and Family Science department at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Her current research focuses on aging issues relevant to marginalized populations and on household production of health in elder-headed households. She conducts this research with Southeast Asian refugee families in the United States and with impoverished families in Cambodia. Her areas of expertise include, family and community resilience, inter-generational relations, culture, refugee, immigrant & transnational families, aging and sexuality, and grandparenting.

Congratulations to Dr. Gene Brody, an OIBR Fellow, who has recently been appointed to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Director’s Strategic Planning Committee. In this role, one of his responsibilities will be to assist in formulating research priorities for the next five to ten years.

NICHD was founded in 1962 to investigate human development throughout the entire life process, with a focus on understanding disabilities and important events that occur during pregnancy.

Since then, research conducted and funded by NICHD has helped save lives, improve wellbeing, and reduce societal costs associated with illness and disability.

NICHD’s mission is to ensure that every person is born healthy and wanted, that women suffer no harmful effects from reproductive processes, and that all children have the chance to achieve their full potential for healthy and productive lives. The institute also aims to ensure the health, productivity, independence, and well-being of people through optimal rehabilitation.

Go here to learn more about NICHD.

University of Georgia President Jere W. Morehead has appointed a search committee to recruit and review candidates to be the next senior vice president for academic affairs and provost of the institution. Among this impressive committee are our very own Lillian Eby, OIBR Director and Phaedra Corso, our Associate Director. We are confident that these ladies will represent the institute well and are thankful for their dedication to the university.

As the chief academic officer at the University of Georgia, the senior vice president for academic affairs and provost guides efforts to promote a campus environment centered on teaching, research and public service. For more information, go here.

Congratulations to Leann Birch, William P. “Bill” Flatt Childhood Obesity Professor with UGA’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences and an OIBR Fellow, on the release of a great article from NIH regarding an intervention designed to help first-time mothers effectively respond to their infant’s cues for hunger, sleep, feeding, and other infant behaviors significantly improved the body mass index (BMI) z-scores of the child through age 3 years compared with the control group. To read the article and for more information on the results of the study by Intervention Nurses Start Infants Growing on Health Trajectories (INSIGHT), go here.

Workplace wellness programs aim to improve employee health and lower employers’ health care costs, but not all programs have the same impact or cost the same.

Much of a program’s success—and whether it was worth an employer’s investment—depends on how it’s delivered, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.

Many employers want their employees to be healthier because employee health can impact the financial bottom line, said Phaedra Corso, director of the Economic Evaluation Research Group at UGA’s College of Public Health and lead author.

“When you have unhealthy workers, they may incur greater health care costs, and they may use more sick days or may come to work but not be able to work at the productivity level that they would ordinarily,” she said. “The only way you’re going to get hold of these health care costs is for us to start intervening on the prevention side of health, not just providing benefits on the treatment side.”

Corso and her team collaborated with colleagues in the college’s Workplace Health Group to implement and evaluate a new weight loss program called Fuel Your Life. The program was adapted from a successful community-based program developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which emphasized the use of health coaches.

Fuel Your Life offered two methods of health coaching: in a group setting and over the phone. A third control group completed a self-study of the program’s educational workbook.

All participants lost weight, but those who received one-on-one coaching over the phone lost more. Yet, phone coaching was also more expensive, said Corso. From a cost effectiveness perspective, no one intervention type stood out from another.

That’s why Corso wanted to measure more than weight loss. The participants also completed surveys describing how they felt about their health and well-being. The team then calculated the cost per quality-adjusted life year, or QALY, for each intervention type.

“The QALY measure is something that we typically use in health care where we’re looking at an intervention’s impact on health-related quality of life and life expectancy,” said Corso, and it often captures impacts of an intervention that go beyond weight loss.

This second measure showed that participants who had group coaching lost less weight compared to the phone coaching, but gained more in terms of quality of life.

For employers considering the Fuel Your Life program, the analysis suggests group coaching delivers more overall health benefits, said Corso, but it’s up to individual employers to decide whether improvements to mental well-being and quality of life are as important as weight loss.

“If you have a workplace intervention that’s impacting how you feel about your job and how you feel about your co-workers, that’s a good thing,” said Corso. “That, to me, is the more exciting finding.”

The study, “Cost Effectiveness of a Weight Management Program Implemented in the Worksite: Translation of Fuel Your Life,” was published in the Journal of Environment and Occupational Medicine and is available online at https://journals.lww.com/joem/Abstract/publishahead/Cost_Effectiveness_of_a_Weight_Management_Program.98669.aspx.

Co-authors include Justin Ingels, Heather Padilla, Heather Zuercher, David DeJoy and Mark Wilson from UGA’s College of Public Health and Robert Vandenberg from UGA’s Terry College of Business.

OIBR Affiliate and 2016 Grantsmanship Development Program participant, Y. Joon Choi conducts research that addresses issues such as substance abuse and intimate partner violence while also educating future social work professionals and researchers. Learn more about Dr. Choi here

OIBR Fellow, Dorothy Carter, Assistant Professor in Psychology, applies I/O psychology principles to help organizations, researchers and companies solve big challenges. In her Leadership, Innovation, Networks, and Collaboration, or LINC, Laboratory, she and her research team work to help provide teamwork and leadership solutions for an array of organizations. Read more

We are excited to welcome Dr. Joshua A. Gordon, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health,  to our campus on Tuesday, May 1 to present the 2018 William A. Owens lecture. This event is free to open to anyone interested in Mental Health. More here

The 2018 First-Year Odyssey Teaching Award goes to Jamie Cooper, an OIBR Affiliate and an associate professor of food and nutrition in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Dr. Cooper uses her research on reducing obesity to give her students a scientific framework for nutrition, along with skills and tools for healthy eating as part of her seminar Healthy Eating: Exploring Truths and Myths.

She also successfully engages her students in a meaningful way with scientific research and critical reading by having them use particular library resources to research and critique scientific articles.

The First-Year Odyssey Teaching Award recognizes outstanding instructors who have demonstrated creativity or innovation in instruction, connection of seminar content to the instructor’s research and incorporation of FYOS program goals into the seminar.

The 2018 Service-Learning Teaching Excellence Award recipient is Jerry Shannon, an OIBR Affiliate and an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the geography department in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the financial planning, housing and consumer economics department of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

Dr. Shannon, a 2015-2016 Service-Learning Fellow and past Lilly Teaching Fellow, developed and teaches a split-level geography service-learning course in Community Geographic Information Systems. In these courses, his students learn principles of undertaking and communicating geographic research, applying GIS and data visualization methods to real-world problems for local community partners including the Athens Wellbeing Project, the Clarke County School District’s local school governance teams, Community Connection of Northeast Georgia, and the Athens-Clarke County Police Department.

Shannon also has mentored undergraduate research through CURO, engaging students in learning about food insecurity, urban development and housing issues through community-requested GIS projects benefiting the Cobbham Historic District, the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing, Bike Athens and local food banks.

The Service-Learning Teaching Excellence award recognizes excellence in developing, implementing and ­sustaining academic service-learning opportunities for UGA students in domestic and/or international settings.

Brett Clementz, OIBR Fellow and a professor in the psychology department, has rapidly advanced the understanding of the biological bases of psychoses with the use of brain scan technologies, batteries of patient tests and sophisticated data analysis.

His early goal was to learn how inaccurate sensory processing can lead to abnormalities in brain functioning and behavior. His laboratory later identified biomarkers of neurobiological deviations that are associated with manifestations of different subgroups of psychoses. These biomarkers could allow clinicians to diagnose and target medications more accurately. With growing evidence to support a novel taxonomy of psychiatric illness, he helped spearhead a game-changing movement to re-envision diagnoses of psychoses based not on century-old symptom groupings but using the tools of modern neuroscience.

His work on alterations in brain oscillation patterns also has shown how integrated brain activity supports higher level cognition, emotion processing and other aspects of behavior.

The title of Distinguished Research Professor is awarded to faculty who are internationally recognized for their original contributions to knowledge and whose work promises to foster continued creativity in their discipline.