Research Notes
Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Computing
Professor Lands $300,000 Grant for Power System Research
Professor Masoud Davari, Ph.D., has been awarded a grant of $299,850 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his research. Davari submitted the proposal, “Collaborative Research: Fully Integrated Power and Energy Systems with Multi-Infeed AC/ DC Architecture: Developing Advanced Controls, Protections, and Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation.” His research will develop advanced protections, controls and automation for the modernized microgrids toward implementing smart grids and help merge those systems into one single process. The developed theories of this project, done in collaboration with Mississippi State researchers, can be tailored and broadly developed for many networked types of control in other domains and power systems.
The three-year project will give specific attention to the involvement of underrepresented minorities at Georgia Southern and Mississippi State University in STEM research and learning. Davari is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in power systems and power electronics.
Waters College of Health Professions
Soldier Athlete Human Performance Optimization Project
Nancy Henderson, DPT, is working collaboratively with the 2nd Brigade Physical Therapist, Capt. Max Dummer, and the 3rd Infantry Division stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, to offer the nine-week program, Soldier Athlete Human Performance Optimization (SAHPO). The program is currently open to students enrolled in the physical therapy program on Georgia Southern University Armstrong Campus. Students who participate in the SAHPO are assigned to their own company, approximately 100 soldiers, within one of the battalions at Fort Stewart. Four to 10 soldiers from each company who are registered for the program are partnered with one of the student-participants.
The program uses a train-the-trainer method where each student provides didactic education on three different injury prevention topics, running, mobility and functional fitness, to their assigned soldiers. Students also provide implementation classes where they assist their soldiers in teaching the rest of the company the material that the students taught them.
Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health
Weight Loss Trends in Overweight Adolescents
Master of Public Health graduate Daneisha R. Hawkins (‘18), co-authored a study published in JAMA Pediatrics on weight loss trends in overweight adolescents. This student-led research used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to examine weight loss trends. Students classified data into three survey periods, early/reference (1988-1994), intermediate (1999-2004) and recent (2009- 2014), and looked at data from participants aged 16-19 in all periods.
Results showed that fewer overweight and obese adolescents attempted to lose weight in 2009-2014 compared with their counterparts interviewed in 1988-1994. Additionally, more overweight adolescents seem satisfied with their weight and not ready or motivated to engage in weight loss efforts.
Parker College of Business
Logistics and Supply Chain Management Program Earns Top-15 Ranking
The Georgia Southern University Logistics and Supply Chain Management (L&SCM) department is ranked in the top 15 in the world by The SCM Journal List for empirically focused research publications in leading supply chain management journals. Each year’s ranking is based on the research published in these journals during the prior five years. Ranking 15th out of 400-plus programs, the L&SCM Department is recognized for its continued excellence in research. The 2018 ranking is up seven spots from last year.
College of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Notable Recognitions
Jamie E. Scalera, Ph.D., was selected as a research scholar-in-residence through the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence Summer Research Scholar Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies. Scalera, the first faculty member from an American university to win this award, teaches and researches in the field of international relations, with a general focus on international organizations and international political economy. She joined the faculty at Georgia Southern in 2012.
In another research note, Psychology Professor Amy Hackney, Ph.D., co-authored an article that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Change in percentages of adults with overweight and obesity trying to lose weight, 1988- 2014.” This is the first article from the psychology department to be published in that prestigious journal, and it has been widely cited in the media.
College of Science and Mathematics
Environmental Toxicology Research Presented
Graduate student Anna Wagner is examining the effects of chemical contamination on feeding relationships between fish and the microscopic animals (zooplankton) they eat. The Department of Biology student is investigating 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM), used to clean coal prior to use. MCHM enters the environment in low concentrations during routine disposal, and occasionally in high concentrations from accidents, such as the 2014 spill in the Elk River in West Virginia. Existing data suggests that zooplankton are more sensitive to MCHM than zebrafish. However, whether MCHM-induced changes to individual species affects their predator-prey interaction has not been previously examined.
Under the direction of Professors Risa Cohen, Ph.D., and Vinoth Sittaramane, Ph.D., Wagner found that MCHM decreased mobility in both species, resulting in a 40 percent decrease in zebrafish feeding rates. She presented these results at the Southeastern Regional Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry meeting in August in Dauphin Island, Alabama, where she won Best Student Oral Presentation.
College of Education
Professors Edit Highlighted Book
The book, Promoting Social Justice through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, edited by Georgia Southern University’s College of Education Professors Delores Liston, Ph.D., and Regina Rahimi, Ed.D., was included in a January compilation of ten “Selected New Books on Higher Education” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
A collection of contributions by a diverse selection of educators and scholars, the book gives an in-depth look at how educators and students can promote equity and social justice across multiple disciplines. The contributors offer reflections related to educational ethics, marginalized groups, community service and activism, counter narratives and a range of classroom practices. Although the authors work in a variety of disciplines and employ different theoretical frameworks, they are united by the conviction that education should improve lives by promoting equity and social justice. The book was published by Indiana University.
College of Arts and Humanities
Researching Dissenting English Authors
Building upon his previous work on 18th and early 19th century dissenting women writers in England, Professor Tim Whelan, Ph.D., has now completed two more projects involving one of the most important dissenting women writers of the 1790s, Mary Hays (1759-1843).
Whelan’s website, Mary Hays: Life and Correspondence, is now open to the public and represents one of the most important additions to the field of digital humanities concerning women writers. The Hays site is the latest addition to Whelan’s greater website Dissenting Studies: 1650-1850, the largest website in existence devoted to the writings of people associated with religious dissent in England during those two centuries.
The new website on Mary Hays includes complete transcriptions of 411 letters to and from Hays, biographical entries on more than 100 individuals named in the correspondence and the first complete genealogical tree of Hays and her extended family. It also introduces a photo gallery, a detailed history of the various places in and around London where she lived during her lifetime, complete texts of all her books and periodical writings between 1784 and 1801, and the most detailed chronology of her life ever produced.
As an outgrowth of his work on Mary Hays, Whelan also uncovered the lost novel by Hays’s younger sister, Elizabeth Hays (c. 1765-1825). Composed over 20 years before being published in 1819, Fatal Errors, or, Poor Mary-Anne was lost to literary history until Whelan’s discovery in 2015, the only known copy that now resides in the British Library. He has completed a new edition of the novel for the Chawton House Library series on women novelists, published by Routledge Press, London, which will appear in 2019, in collaboration with another Hays scholar, Felicity James, University of Leicester, U.K.