Dr. Erin Dolan, the Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Innovative Science Education in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has been awarded the prestigious OIBR Lillian Eby Mentoring Award.
Erin’s illustrious career has been dedicated to enhancing biology education, particularly focusing on the profound impact of students’ research experiences and the pivotal role played by research mentors.
At the heart of her impactful work lies her research laboratory, SPREE (Social Psychology of Research Experiences and Education). She has received over 30 grants from prestigious institutions including a NIH predoctoral training grant, a separate NIH post-baccalaureate training grant, and an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant. Currently, she leads a SEER Center initiative, generously funded by the NSF, leading teams of postdoctoral fellows in Biology Education, providing them with comprehensive professional development and research training.
Erin has not only contributed significantly to the science of science mentoring but has also been a dedicated mentor herself. She has earned widespread recognition, having served on the National Academies consensus committee on mentoring in STEM. Her stellar contributions have garnered prestigious awards, including the American Society for Cell Biology Bruce Alberts Science Education Award and the Award for Exemplary Contributions to Education from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
At OIBR’s annual meeting in early December, Erin Dolan was awarded the 2023 OIBR Lillian Eby Mentoring Award in recognition of her exceptional dedication to science education and mentorship contributions. Please join us in congratulating Erin as she continues to inspire and shape the future of biology education at the University of Georgia.
Celebrating Steve Beach: A Champion of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UGA
Steve Beach is not just a Regents Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Center for Family Research—he has been a tireless advocate for the social and behavioral sciences throughout his 35+ years at UGA. This advocacy work took center stage while Steve was first associate director and then director of what is now known as the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research.
One standout accomplishment defines Steve’s legacy of service—the establishment of the William A. and Barbara R. Owens Institute for Behavioral Research Endowment. As director of the Institute for Behavioral Research, Steve collaborated with Barbara Owens to honor the legacy of her late husband, Bill Owens, the founding director of the Institute of Behavioral Research. Together, they created an endowment that rebranded the institute and provided funds to foster interdisciplinary social science research at UGA.
The most tangible result is the OIBR seed grant program, which is entirely funded by the endowment. OIBR events are also funded by the endowment. These include casual meet-and-greets, lectures, workshops, speed networking and the OIBR annual meeting. None of this programming would be possible without the endowment, which would not have been possible without Steve Beach.
At OIBR’s annual meeting in early December, Steve Beach was awarded the 2023 OIBR Service Legacy Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions. Please join us in congratulating Steve for shaping the social and behavioral sciences at the University of Georgia.
Research published in the Fall 2023 issue of Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology reveals that viewing violent police videos can lead to trouble sleeping, symptoms of PTSD, and heightened feelings of being on guard, particularly among Black Americans.
The study, conducted by OIBR Grant Development Program participant, Glenna L. Read, Associate Professor in Advertising and Public Relations, and her team aimed to investigate if Black Americans reported higher levels of negative experiences with police and increased exposure to violent police videos compared to white Americans. The survey involved 1240 participants and found that Black Americans reported more trauma symptoms and increased concerns about discrimination and stereotyping compared to their white counterparts exposed to similar videos.
The study highlights the impact of vicarious trauma through media on mental health, challenging the current DSM-5 classification that excludes such experiences from PTSD diagnoses. The research suggests a shift in worldview influenced by the belief that one could be stereotyped as a criminal, even though the events are experienced vicariously through media.
The research emphasizes the need for mental health practitioners to be aware of these effects, especially for their Black clients. This research is part of a larger collaboration investigating the impacts of body-worn cameras on perceptions of police-citizen interactions. They are currently testing an intervention to reduce this bias.
Dr. Jessica Knight, Assistant Professor, in Epidemiology and Biostatistics and former OIBR Grant Development Program participant, has been granted a pilot award by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program. The grant, valued at $57,337, has been awarded for her research project, “Addressing stress-related pathways of disparities in cardiovascular health for young Georgia families using a wearable biometric device (CTSA Pilot).”
This innovative project seeks to explore new ways of understanding and addressing disparities in cardiovascular health, particularly in young Georgia families. They aim to achieve this through the utilization of cutting-edge technology and novel research methods. The project’s primary focus is on measuring and evaluating heart rate variability (HRV) responses to stress, an essential factor in cardiovascular health.
The research team plans to combine several key elements in their approach, including ecologic momentary assessment, wearable biometric devices, and advanced machine learning analytics. By combining these elements, they aim to gain a comprehensive understanding of how stress affects HRV, particularly in young populations.
The significance of this research extends beyond the immediate findings. Dr. Knight hopes that the insights gained from this project will serve as a foundation for future NIH and American Heart Association (AHA) applications. The ultimate goal is to incorporate their model into prevention studies that aim to reduce stress-related cardiovascular diseases in young individuals.
In addition, the project’s long-term vision extends to using the developed model in other youth populations. This includes those with obesity, sleep disorders, diabetes, and mental health disorders, broadening the potential impact of the research beyond its initial scope.
Collaborators from the University of Georgia (UGA), including Kyle Johnsen from the College of Engineering, Michael Schmidt from the Department of Kinesiology, and Allan Tate from Epidemiology & Biostatistics, will play vital roles in the project’s success.
The project began on August 1, 2023, and will conclude on July 31, 2024. Dr. Knight’s work, along with her research team, is expected to shed new light on the relationship between stress and cardiovascular health, offering potential solutions for at-risk youth in Georgia and beyond.
Environmental portrait of Assaf Oshri in front of an MRI scanner
The University of Georgia was recently awarded $3.2 million from the National Institutes of Health to study resilience in rural children using neuroimaging technologies, to help find the answers.
The BRANCH study, which stands for Building Resiliency and Nurturing Children’s Health, will investigate the development of resilience among low-income children living in rural Georgia areas over five years, starting at age 7.
The overarching goal is to determine how children’s communities affect their neurocognitive development and risk for drug use as adolescents.
“If you really want to prevent drug abuse, you need to start early,” said Assaf Oshri, OIBR distinguished scholar, principal investigator of the study and an associate professor in UGA’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences and the director of the Youth Development Institute at UGA. “Toxic environments and conditions during childhood can promote risky behavior over time. Things like stress related to poverty, unsafe communities or feeling lonely can manifest in physical stress that can affect brain development.
“And that developmental damage can affect where these kids go and what they do as adults.”
Oshri’s previous research has shown that low to moderate stress can be good for you, as it forces your body to optimize brain cognition and function. But there is a limit to how much stress is a good thing.
Once stress levels go above moderate levels, which is common in households struggling to pay bills or keep a roof over their family, that stress becomes toxic.
Constant high levels of stress can actually change the structure of the brain. It can lead to increases in white matter at the expense of gray matter, which is involved in muscle control, decision-making, self-control, emotional regulation and more. Chronic stress can also make people more susceptible to a variety of illnesses ranging from nausea and migraine headaches to high blood pressure and heart disease.
Children are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of stress because their brains are still developing.
“If a child doesn’t have routine at home and they don’t have the security and the safety of the trust in their environment, how do you expect them to do well in school, behave and be attentive?” Oshri said. “Connecting their environment and trying to understand the psychobiological consequences of it—as we will do in the BRANCH study—can help us design preventive intervention to intervene and reduce risk among children with these environments.”
Oshri hopes the BRANCH study will connect the dots between childhood conditions and brain development not only by interviewing and getting to know the families in the study but also by using MRI scanning technology to assess how stress can affect cognition and neural functioning.
Co-investigators on the project include OIBR distinguished scholar, Lawrence Sweet from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Department of Psychology, and from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences’ OIBR distinguished scholar, Steven Kogan, OIBR Grant Development Program member, Kalsea Koss, Diane Bales and Margaret Caughy, OIBR distinguished scholar.
The study is funded by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Dr. Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn, Professor, Advertising & Public Relations, never thought she would become an academic. Her dad worked in sales for a very long time at multinational corporations in South Korea, and Grace still remembers her dad telling her about the challenges of leading large, integrative teams of people from different backgrounds and the excitement of finally being able to close a deal after months of preparation. She said, “I didn’t really understand much of the content of what was being said- but was always in awe of how the adult world worked and at the multinational scale of things.”
Looking back now, though, Grace shared that “it’s funny how my dad’s experiences and wisdom delivered to me during long conversations over dinner impacted my career choices: I love thinking about how persuasive messages can be designed and evaluated, the processes and outcomes of persuasion, pulling together large integrative teams for research, and ultimately developing interventions for large-scale attitude and behavior change. I never intended to be a professor of advertising but maybe my dad secretly knew all along!”
“Studying persuasion is a constant lesson in humility and the appreciation of diversity,” said Dr. Ahn. “Communication science is complicated and fascinating, because it is very much a relational science, where interactions between the medium, user, and contextual details all matter. The human stands at the center of our science and their lived experiences play a key role in how persuasive messages are processed and interpreted. Understanding the diversity and complexity of these relationships and designing a successful intervention to modify behavior, particularly in the context of everchanging technologies always keeps me on my toes,” Grace said. “What surprises me most about working on these types of projects is that understanding human behaviors and how they interact with technologies never, ever gets any easier (despite all these years)!”
Communication undergirds almost every human activity we can think of; it’s omnipresent. As a result, there are many more armchair scientists in this neck of the woods than there may be in, say, physics or chemistry. Grace added, “It’s surprisingly challenging to get noncommunication scholars to understand what communication science is and why it is important. Despite the seemingly frivolous nature of our research topics (e.g., entertainment, video games, social media), we employ systematic and rigorous methodologies to address our scientific inquiries.”
“Media and communication are weaved into almost every part of our lives and we are far more impacted by mediated communication than we realize; yet, it’s often a challenge to be taken seriously when your area of research is virtual reality, avatars, and video games.”
Grace has over 20 years of training and experience in media psychology with an emphasis on technology-integrated community-level interventions. She is currently serving as the Deputy Director and a MPI of the Center for Children’s Health Assessment, Research Translation, and Combating Environmental Racism, which is part of her current $4.5 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health.
The Center for Children’s Health Assessment, Research Translation, and Combating Environmental Racism (CHARTER), works to develop effective strategies to translate research findings of importance to children’s environmental health to relevant stakeholders in the community, academia, and healthcare. The research team with CHARTER know that working with community partners are the key to developing communication products that can be used to improve children’s health. The center acknowledges the structural nature of health inequity and is working on projects that address how structural inequities can negatively impact children’s health via research projects and community engagement (e.g., social media activities, training community health workers, K-12 outreach programs).
In recent years, Dr. Ahn has really expanded her partnerships with grassroots, non-profit organizations in the community, translating science into actionable, technology-mediated interventions. “When I launch interventions with these community partners, my research team gets to know them well and over the years, and we develop strong friendships with people who share our vision of leveraging science to help people live happier, healthier lives,” she said. “Being able to directly see and interact with community members and observe the positive impact of my research really makes all the hard work worth it. As many of us understand, this job is much more than “just a job”—it creates a lot of meaning in my life. The thrill of making discoveries and generating new knowledge never gets old, but I truly love the opportunity to be able to give back to community through my research. I think that intrinsic reward is what keeps me up working late at nights and drives a lot of the motivation behind my recent work.”
“My research program that started out with a small $20,000 internal grant has now become a sizeable enterprise with over $10 million in extramural funding. The interesting thing is that none of these people are in the field of communication; but their mentorship, guidance, and friendship over the years has allowed my scholarship to dramatically expand beyond its initial narrow focus to something that is much more transdisciplinary and meaningful,” Grace added.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, annually bestows the honor of Lifetime Fellow for extraordinary achievements leading to advancement in science. This award is one of the most distinguished honors within the scientific community.
This year, two scholars from the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research were awarded this prestigious title.
Ping Ma is a Distinguished Research Professor in Statistics and an adjunct professor of computer science at UGA. He has authored or co-authored more than 80 research articles and was recognized with the National Science Foundation Distinguished Lecture in 2021. His work lies in development of statistical theory and methods to solve scientific and engineering problems with broad societal impacts. He was recognized in the statistics category by AAAS.
“I was deeply honored to be elected to AAAS Fellow,” said Ma. “I have been fortunate to work with many colleagues at Owen Institute on many important behavioral research projects, which have been a very rewarding experience.”
He is currently working on statistical and data science, which play a significant role in modern society. They are used extensively in various fields, including healthcare, business, finance, social sciences, and many others. Statistical and data science help us to understand and interpret data, make informed decisions, and solve real-world problems. Statistical and data science provide valuable insights into human behavior and social trends, which the researchers at Owen Institute have been focused on.
Ronald Simons is a Regents’ Professor in Sociology, a Fellow in the Center for Family Research, and co-director of the Center on the Biological Embedding of Social Events and Relationships at OIBR. He has received numerous awards for his research including best article awards from three different professional organizations and the UGA SEC Academic Achievement Award. The National Institutes of Health have provided nearly $50 million dollars of support for his longitudinal studies since 1990, and his research has resulted in over 300 peer-reviewed articles.
Simons stated that, “It is a great honor to be inducted as a fellow into the AAAS and I am humbled to be included in this group of accomplished scientists.”
Much of his scholarship has involved investigations of the mechanisms whereby social-environmental conditions and health risk behaviors become biologically embedded via gene expression and trigger onset of various chronic illnesses. An important component of this work has been the utilization of blood-based epigenetic markers to calculate, in years and months, the extent to which an individual is experiencing accelerated or decelerated biological aging.
These new Fellows will be celebrated for their scientific and socially notable achievements spanning their careers in Washington, D.C., in summer 2023.
UGA faculty members (left to right) Tessa Andrews, Peggy Brickman, Paula Lemons and Erin Dolan. (Photo by Lauren Corcino)
A research team from the University of Georgia will join 103 institutions from across the country to form a collaborative learning community that seeks to foster inclusive undergraduate science education.
Funded by a six-year, $493,065 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Inclusive Excellence 3 (IE3) initiative, the UGA team will focus on three areas of effective and inclusive teaching including changes in policy, effective instructor development and optimal sources of evidence.
The HHMI’s IE3 initiative challenges U.S. colleges and universities to substantially and sustainably build capacity for students to have meaningful and positive experience in science through which they will better understand and engage in scientific thinking and discovery, especially students from backgrounds that have been historically excluded from the sciences.
Of the nearly one million students who enter college intending to study STEM, more than half will not complete a degree in a STEM field. Those who leave STEM are disproportionately students who are first in their family to attend college, students who begin at community colleges and students from historically excluded ethnic and racial groups.
The 104 participating institutions have been divided into seven Learning Community Clusters, or LCCs, that comprise approximately 15 schools each. These clusters will focus on the content of the introductory science experience, evaluating effective and inclusive teaching, and building partnerships between the two- and four-year schools.
Leveraging their collective experiences and resources, the UGA LCC4 research team aims to advance policies around inclusive and effective teaching for promotion and tenure, and to improve sources of evidence used to evaluate teaching more robustly and holistically.
“I think that one of the things we know from lots of research on teaching is that it’s not just about instructor knowledge and skills,” said program director Erin Dolan, who serves as Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Innovative Science Education in the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. “It’s also about incentives, rewards and friction in the environment. What incentivizes an instructor to change their teaching if they need to? How do they know they need to change their teaching? What evidence can inform how they teach, including any changes they make? And then what makes it possible for changes to be sustained over time?”
According to Dolan, one of the things that the university’s recent NSF-funded, $2 million Department and Leadership Teams for Action (DeLTA) project did, which this project capitalizes on, is move away from assuming that faculty are going to be effective teachers from the first time they teach, and toward this idea of continuous improvement.
“And that’s really what we want,” Dolan said, “for people to be reflective teachers who base their teaching decisions on evidence.”
This new project is inherently a team effort. The core team is made up of two groups of faculty and administrators: an implementation team and an advisory team. Along with Dolan, the implementation team members include Tessa Andrews, associate professor in the Department of Genetics; Peggy Brickman, Meigs Professor in the Department of Plant Biology; and Paula Lemons, professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and associate dean of Franklin College. The advisory team will function more strategically and includes: Allan Aycock, director of assessment and accreditation, Office of Academic Planning; Michelle Cook, senior vice provost, Office of Institutional Diversity; Meg Mittelstadt and Ruth Poproski, director and associate director, respectively, of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Naomi Norman, associate vice president for Instruction, and Henry Young, Kroger Professor and head of the College of Pharmacy Department of Clinical and Administrative Pharmacy.
“This project definitely builds on the work that got started with the DeLTA project,” Dolain said. “It nicely complements work that’s happening in CTL with the new QEP and with the 2025 plan for promoting diversity and inclusion, along with the University Strategic Plan. It’s really well aligned with where the university is going, and I think that we are poised to make substantial improvements in supporting faculty in teaching more effectively and inclusively.”
Dr. Lawrence Sweet was awarded the inaugural Lillian Eby OIBR Mentoring Award at our recent annual meeting.
Sweet, an OIBR Distinguished Scholar and Gary R. Sperduto Professor in Clinical Psychology in Franklin College, joined the University of Georgia faculty in 2012. He received a K award with mentee, Jiaying Lui, OIBR Distinguished Scholar and associate professor of Communication Studies and he also received a K award with mentee Assaf Oshri, OIBR Distinguished Scholar and associate professor of Human Development and Family Science. Prior to coming to UGA, Sweet was the mentor on five other grant awards.
His research interests include substance abuse and treatment outcomes (tobacco, vaping, alcohol, opiates), cardiovascular disease, aging, and outcomes of chronic stress and adversity. In collaboration with Dr. Liu, they recently received a R21 grant entitled, “A neuroimaging approach to advance mechanistic understanding of tobacco use escalation risk among young adult African American vapers.”
Dr. Sweet has received several other mentoring awards including the Richard L. Marsh Mentoring Award (UGA Psychology) and is a two-time recipient of the Psychiatry Research Mentor Award in the Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
“Mentoring is my favorite part of my job. Recognition from the outstanding faculty and staff at OIBR is a true honor. Their outstanding facilitation of research and mentorship is highly respected, and this association with Lillian Eby’s record of mentorship and service is such a compliment,” said Sweet.
Congratulations to our 2022 Rising Star, Justin Lavner!
The OIBR Rising Star Award recognizes the scholarly achievements and future potential of an OIBR Distinguished Scholar or Affiliate who is within 8 years of their Ph.D. This award focuses on exceptional and sustained research contribution and future promise, as evidenced by publications, grant submissions (both through OIBR and through other units on campus), funded grants, major works-in-progress and other discipline-relevant evidence of past and likely future scholarly impact.
Dr. Lavner received a beautiful commemorative plaque and a $1,000 research fund.
Dr. Erin Dolan, the Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Innovative Science Education in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has been awarded the prestigious OIBR Lillian Eby Mentoring Award.
