2025 Graduate Student Awards

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Teaching Awards

The Excellence-in-Teaching Award was established by the Graduate School to recognize those students who have demonstrated superior teaching skills and have contributed to teaching beyond their own classroom responsibilities, making a significant contribution to the instructional mission of the university.

Alexander Tepper
Department of Mathematics
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences

Alexander Tepper is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mathematics, and his major professor is David Gay. His research is in singularity theory and low dimensional topology, a branch of mathematics that investigates how geometric objects behave under deformations.

Tepper obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from Florida International University (FIU) and has worked in education at various levels for more than a decade. Prior to his enrollment at UGA, he spent one year as a high school mathematics teacher in the Florida public school system before starting as a graduate teaching assistant at FIU. In 2022, he spent a year working in computer graphics research at Microsoft, where he developed computer visualization skills that continue to find regular application in his research, teaching, and outreach projects.

Tepper has served as instructor of record for 12 courses at UGA and spent three semesters leading the development of Spacing Out: Art and Topology Pop-up Museum in collaboration with the UGA Arts Cooperative and the Lamar Dodd School of Art. This NSF-funded math exhibition featured artworks developed by UGA undergraduates from a diverse range of majors and was exhibited in the Shirley McBay Science Library for the month of November 2024 as part of Spotlight on the Arts. In addition, he has led workshops in computer graphics and is an active member of the Geometry, Research, Outreach, and Visualization Initiative (GROVI), an NSF-funded project which serves as an umbrella for a variety of interdisciplinary geometry visualization and outreach projects at UGA. 

María González-Ferrer
Department of Romance Languages
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences

María González-Ferrer is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic linguistics at the University of Georgia, where she also serves as a teaching assistant. Her major professor is Timothy Gupton. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and language variation. Specifically, her dissertation examines pronoun doubling structures in Spanish among learners of Spanish as a second language, Spanish teachers and native speakers from Argentina, Spain and Mexico, exploring their implications for linguistic theory and language learning.

A native of Madrid, Spain, González-Ferrer holds a B.A. in translation and interpretation from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and an M.A. in Hispanic linguistics and cinema from the University of Georgia.

With extensive experience teaching Spanish at the university level, González-Ferrer has taught a wide range of courses, including beginner, intermediate and advanced Spanish, as well as specialized courses such as Introduction to Spanish Linguistics, and she has served as a TA for the courses of Service Learning and Latin American Cinema. González-Ferrer has also taken on leadership roles, including serving as the coordinator for the UGA Valencia Study Abroad Program, where she facilitated immersive language experiences for students. Additionally, she has been an active member of the organizing committee for the Spanish short film festival España en Corto and the Women+’s Forum series, which amplifies female voices in academia.

González-Ferrer was honored with the the Willson Center travel grant to conduct research in Buenos Aires and received the Sigma Delta Pi Award for International Research, which supported her fieldwork in Mexico City.

Passionate about education, González-Ferrer is committed to developing inclusive, student-centered teaching methodologies that promote linguistic diversity and social and cultural awareness.

Meg Fletcher
Department of Linguistics
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences

Meg Fletcher is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics, specializing in sociolinguistics. Under the mentorship of Jon Forrest, her research explores how individuals construct and express their identities through language. Her first qualifying paper examined dialect variation among African American English speakers in Georgia, while her second qualifying paper and dissertation focus on language, dialect variation and identity construction among Afro-Latines in the U.S.

At UGA, Fletcher has served as an instructor of record for multiple linguistics courses, including Introduction to Linguistics and Phonetics and Phonology. She also developed and taught a novel course in Forensic Linguistics, integrating linguistic analysis with real-world legal applications. Across all her courses, Fletcher prioritizes student engagement, inclusion and real-world application.

She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a recipient of the Presidential Fellowship Award, was selected for the 2024 Future Faculty Fellows Cohort, and participated in the Fulbright-Hays Zulu Group Project Abroad. After her Ph.D., Fletcher plans to pursue a career as a linguistics professor. 

Morgane Golan
Department of Animal and Dairy Science, Regenerative Bioscience Center
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Morgane Golan is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the Regenerative Bioscience Center. Her major professor is Steve Stice. In addition to her research in the laboratory, she also conducts discipline-based education research to evaluate the impact of active learning and student engagement on outcome achievement, motivation and sense of belonging in the sciences.

Golan’s teaching philosophy centers active learning, collaboration and experiential learning, with an emphasis on enhancing students’ scientific literacy and supporting research skill development. Her dedication to effective teaching is reflected by her pedagogical training. She is actively involved with the UGA Center for Teaching and Learning and credits the CTL for helping her discover her interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Additionally, Golan has earned the UGA GradTeach Certificate and completed the Johns Hopkins University Teaching Academy Online Institute, equipping her with advanced strategies for student-centered instruction. She is also involved with the UGA Scientists Engaged in Education Research (SEER) Center and the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI), which have been valuable toward enhancing her skills in STEM pedagogy.

Golan’s contributions to education at UGA have been recognized with the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award and the 2024 Future Faculty Fellowship Program. Passionate about bridging research and education, she intends to continue teaching future leaders in the biomedical sciences, aspiring to instruct her own courses in the innovative field of regenerative bioscience. 

Stephanie Hanus-Knapp
Department of Sociology
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences

Stephanie Hanus-Knapp is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, studying family, life course and aging. More specifically, Hanus-Knapp focuses on romantic relationships, media and healthy aging, publishing her research in the Journal of Gerontology: Series B and Media, Culture, and Society. Her major professor is Leslie Gordon-Simons.

Hanus-Knapp’s research informs and is informed by her teaching, having been the instructor of record for five different courses at UGA, including Sociology of the Family, Cultural Diversity in Families, Lives in Time and Place, Sociology Research Methods, and Sociology in Film. During her tenure at UGA, she has had the pleasure of working with more than 400 students. In each of her courses, Hanus-Knapp is dedicated to collaborative learning, critical thinking and connection building to create responsible learners and social citizens.

In doing this work, Hanus-Knapp has become an active member in the community of teacher-scholars. She works as the editorial assistant to First Publics, an online teaching community housed at the University of Georgia focused on the practice and politics of teaching as public sociology. Even more, she has engaged with the scholarship of teaching learning, publishing several pieces in the top teaching journal in her discipline, Teaching Sociology.

Hanus-Knapp’s instructional efforts and dedication have been recognized as a recipient of the Graduate School’s 2024 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award and as a member of the 2024 Future Faculty Fellows cohort, where she engaged in interdisciplinary discussions about the value and practice of teaching.

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Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Awards

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Awards were initiated in 1999 to recognize the quality and significance of graduate-student scholarship, these awards may be given in five areas: Fine Arts, Humanities and Letters, Life Sciences, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and Applied Studies.

Ron and Yvette Walcott Excellence in Fine Arts and Humanities Doctoral Research Award

Bill Kelson is a Postdoctoral Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he is a visiting assistant professor. He is currently working to turn his Ph.D. dissertation, a wide-ranging history of the Chinese financial crisis of the 1880s, into a book manuscript.

His study, researched at archives in Shanghai, Taipei, London and Hong Kong, explores the ways in which China’s integration into global capitalism in the late-nineteenth century made the Chinese financial system increasingly fragile, as well as the consequences of that financial fragility for Chinese society writ large.

Kelson’s first peer-reviewed publication, “Manias, Panics, & Land: The Property Bubbles of the Great Chinese Crash of the 1880s,” was recently published in a special issue of Business History titled “The Global Economy & the Origins of Modern Chinese Business,” edited by John D. Wong, Ghassan Moazzin and Kang Jin-A.

Kelson was educated at Emerson College, Boston College, the University of Georgia and IUP Tsinghua. He earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Georgia in 2024, working under major professor Stephen Mihm.

His research has been supported by the Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the John E. Rovensky Fellowships in International Business & Economic History and the Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program.

S. Jack Hu Family Excellence in Social and Behavioral Sciences Doctoral Research Award

Cydney Seigerman is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the University of Georgia’s Social Sustainability of Agriculture and Food Systems Lab. Seigerman earned a Ph.D. in integrative conservation and anthropology in May 2024 under major professor Don Nelson. During that time, Seigerman was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a research fellow at the Research Institute for Meteorology and Water Resources – Ceará (FUNCEME) in Ceará, Brazil from 2021 to 2023.

Seigerman’s work centers equity and justice in the development of integrative approaches toward sustainable socioecological futures. Seigerman’s dissertation, titled “Fluid Inequities: The Dynamics of Water Relations and Water Insecurities in Ceará, Northeast Brazil,” integrated theory and methods across anthropology, theatre and performance, philosophy of technology, and hydrology to examine the sociopolitical, technological and environmental determinants of water insecurity in the semi-arid region of Ceará, Brazil. As a postdoctoral researcher, Seigerman promotes sustainable food systems through their research on the dynamics of on-farm research and the barriers to adoption of regenerative agricultural practices experienced by U.S. commodity producers.

Seigerman earned a B.S. with majors in chemistry and Spanish language and literature from the University of Michigan in 2013, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the Residential and Honors Colleges. Before pursuing a Ph.D. at UGA, Seigerman moved to Madrid, Spain, and served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant and studied acting at the theater school La Lavandería. Seigerman continually draws on an interdisciplinary background to incorporate the arts, physical and social sciences and humanities into transdisciplinary research and praxis.

Excellence in Mathematical and Physical Sciences Doctoral Research Award

Jarvis Hill is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. His Ph.D. dissertation research focused on the synthesis and application of trisubstituted hydroxylamines in medicinal chemistry.

During his time at UGA, Hill developed synthetic methods to access trisubstituted hydroxylamines in a direct fashion, which represents the current state of the art for their assembly. He also challenged the widely-held belief that trisubstituted hydroxylamines are “structural alerts” or “red flags” in drug discovery by using trisubstituted hydroxylamines as key structural motifs in the development of novel small-molecule kinase inhibitors for the treatment of metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer and chronic myeloid leukemia.

Hill earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Georgia in spring 2024, with a predoctoral fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). His major professor was David Crich.

He has authored 12 peer-reviewed journal articles and is an inventor on multiple patent applications and one issued patent. During his doctoral studies, Hill was a recipient of the Grimes Family Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Natural Sciences and the UGA Graduate Education Advancement Board Fellowship from the Graduate School. He was also named a Medicinal and Bioorganic Chemistry Foundation Scholar and was one of two recipients nationally for the 2024 American Chemical Society Robert M. Scarborough Graduate Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry.

Hill currently holds a prestigious Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University where he works with Seth Herzon to develop novel small-molecule chemotherapies for genetically predisposed cancers.

Excellence in Professional and Applied Studies Research Award

Jeongah (Christina) Shin is a Postdoctoral Assistant Professor-Educator in the Department of Marketing at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on consumer behavior and well-being in digital retail environments, with a particular interest in how consumers engage across various channels, including social media, e-commerce and virtual reality.

Shin earned her Ph.D. in fall 2024 from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences’ Department of Textile, Merchandising and Interiors, working under Yoo-Kyoung Seock. She was recognized for her research contributions as a recipient of the Endsley-Peifer Student Research Award from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences for two consecutive years (2023 and 2024). Additionally, she was awarded a Doctoral Student Research Grant from the Graduate School and the Jan M. Hathcote Social Science Academic Support Award for her dissertation study.

Shin’s dissertation specifically examined the impact of technology anxiety on shopping well-being in virtual settings. She is also interested in sustainable fashion consumption. Her work has explored generational differences in perceptions and motivations for sustainable clothing purchase, as well as how environmental sustainability consciousness influences the adoption of slow fashion. Shin plans to integrate these two research areas in future studies by investigating how technological advancements in retail channels may shape consumers’ sustainable consumption behaviors. 

Excellence in Life Sciences Doctoral Research Award

Yitang Sun is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research leverages genetic data to unravel the health effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs).

During his doctoral training, Sun conducted large-scale genome-wide association studies to identify novel genetic loci influencing circulating levels of PUFAs and integrated multi-omics approaches to elucidate their genetic architecture and health impacts. He also explored the shared genetic basis between PUFAs and brain disorders, including major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder.

Additionally, he applied Mendelian randomization to assess the causal effects of PUFAs on disease risk and examined how gene-environment interactions, particularly fish oil supplementation, modify genetic predisposition to dyslipidemia and cardiovascular diseases.

Sun earned his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Georgia in 2024 under the mentorship of Kaixiong Ye.

Sun has published extensively, with 18 research papers, including eight as first or co-first author. He has received multiple awards to support his scholarship, including the Mary Erlanger Graduate Fellowship and the Graduate Education Advancement Board Fellowship from UGA’s Graduate School, as well as the Lois K. Miller Award and the Mote Graduate Support Fund for Biomedical Genetics Research from the Department of Genetics. His work has also been recognized by the American Society of Human Genetics with the Reviewers’ Choice Award.

Currently, Sun is focused on incorporating functional and structural genomic data into constraint calculations, advancing precision medicine applications in human genetics.

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Engaged Scholars

The inaugural Engaged Scholarship by Graduate Students Award recognizes extraordinary community-engaged scholarship and public service by graduate students. Such as endeavors that advance the public service, outreach, and engagement mission at UGA. This award is established by the Graduate School in connection with the Office of the Vice President for Public Service and Outreach and the Office of Service-Learning.

Three awards of $1,000 will be presented annually. Each graduate department may nominate one student. Recipients will be selected by a committee drawn from Public Service and Outreach-affiliated administrators and graduate faculty

Christina (Tina) Novelli is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education and a scholar with the National Center for Leadership in Intensive Intervention (NCLII–2), an OSEP-funded doctoral training consortium. Her major professor is Scott Ardoin. Her research focuses on how readers acquire high-quality word representations, with an emphasis on orthographic learning and interventions for students with or at risk for dyslexia.

Novelli has extensive experience conducting school-based research using single-case and experimental methodologies, including eye-tracking studies examining reading comprehension processes. She has collaborated on multiple large-scale research projects, including an Institute of Education Sciences exploration grant, and has contributed to several peer-reviewed publications and national presentations. Her work bridges research and practice through intervention development and implementation science to improve literacy outcomes for at-risk readers.

Morgane Golan is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center. Her major professor is Steven Stice. Her research focuses on enhancing neural stem cell-derived extracellular vesicle (NSC-EV) manufacturing processes, toward improving the accessibility and efficacy of this regenerative therapy for neurotraumatic and neurodegenerative conditions.

Golan is deeply committed to engaged scholarship and science communication. She spearheaded the Regenerative Bioscience Open House, an outreach initiative designed to connect high school students and teachers in Georgia with cutting-edge research and career pathways in regenerative medicine. She has also led additional community-focused events, including RBC Reads, a partnership with the Athens-Clarke County Public Library, and the Athens ABTA 5K, a fundraiser in support of the American Brain Tumor Association. As a dedicated educator, Golan has been instrumental in shaping undergraduate education in the regenerative bioscience program, contributing to curriculum development and teaching initiatives at UGA.

Originally from New Jersey, Golan earned her B.S. in Pre-Veterinary & Animal Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2020.

Through her research, teaching, and outreach, Golan strives to bridge the gap between scientific innovation and public understanding. Her efforts have been recognized through numerous awards and honors, including the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) and the 2024 UGA Future Faculty Fellowship Program (3FP). She has completed the Graduate Portfolio in Community Engagement, a distinction awarded by UGA’s Office of Service-Learning, for her commitment to bridging academia and community impact.

Summer Fink is a Ph.D. student in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her major professor is Michel Kohl. Her dissertation research, titled “Identifying Urban Wildlife Distribution and Conflict to Prioritize Education and Outreach,” focuses on the use of advanced scientific methods to develop wildlife conflict risk maps for Atlanta. This collaborative project between the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and UGA Extension will use the risk maps to implement targeted outreach and education in high-risk conflict areas.

Originally from southern Virginia, she graduated from UGA with a B.S. in fisheries and wildlife science. Before Fink entered her doctoral program to continue her academic journey as a Double Dawg, she conducted wildlife research in Athens and across the world, including southern Illinois, Chicago and Namibia.

Fink is passionate about dissolving the barriers between urban residents and the natural world and making wildlife more accessible for all people. Most urban human-wildlife conflicts arise from the lack of exposure to or knowledge about wildlife. In addition, disconnect from nature or natural spaces perpetuates “nature deficit disorder” and negatively impacts mental and physical health. She especially loves engaging with children as they are full of excitement and can be used as bridges into the greater Atlanta community.