Postdoc Research Excellence Awards

Each year, the Postdoctoral Scholars Awards for Research Excellence are given in recognition of the research promise demonstrated by individual postdoctoral scholars.  The awards are open to postdoctoral scholars in all disciplines and are designed to assist postdoctoral scholars in their continued professional development by supporting the recipients in conference travel, purchasing books, lab materials, or engaging in other scholarly activities that directly enhance the individual's professional growth.  Each recipient receives a monetary award of a $1000 along with a plaque.

  

The following terms apply to the awards:

  • Applicants must be full-time and fall into one of two Human Resources designations: Postdoctoral Fellow/Trainee (Rank Code 27), or Postdoctoral Research Associate (Rank Code 28).
  • Applicants must be in years 2 through 4 of their postdoc appointments at the time of application.
  • Funds from the awards may be used for books, travel to a conference, skills workshops, or other resources or activities that directly enhance the postdoc’s professional development.  Computers cannot be purchased with the funds for the award.  Travel must follow the guidelines of the university.
  • Memo of Application Requirements
  • For more information on the awards, please contact Faculty Advisory Committee Chair, Doug Cyr at (919) 843-4805.

 

2009 Award Recipients
2008 Award Recipients
Past Recipients

 

2009 Postdoctoral Scholar Award Recipients

Irving Coy Allen
Sergio Chavez
Joyee Ghosh
Tae-Hong Kang
Conggang Li
Liqing Ma
Aaron Neumann
Nasser Rusan
Mindy Steiniger
Kai Ziervogel

 
For news articles and pictures visit our Postdocs in the News page 

Award Recipient Information:

 

Irving Coy Allen serves as a postdoctoral fellow in the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, in the School of Medicine.  His current project is focused on addressing the mechanisms underlying how influenza viruses interact with components of the host innate immune system. 

Sergio Chavez is a postdoctoral fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Since arriving at UNC, he has collaborated with Jackie Hagan and Ted Mouw on a project that examines how immigrants acquire and transfer skills across labor markets and industries. He has research interests in international migration, labor markets, border studies, and social inequality.

Joyee Ghosh serves as a postdoctoral fellow under Dr. Amy H. Herring in the Department of Biostatistics. Her research interest is statistical genetics, and she has worked on a project that involved building novel flexible Bayesian latent class models for weight gain in pregnancy, used to predict child birth weight based on the mother's latent weight gain class.

Tae-Hong Kang serves as a postdoctoral fellow in Aziz Sancar’s laboratory in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. His research is focused on biological mechanisms of DNA repair and circadian clock, and the interconnection between them. Recently, he discovered that DNA repair activity at certain times of day displays variations due to circadian clock regulation.

Conggang Li is a postdoctoral fellow in Gary Pielak’s Lab in the Department of Chemistry. He is using in-cell NMR to characterize protein structure and dynamics directly in living cells at atomic resolution. 

Liqing Ma serves as a postdoctoral associate working with Professor Wenbin Lin in the Department of Chemistry. He is focusing on exploring highly porous homochiral metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for gas storage, chiral separation and heterogeneous asymmetric catalysis. 

Aaron Neumann serves as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, and has been applying light microscopic imaging techniques to study the lateral organization and transport of C-type lectin membrane microdomains in human immature dendritic cells. 

Nasser M Rusan serves as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Mark Peifer in the Biology Department, where he researches the mechanisms of mitosis using Drosophila (the fruit fly) as a model system, and is interested in studying mitosis and centrosomes in a variety of cell types.

Mindy Steiniger is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, working in Dr. William Marzluff’s lab. Her research interests include the relationship between protein structure and function; the molecular actions of proteins; transcriptional control; RNA biology including 3’ end formation, metabohistone mRNAs; and co-transcriptional processing. 

Kai Ziervogel is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Marine Sciences in Professor Carol Arnosti’s lab. His research interests include the dynamics and formation of marine aggregates and the role of aggregate-associated enzymes in the global carbon cycle.

 

 

2008 Postdoctoral Scholar Award Recipients  

Award Recipient Information:

Guohua Cao, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, whose research focus is directed toward the application of carbon nanotube x-ray technology for better cancer detection and therapy.  Cao is currently developing a dynamic micro-computed tomography scanner for in vivo imaging of small animals, and a stationary digital breast tomosynthesis system for breast cancer detection.

Javier J. Concepcion, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemistry, whose current research involves water oxidation, reactivity of high oxidation state osmium nitrido and ruthenium oxo complexes, ground and excited state proton coupled electron transfer and computational chemistry.

Molly De Marco, a postdoctoral scholar at the Sheps Center for Health Services Research, whose research focuses on health disparities related to poverty and place, with a special interest in rural communities.

Paul G. Hoertz Jr., who serves as a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Thomas J. Meyer in the Department of Chemistry where he is working on solar fuel production via photoelectrochemical water oxidation and carbon dioxide reduction.

Xiaoyang Hua, who has a joint appointment as a postdoctoral scholar in the Pulmonary Division of the Department of Medicine, and in the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma and Lung Biology. His research focuses on understanding the pathogenesis of asthma and other airway diseases; particularly how adenosine, a small molecule released during cell metabolism, and mast cells, a major cell type responsible for allergic diseases, contribute to the formation of inflammation in asthma and other lung diseases.

Ajit Joglekar, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Biology, whose research centers on the biophysical mechanisms that enable the kinetochore, a complex, macromolecular machine, to accurately segregate chromosomes during cell division.

Alexey Savelyev, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemistry, who is an expert on the multiscale modeling of complex biological systems and his primary research is the building of an accurate coarsegrain model of the chromatin fiber to study the millionfold compaction of DNA in eukariotic cell.

Naomi J. Spence, a postdoctoral scholar at of the Carolina Population Center, whose research examines the social determinants of military enlistment and the role of child maltreatment in adolescent outcomes.

Jill Weimer, a postdoctoral research associate in the Neuroscience Research Center, whose current research focuses on the study of molecular factors influencing cell migration and differentiation in the developing mammalian brain.

Shuangye Yin, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, whose research focuses on experimental studies of magnetic and electric properties of metal clusters, especially alloy clusters. He became interested in the biomedical field and joined Nikolay Dokholyan’s group in 2006, where he uses computational tools to study protein stability, protein-ligand interaction and protein design.

 

2007 RECIPIENTS 

To view the University Gazette article click here.
  • James Patrick Cronin, Department of Biological Sciences
  • Mathew Dupre, Carolina Population Center
  • Matthew Frieman, Hooker Research Center, School of Public Health 
  • Hegui Gong, Department of Chemistry
  • Laura Halperin, Department of English and Comparative Literature
  • Heidi M. Mansour, Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy
  • Dan Marston, Department of Biology
  • Joanna Poblete-Cross, Department of History
  • Rachael Rigby, Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology 
  • Leslie Sombers, Department of Chemistry

2006 RECIPIENTS

  • Zhongying Chen, Department of Biology
  • Shannon Davis, Carolina Population Center
  • Nora Franceschini, Department of Epidemiology
  • Andrea (Nackley) Neely, School of Dentistry's Center for Neurosensory Disorders
  • Thomas Parsons, Department of Neurology
  • David Singleton, Department of ESE
  • Anthony Yannarell, Institute of Marine Sciences

2005 RECIPIENTS

  • Melanie Bishop, Institue of Marine Sciences
  • Jennifer DeLuca, Department of Biology
  • Feng Ding, Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics
  • Jay Garcia, Carolina Postdoc for Faculty Diversity
  • Steven Hitlin, Carolina Population Center
  • Karen Kim, Department of Health Behavior & Health Education
  • Craig Lee, Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics
  • Kristopher Preacher, Department of Psychology
  • Eric Wagner, Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics

2004 RECIPIENTS

  • J. Scott Brown, Carolina Population Center
  • David Carr, Carolina Population Center
  • Daniela Cimini, Department of Biology
  • Raymond Coakley, Cystic Fibrosis/Pulmonary Research and Treatment Center
  • Timothy Donaldson, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
  • Heidi Gazelle, Center for Developmental Science
  • Aiguo Hu, Department of Chemistry
  • Robert Maile, Department of Microbiology and Immunology
  • Hengbin Wang, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
  • Francis Willard, Department of Pharmacology