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New Faculty Fellows MU-ADVANCE is pleased to announce that three Faculty Fellowships and one seed grant have been awarded to four pre-tenure female STEM faculty for the academic year 2009-10. The purpose of the fellowships is to provide both monetary and mentoring support to junior female faculty by enhancing faculty development during their pre-tenure period. Fellowships provide $15,000 to the faculty member to be used for research and/or teaching. In addition, the Fellows receive $5,000 for a mentor, as well as individual coaching sessions with MU-ADVANCE PI Dr. Marcia Harrison. Dr. Tracy Christofero, an Associate Professor and the Program Director of Technology Management, was awarded a $5,000 seed grant to explore new avenues of research. These funds will provide Dr. Christofero support for both the development of a new research project and for subsequent grant proposal development. Dr. April Fugett-Fuller, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, investigates word recognition and neighborhood effects, which involve words that differ from each other by one character, such as boy and bay. Her current research examines the influence of phonological (sound) and orthographic (spelling) neighborhood size on semantic factors in language processing. This fellowship will help Dr. Fuller employ cross task comparisons, including perceptual identification (interpretation of a degraded stimulus) and naming (producing the words out loud). Dr. Laura McCunn, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, will investigate the molecular photochemistry of halogenated molecules isolated in a low-temperature matrix of argon atoms, using the matrix-isolation Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (MI-FTIR) technique. Dr. McCunn completed the construction of a MI-FTIR in her lab during the summer of 2009. The new MI-FTIR will enhance chemistry research at Marshall by allowing the measurement of the vibrational spectra of radicals that occur as reaction intermediates during combustion. The apparatus will also be used to learn about the photochemistry of halogenated hydrocarbons. Dr. Anna Mummert, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, will study the effect of super-spreading events in infectious diseases. Super-spreading events, for the purpose of this study, are defined as “those individuals who infect more than the average number of secondary cases.” Dr. Mummert will employ a basic deterministic mathematical model, called the SIR model (where S is the number of individuals susceptible to the disease; I is the number who are infected; and R is the number of individuals who have recovered) to model infectious diseases that involve super-spreading events. The goal of the fellowship is to transition Dr. Mummert’s research focus from theory to application by using mathematical biology.
MU-ADVANCE congratulates the Fellows
and wishes them productive and rewarding research
experiences.
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