Named in honor of UGA’s 19th president (Fred C. Davison), 20th president (Charles B. Knapp) and 21st president (Michael F. Adams), these awards recognize outstanding accomplishment and evidence of potential future success in scholarship, creative work or research by early-career faculty members.
Fred C. Davison Early-Career Scholar Award
Named in honor of the UGA’s 19th president, this award recognizes outstanding accomplishment and evidence of potential future success in scholarship, creative work or research by an early-career faculty member in the sciences.
Roberto Perdisci, an assistant professor of computer science, has made great strides in his research on Internet security by inventing new, more effective defense solutions against malicious software, more commonly known as malware.
Malware infections affect hundreds of millions of users worldwide and enable most of today’s cybercrimes, including identity theft and online robberies. His research bridges computer and network security with machine learning and big data mining, and his work already has made significant impacts on real-world network defense systems. Perdisci and his students have developed a malware detection system called AMICO, which is used by the UGA Information Security Office to defend UGA’s campus network against infections.
The success of this project is further demonstrated by the fact that Perdisci has received new funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to transition the AMICO system to market. He also has received a Faculty Early Career Development grant from the NSF.
Charles B. Knapp Early-Career Scholar Award
Named in honor of UGA’s 20th president, this award recognizes outstanding accomplishment and evidence of potential future success in scholarship, creative work or research by an early-career faculty member in the social and behavioral sciences.
Nicholas Berente, an assistant professor of management information systems, is a rising star in his field, leading a number of interdisciplinary efforts to fundamentally affect the way large-scale science happens.
His research focuses on the way digital innovations reshape some of society’s most entrenched institutions. “Digital innovation” is a term Berente uses to describe everything from smartphones, computers and software to large-scale IT-enabled infrastructures. His work in the social sciences focuses on the development of computational approaches based on gene-sequencing tools from computational biology to better understand organizations. He looks at sequences of organizational activities, or routines, along with the individuals and technologies used in these routines as a sort of “organizational DNA.” Berente’s approach bridges the divide between computer science and information systems, which could be highly beneficial to helping manage the nation’s scientific efforts.Michael F. Adams
Early-Career Scholar Award
Named in honor of UGA’s 21st president, this award recognizes outstanding accomplishment and evidence of potential future success in scholarship, creative work or research by an early-career faculty member in the arts and humanities.
Chloe Wigston Smith, an assistant professor of English, is an outstanding scholar and author of the recently published book Women, Work and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.
This groundbreaking work shows, for the first time, how women’s work with textiles and garments contributed to the creation of the British novel. It revises current approaches to the role of labor in fiction and the history of sexuality to reveal how the novel reshaped women’s roles and the value of their work. Using an innovative interdisciplinary methodology, this book juxtaposes novels with a wide-ranging collection of clothes, engravings, criminal trials and trade debates to examine the genre from a new perspective.
Wigston Smith currently is working on a new book project that examines gender, the novel and domestic crafts in an imperial setting. This work also will draw on her joint expertise in literary studies and art history, and bring together a diverse range of texts and material artifacts.
