Faculty & Staff Accomplishments

2010-11

• College of Liberal Arts History Professor John T. Scott was elected to a 3-year term as a Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Councilor in the Art/Humanities Division. The mission of the Council on Undergraduate Research is to support and promote high-quality undergraduate student-faculty collaborative research and scholarship.
• IMAGE Journal named Mercer University associate professor Anya Silver as its “Artist of the Month” for October. IMAGE is a national literary publication dedicated to supporting and showcasing art shaped by the faith traditions of western civilization.
• Townsend School of Music professor and critically acclaimed violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti released of her debut album, "Kaleidoscope."
• Mercer Distinguished University Professor Dr. David Gushee has been named to the Constitution Project’s bipartisan Task Force on Detainee Treatment. The goal of the Task Force is to investigate and report on the past and current treatment of detainees by the U.S. government, as part of the counterterrorism policies of the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations.
• Chalet Tan, Ph.D., and Hailing Zhang, Ph.D., both assistant professors of pharmaceutical sciences in the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, were selected by the Georgia Cancer Coalition to be among 12 recipients of 2011 Cancer Research Awards. Tan and Zhang will receive $50,000 each toward research on encapsulating anticancer drugs in nanocarriers for drug delivery and targeting.

2009-10

• The College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences was featured at a meeting of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) in Los Angeles with over 7,500 scientists from all over the world in attendance. The graduate program in the area of pharmaceutics, which encompasses drug delivery and pharmacokinetics, was represented by 5 faculty members and about 25 graduate students at the AAPS meeting. Mercer had 19 scientific poster presentations and one of our graduate students was among four in the nation to receive an AAPS student fellowship. This was huge for Mercer because the student (Delaram Moshkelani) was presented at a general session with several thousand national and international scientists present.
• The Walter F. George School of Law continue to be very active in areas of scholarship and research. Numerous faculty accomplishments are listed on the School's  Faculty News  Web page.
• The School of Engineering is proud to congratulate two professors. Both have received NASA summer research fellowships at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
  • Dr. Behnam Kamali will be pursing research on “Aeronautical Communications Analysis”.  He will be specifically working on power/ bandwidth requirements for “Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communication System (AeroMACS)” a VDL-2 and IEEE 802.16 (WiMax) technology. These studies are conducted for the final selection of a new communications technology for the airport surface domain.   NASA has an airport surface test bed that is used to support experimental research work in aeronautics.
  • Dr. Loren Sumner will be developing a model of the wicking water flow in non-flow-through fuel cells.  The work is in collaboration with the Electrochemisty Branch of the Power and In-Space Propulsion Division. The Glenn Research Center is developing new fuel cell designs for NASA’s Human Exploration Program.  The objective of the project is to gain a better understanding of the internal wicking mechanism within the cathode compartment of the fuel cell which is used to remove product water.  This should assist future designs improve fuel cell performance for long-term and stable mission operation.  

2008-09

• The McAfee School of Theology's faculty contributed to 118 publications, such as authoring books, journal articles, internet publications, book reviews, and so forth. See the complete list >
• The College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences faculty were very active in teaching, research, and service. Read more about these achievements >
• The Walter F. George School of Law continue to be very active in areas of scholarship and research. Numerous faculty accomplishments are listed on the School's  Faculty News  Web page.

2007-08

In total, the Mercer University faculty has published 10 books, 203 journal articles, and 16 book chapters/articles in academic year 2007-08.

• The Georgia Cancer Coalition has funded two Distinguished Cancer Scholars for the School of Medicine in Savannah: Shi-Wen Jiang, M.D. and Edward L. Perkins, Ph.D. These two scientists are engaged in promising areas of cancer research. Read more information. Read more.
  • Dr. Jiang received a total of $500,000 to focus on the epigenetic regulation of gene expression in the preeclamptic placenta and endometrial cancers.
  • Dr. Perkins received $250,000 to study the mechanisms by which cells maintain stables genomes, in search of the changes in genome stability that are hallmarks of many inherited disorders, including the multistage process leading to cancer.
    
• The Georgia Research Alliance awarded a grant to faculty members Martin J. D'Souza, Ph.D., and Ravi Palaniappan, Ph.D., from the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences to study oral vaccines for melanoma, a form of skin cancer.
  Read more information. Read the Newsletter.
  
• The National Institutes of Health is providing the Department of Family Health within the School of Medicine a grant for $3.1 million to conduct a five-year study of the Church-Based Diabetes Prevention and TRanslation program. Read more information. Read more.

For more information about Faculty and Staff Notables, please visit the News@Mercer site.