Dean’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Graduate Education
These awards, one for graduate coordinators and one for graduate coordinator assistants, recognize excellence in service and advocacy on behalf of graduate students and graduate education at the University of Georgia.
Jennifer Brown (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
Jennifer Brown is a professor and graduate coordinator in the Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education.
Her research is focused on improving communication outcomes for young children with an increased likelihood of developmental disabilities in natural environments through collaborative practices. She has peer-reviewed publications, presentations and service in the areas of early communication intervention, caregiver coaching in family-guided routines, autism, and scholarship of teaching and learning.
Brown has served as the department’s graduate coordinator since 2020. The department includes a large and complex graduate landscape across three program areas containing multiple specializations representing more than 15 graduate programs of study leading to graduate certificates and master’s (M.Ed., M.A., M.S.), educational specialist (Ed.S.) and dDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees. Brown also serves as the program coordinator for the department’s Ph.D. programs and acts as a liaison between the graduate students, graduate program faculty, program coordinators and the Graduate School across programs.
Brown is a mentor and advocate to students across the department providing guidance, encouragement and problem-solving. Her commitment is further realized through her mentorship to new faculty on graduate student mentorship. She has instituted processes and systems to support student success and streamline faculty activities. Specifically, she has initiated recruitment efforts to increase visibility, application and enrollment; developed processes to support degree progression and timely degree completion; and advocated for student recognition through award and grant applications. Despite the demand of her role, she goes above and beyond what is required to reduce the stress of graduate students, enhance their experience, support their development and, most importantly, ensure their graduate school success.
Katrina Neidlinger (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)
Katrina Neidlinger is the graduate program administrator for the Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Department of Mathematics, Science and Social Studies Education.
Neidlinger coordinates admissions and enrolled student services for graduate programs offered on UGA campuses in Athens, Griffin and online. She works as a liaison between faculty, the graduate school, program applicants and enrolled students. Neidlinger provides unwavering support and guidance from time of application until graduation.
In 2023, the Mary Frances College of Education awarded Neidlinger the Dean’s Unsung Hero Award. She was described as a “Swiss Army knife” who goes well beyond her job description, willingly and cheerfully stepping in to cover anything and everything that needs to be done. Neidlinger is an incredible problem solver who exhibits tremendous care for the graduate students, faculty and staff in the department, doing anything she can to help them meet their goals. She makes a positive impact in the lives of the students on a daily basis.
Faculty express that Neidlinger provides a welcoming and inclusive environment in the department. She recognizes challenges that students from diverse backgrounds face and actively works to ease the transition of graduate life. She provides continuous personal support to students, faculty and staff. Neidlinger is often referred to as the backbone of the department.
Outstanding Mentoring Award
The Outstanding Mentoring Award recognizes excellence in a variety of mentoring functions. This award encourages and rewards innovation and effectiveness in mentoring graduate students during their educational experience. Two awards are given each year to current members of the Graduate Program Faculty. Awards in Professional/Applied Sciences and Social/Behavioral Sciences are given even years. Awards in Humanities/Fine and Applied Arts and Life/Physical Sciences are given in odd years.
Ming-Jun Lai (Submitted photo)
Ming-Jun Lai is a professor of mathematics at the University of Georgia. He has contributed to the educational mission of the University of Georgia for more than three decades and has advised 23 Ph.D. students in the university’s math department.
His research in applied mathematics includes approximation theory, in particular, on high dimensional function approximations. He is an expert on multivariate splines which are smooth piecewise polynomial functions over triangulations. He uses them for various applications such as high dimensional data fitting and visualization; construction of smooth curves, surfaces and manifolds; and numerical solutions of partial differential equations. In addition, he is an expert on sparse solutions of linear systems of equations and their applications for graph clustering.
Lai immigrated from China in 1984 for his Ph.D. studies at Texas A&M University. After three years of postdoc research at the University of Utah, he became an assistant professor in he math department at the University of Georgia in 1992. He was promoted to a full professor in 2000.
Lai has had two research monographs published. He has been the principal investigator of five National Science Foundation research grants and several conference grants. He has published more than 140 papers with 7,620 Google citations. He also won the department’s McCay Award in 2013. Currently, he continues to mentor Ph.D. students and is now writing a textbook on applied linear algebra for undergraduate students.
Isabelle Loring Wallace (Submitted photo)
Isabelle Loring Wallace is an associate professor of contemporary art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Her research ranges from mid-20th-century American painting to early 21st-century photography, video and installation.
At the School of Art, she teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on contemporary visual culture and has served as associate director of research and graduate studies since 2015. In this capacity, she significantly transformed the School of Art’s MFA program while serving as an enthusiastic and dedicated mentor to dozens of students in both art history and studio art.
She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Steven Meisel and Paul Pfeiffer, and is the co-editor of three anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennifer Hirsh (Ashgate 2011); Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate 2013); and Ventriloquism, Performance and Contemporary Art, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Routledge 2022). Wallace is also author of” Jasper Johns” (Phaidon, 2014) and a second, recently completed manuscript on the artist that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis.
