Research Notes

College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Professor Wins Book Award Class

CLASS faculty member and Department of History Professor, Michelle Haberland, Ph.D., received the Southern Historical Association’s H. L. Mitchell Award for her latest book, Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930–2000. The award recognizes the best book published on the southern working class. The professor’s book examines the apparel industry’s impact on gender transformation in the garment industry and the industry’s great expansion in the South in the 1930s, to the demise of its southern branch at the end of the 20th century.


College of Business Administration

Outstanding Dissertation Award

Brian Dowis, Ph.D., assistant professor of accounting, received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Accounting Association Gender Issues and Work-Life Balance Section. The award included a plaque and a $1,000 cash prize, which was presented to Dowis at the Section’s annual business meeting in New York City. Dowis is being recognized for his exceptional contribution to scholarly research via his dissertation titled, “An Empirical Examination of Gender, Political Affiliation, and Family Composition Issues Affecting Reasonable Compensation in Closely Held Corporations.”


College of Health and Human Sciences

New Community Outreach Grant

The School of Health and Kinesiology’s Sport and Exercise Psychology program received a community outreach grant from the Association of Applied Sport Psychology in the amount of $4,583 to fund the project “Beyond the Playing Field: The Implementation and Evaluation of a Sport-Based, Positive Youth Development Program for At-Risk Youth.” Five graduate students, Mindy Scott, Kelley Catenacci, Kylie Phillips, Kendra Grant and Meghan Kupiec developed the grant to support the development and implementation of a sport-based life skills program for underserved youth at the Boys and Girls Club in Statesboro. The project is under the direction and supervision of associate professor Brandonn Harris, Ph.D.


Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Information Technology

Research Symposium

More than 100 students participated in the annual CEIT Student Research Symposium this spring. The symposium is an opportunity to showcase ongoing research efforts to invited engineering and IT professionals as well as Georgia Southern students and faculty. Students submitted at least 83 posters for presentations this year. The research interests cover almost 20 areas, including alternative energy, autonomous vehicles, data management, cybersecurity, micro and nano grids, infrastructure and biomedical engineering


Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health

Maintaining Access

Since 2015, faculty from the Georgia Southern Jiann- Ping Hsu College of Public Health have been awarded three grants totaling $810,000 to study Georgia’s rural hospitals financial and operational sustainability. The FLEX Financial and Operational Improvement Grant (2016-18) brings together researchers from the College of Public Health and the College of Business Administration to help improve the performance of Georgia’s rural Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs). In the last six years, 72 rural hospitals have closed nationwide. Georgia is one of the hardest hit states, with five rural hospitals closing since 2012. Four of these five were CAHs, which serve as lifelines for patients who need health care. CAHs are characterized as being the smallest of hospitals, yet serve the greatest of needs within Georgia’s statewide rural landscape.


College of Science and Mathematics

Chemistry Professor Receives NASA Grant

Professor Ryan C. Fortenberry, Ph.D., in the Department of Chemistry has been selected for research funding from NASA. The award supports NASA missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. His co-principal investigator on the research project is Professor Joshua P. Layfield, Ph.D., of St. Thomas University in Minnesota. Their proposal, titled, “Development of a Reparametrized Semi-Empirical Force Field to Compute the Rovibrational Structure of Large PAHs” will provide benchmarked data for the infrared spectra of large, amorphous molecules.


College of Education

Professor Collaborates With Smithsonian Institution

Amanda Glaze, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the College of Education, is serving as a co-investigator on a grant the Smithsonian Institution has received from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In mid- September, Glaze was informed that the team’s grant was fully funded in the amount of $1,083,000 over the next five years. It is the second grant in a series that began with a three-year NSF grant to develop teaching modules for AP biology students. The grant, titled, “Learning Evolution through Human Examples,” focuses on the redesign of the early AP teaching modules for use in general high school biology courses to encourage and support the teaching of human and non-human evolution in the curriculum. The program also provides culturally responsive teaching strategies (CRS) for broaching topics that are deemed “controversial” in the public arena. The piloting of the curriculum will take place in Alabama. If effective, the CRS and the evolution modules will be made available at no charge for classroom teachers through the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program website. Since teachers in Georgia face many of the same challenges as those faced by Alabama educators, this curriculum and CRS will provide access to programs and support that are relevant and meaningful to their unique experiences.