Creative Research Medals
These medals are awarded for outstanding research or creative activity within the past five years that focuses on a single theme identified with the University of Georgia. The 2010 recipients are:
• Keith Campbell, professor and head, department of psychology, is widely known for his groundbreaking work on narcissism, which has advanced the fundamental understanding of this ultimately self-defeating personality trait. Specifically, Campbell’s research informs us that narcissism is a complex construct with important social implications. More importantly, Campbell has quantified the negative consequences of narcissism in various relationships, whether romantic, friendships or in the workplace. He has shown that narcissists look for opportunities to elevate and protect their social status and self-views across all relationships.
• Lillian Eby, professor of psychology, broadened our understanding of mentoring and put this important, but poorly understood, area of research on a solid scientific foundation. Through a series of qualitative studies with protégés and mentors, Eby carefully cataloged the types of problems that both participants can experience in workplace mentoring relationships. She then developed a set of predictors, correlates and outcomes of relational problems and demonstrated the distinction between positive and negative experiences.
• Jerome Morris, associate professor in the College of Education and Research Fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Research, studies social and educational inequalities and their implications for schools, communities, families and youth. The nexus of race, social class and the geography of educational opportunity captures the single coherent theme of his research and scholarship. As a social scientist, Morris has researched black schooling in poor and urban settings in major cities such as Atlanta, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Nashville as well as middle-class and suburban contexts in metropolitan Atlanta. Specifically, his investigation of how the Southern black suburban context frames the academic experiences of black students is unique, given that most studies on the achievement gap have been based in black urban and low-income settings—or in predominantly white, middle class settings.
• Kanzo Nakayama, associate professor of physics and astronomy, is a world leader in theoretical nuclear physics, especially hadron structure and reactions. In particle physics, a hadron is a particle made of quarks held together by the strong force. He is involved in a worldwide effort to unravel the complex technical problems of Quantum Chromodynamics, whereby quarks are prevented from being observed isolated in nature. Nakayama and his collaborators developed a new reaction theory that is currently being applied with great success to describe a variety of photoproduction processes and to analyze data from major hadron physics laboratories around the world.
• Doug Peterson, associate professor of fisheries, is an internationally recognized expert on sturgeon, an ancient family of bony fish native to the rivers, lakes and coastlines of Eurasia and North America. He has conducted research on the life history and population dynamics of sturgeon populations in Georgia, New York, Michigan, Canada and Europe. While originally working on the captive culture of lake sturgeon for reintroduction to the Coosa River in northwest Georgia, Peterson saw potential to apply his newly developed techniques to alleviate commercial harvest impacts on wild populations of Russian sturgeon, which have been severely over-fished in recent years. Peterson pioneered a new, cost-effective, sustainable method for farming sturgeon that has the potential to alleviate the caviar-harvest threat to wild sturgeon—and to create a lucrative commodity for Georgia fish farmers.
• David Starkweather, professor of music, produced one of the most comprehensive explorations of the Six Suites for Violoncello by J.S. Bach ever published. He combined his scholarship and technical expertise to produce a print edition as well as a three-DVD set. Starkweather edited all of the audio and video, producing DVD-ready masters for his publisher, Lorenz Music. The DVD format allowed him to combine the score with the performance, and using the DVD angle button, viewers can move seamlessly between the score and manuscripts. These manuscripts are the contemporaneous copies made by Anna Magdalena Bach and Johann Kellner, as the autograph manuscript in Johann Sebastian Bach’s hand is lost. The set also includes two slideshow-style lectures entitled “Disagreement of Sources” and “Comparison of Copyists Accuracy,” that discuss decisions regarding bowings and notes. Starkweather’s lectures point out the many textual divergences that might otherwise escape notice.