14 get UAH New Faculty Research awards

Dr. Ray Vaughn, UAH vice president for research and economic development.

Michael Mercier | UAH

Fourteen new tenure-track faculty members at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) will share $127,213 in 2014-15 New Faculty Research (NFR) awards from UAH's Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development.

"We invested more UAH funds then we had originally anticipated due to the high quality of the proposals we received," says Dr. Ray Vaughn, vice president for research and economic development. "It is important for us to remember that we are investing based on our expectation of facilitating a return on that investment by our faculty. I've found the UAH faculty to be a very good investment."

I’ve found the UAH faculty to be a very good investment.

The NFR program is intended to assist UAH's new tenure-track faculty in securing external funds in support of their scholarly interests. Tenure-track professors who had been at UAH less than three years at the time of proposal submission were eligible. The funds must be spent within one year of the award, and the maximum award was set at $10,000. Awards were limited to one per faculty member.

"Our response to these programs has always been good," Dr. Vaughn says, "but we do tweak the programs offered each year to meet what we perceive the campus needs to be."

Award winners, their college, center or department and their proposal title:

• Dr. Azita Amiri, Nursing, "The Effect of an Educational Intervention for Second Hand Smoke on Pregnancy Outcomes;"
• Dr. Anna Foy, Humanities, "Cotton Mather, the Revolution Controversy, and the Seventeenth-Century English Epic;"
• Dr. Andrei Gandila, Humanities, "Money in a Pre-Modern Economy: Coin Circulation in the Eastern Mediterranean, c. 500-650 A.D.;"
• Dr. Liwu Hsu, Business, "Dynamic Examination of Employee Satisfaction, Customer Satisfaction, and Transaction Performance;"
• Dr. Kyle Knight, Sociology, "Pathways to Sustainability: A Cross-National Analysis of the Carbon Intensity of Human Well-Being;"
• Dr. Eunseok Lee, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, "First Principles Study on the Multilayer Solid Electrolyte Materials;"
• Dr. Ansuree Mukherjee, Chemistry, "Bio-Inspired Nickel Complexes to Protect Cell-Damages under Oxidative Stress;"
• Dr. George Nelson, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, "In Situ Neutron Imaging of Enzymatic Electrochemical Cells;"
• Dr. Chao Peng, Computer Science, "A Multi-GPU Approach for Massive CAD Model Visualization;"
• Dr. Christina Steidl, Sociology, "Gender and the Negotiation of Career: Women's Experiences in the U.S. Military;"
• Dr. Christopher Taylor, Visual and Performing Arts, "Spectatorship in the Southeastern United States: Creative Research; Sculpture as Spectator;"
• Dr. Wolfram Verlaan, Education, "Comparing Reading Comprehension and Listening Comprehension of Narrative and Expository Text in Middle-grade Students;"
• Dr. Tingting Wu, Civil and Environmental Engineering, "Synergistic Integration of Advanced Oxidation and Reverse Osmosis for Wastewater Reuse with Zero Liquid Discharge;"
• Dr. Hongyu Zhou, Civil and Environmental Engineering, "Sustainable Bamboo Fiber Composites for Civil Infrastructural Applications"

"Internal investments are critical for a research institution. This is one of the major differences between a teaching university and a research university," Dr. Vaughn says. "We invest in our faculty's ideas, equipment needs and professional development in anticipation of their future research successes and contributions to science in general."

The program strengthens the bonds between UAH's faculty and administration in order to facilitate faculty success, Dr. Vaughn says.

"We are not a funding agency, so we want to promote the ability of our faculty to be competitive for external funding, and sometimes that simply means supporting them early in their research so that they can prove the viability of an idea or to show some early results," he says. "Our faculty and research staff are very strong and have proven to me that they will succeed if given the opportunity."