Arts and Sciences

Dr. Frank Andrasik, chair of psychology, as well as psychology faculty members Drs. Gayle Beck, Kris Berlin, Brook Marcks, Meghan McDevitt-Murphy and James Murphy, attended the 46th annual Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Convention in National Harbor, Md. Psychology doctoral student Chris Monahan won an award for a Disaster and Trauma SIG poster.

Renee Cogar, senior administrative secretary in the Institute for Intelligent Systems, has earned the Certified Administrative Professional designation.

Dr. Tom Fagan, professor of psychology, received commendation for “service to the State of Louisiana in demonstrating an ongoing commitment to improving the lives of students with disabilities in Louisiana schools.” The framed citation was presented to him at the Louisiana School Psychological Association meeting.

Dr. Art Graesser, professor in psychology, is PI on an Institute of Education Services grant that will fund the establishment of the Center for the Study of Adult Literacy. The five-year study will focus on two major goals: to assess underlying cognitive and motivational processes that contribute to or impede the reading growth of adults (reading between third and eighth grade levels) attending adult basic education programs and to develop and evaluate multiple-component reading instruction for this group. Drs. Xiangen Hu, professor in psychology, and Mark Conley, professor in instruction, curriculum and leadership, are co-principal investigators. The award is part of a larger $10 million award with colleagues in Georgia, Texas and Canada. Graesser also received a $1,083,868 NSF REESE grant titled “Beyond Boredom: Modeling and Promoting Engagement During Complex Learning.” Dr. Andrew Olney, assistant professor in psychology, is also working on the project.

Latica Jones, business officer II in psychology, received a Catherine Core Minority Travel Award to attend the National Council of University Research Administrators annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Duane D. McKenna, assistant professor of biological sciences, was quoted in a national news segment on the potentially deadly “kissing bug.” The article can be found at http://www.americanownews.com/story/20073786/kissing-bug-could-potentially-kill-people-pets.

Dr. James Murphy, associate professor in psychology, was awarded a grant for $2,234,949 by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism titled “Improving Brief Alcohol Interventions with a Behavioral Economic Supplement.”

Dr. Robert A. Neimeyer, professor of psychology, was awarded the highest recognition bestowed by the Viktor E. Frankl Association at its November annual meeting in Valencia, Spain. Neimeyer was inducted as an Honored Associate of the society in recognition of his lifetime contributions to psychological theory, research and practice pertaining to the role of meaning in human life.

Communication and Fine Arts

Cary Holladay, associate professor of English and a former O. Henry Prize award winner, is about to publish two books: Horse People: Stories and The Deer in the Mirror: Stories and a Novella. Horse People (Louisiana State UP) begins during the Civil War and features three generations of a family in Virginia’s horse country. The Deer in the Mirror won Ohio State University’s Prize in Short Fiction. It begins with an expedition to the Blue Ridge Mountains and culminates with an award-winning novella about the 1898 Yukon Gold Rush.

Libraries

Steven A. Knowlton, assistant professor and collection development librarian, won the Captain William Driver Award for best presentation at the 46th Annual Meeting of the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) held last October in Columbus, Ohio. His paper, “Pragmatic Unity and Visual Synedoche in Tennessee Flag Culture,” explores the use of graphic elements from the Tennessee flag in logos (such as the Tennessee Titans’ helmets) and examines why such flag-based logos are more popular in the Volunteer State than in other states.

Loewenberg School of Nursing

Dr. Sunghee H. Tak has joined the School as Loewenberg Endowed Chair of Excellence/Associate Dean for Research. Tak has worked to build a funded program of research that uses technology in a creative way with the vulnerable elderly population. Her research links nursing to two other disciplines at the University of Memphis, public health and intelligent systems (artificial intelligence), which is in line with the 21st century research calling for inter-professional and scholarly collaborations to translate research into better health, better health care and reduced healthcare cost.

School of Communication Sciences and Disorders

Several students and faculty of the School recently made presentations at the annual conference of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association in Atlanta:

Johnnie Bass, doctoral student, gave the oral seminar “Radiation-induced Hearing Loss in the Pediatric Oncology Population.”

Kathleen Bauer, graduate assistant, and Dr. Linda D. Jarmulowicz, associate professor, presented the poster board session “Bilingual Fourth-graders’ Stress Production of Derived English Words.” The associate professor and Wei-Lun Chung, doctoral student, presented the poster session “Morphological Awareness: A Comparison of Two Derivational Morphology Tasks.” Jarmulowicz and Stephanie M. McMillen, graduate assistant, presented the poster board “Rapid Automatic Naming Errors in Spanish Kindergarteners Learning English” while Jarmulowicz and graduate clinicians Kaitlyn Lanner and Kristin Haller presented “Reliability of Learning Strategies Checklist as an Alternative Assessment Measure.” Chung, Jarmulowicz and McMillen presented “Lexical Stress Assignment in Adult Chinese-speaking English Learners.”

Dr. Eugene H. Buder, associate professor, and Dr. D. Kimbrough Oller, who holds the School’s Chair of Excellence, presented the invited seminar “Vocal Control in Human Language: Cross-Species, Neural & Evolutionary/Developmental Perspectives.” Oller, Jarmulowicz and Lauren Burrows, doctoral student, presented the poster board session “A Longitudinal Study of Possible Allophony Interaction in Bilingual Learners.” Buder and JoAnna Sloggy presented the poster session “Effects of Nonlinear Source-Filter Coupling on Vibrato Stability.” Oller and Barbara Franklin, graduate assistant, presented the poster session “The Tests for Autism: A Review and Recommendations.” Oller, Yuna Jhang, doctoral student, and C.C. Lee presented the poster session “Syllabification & Segmentation in English & Mandarin.” Oller, Jhang, Lee and research coordinators Neeraja Rangisetty and Edina Bene presented the poster session “Recognition of Infant Vocalizations by Parent Report & Naturalistic Listening.” Oller, former graduate student Anne Warlaumont, Bene and Lee presented the technical research session “Volubility of Infant Vocalization in Interactive and Non-Interactive Circumstances.”

Christopher Costantino, doctoral student, and others presented the poster session “Day-to-Day Variability of Stuttering.”

Dr. Herbert Gould, professor, and Elizabeth Meenen presented the poster session “Word In Context Intelligibility Test (WICIT) in Children & Young Adults.”

Dr. Joel Kahane, professor and M. Gossa presented the poster session “Videofluoroscopic Analysis of Thickened Liquid Effects on Infant Swallow Function.”

Teresa Wolf, clinical associate professor, and Jarmulowicz presented the session “Hello to Hola & Back Again: Child Diagnostics with Interpreters.” Wolf, Dr. Michael Cannito, professor, and others presented the poster board “Harmonic Amplitude Differences & Intelligibility Pre-/Post-treatment in Parkinson's Disease.” Cannito and M. Hough presented the poster “Comparison of Speech Sound Disorders in Broca's vs. Conduction Aphasia.”