FY 2022 Research Professorships

^{Photo left to right: President Bill Hardgrave, Drs. Satish Kadia, Brian Waldron, Kathryn Howell, Hongmei Zhang, Matthew Smeltzer, Roger Kreuz, Andrew Olney, Andre Johnson, Joy Goldsmith, and Abby Parrill}

As part of the University’s push for top-tier Carnegie R1 status, the office of the Provost and the Division of Research & Innovation have partnered to celebrate research excellence on campus. As part of that recognition, they recently awarded twenty professorships to various UofM faculty. The College of Arts & Sciences recipients are listed below. The full list of UofM awardees are found in the 2023 Research Celebration publication.

Kathryn Howell, Professor, Endowed Chair in Child Well-being, Department of Psychology

Kathryn H. Howell, Ph.D., is the Endowed Chair in Child Well-being and a tenured Professor in the Department of Psychology. She is a member of the Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies research area, which she directed from 2018-2021. Dr. Howell is a licensed psychologist in Tennessee. Her program of research centers on the health and well-being of children and families. Across Dr. Howell’s projects, she assesses individual, relational, and contextual factors that enhance resilience or reduce psychopathology following exposure to traumatic events during childhood. Much of her current work seeks to apply basic research to intervention development for violence-exposed groups. She has developed a research specialization in strengths-based interventions to promote well-being for children and families experiencing trauma. Dr. Howell is author or co-author of more than 125 publications. She recently completed her appointment as chair of the APA Committee on Children, Youth, and Families.

Roger Kreuz, Professor, Department of Psychology

Dr. Kreuz is a professor of Psychology and an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, serving as the College’s director of graduate studies. A UofM faculty member since 1988, he was previously the director of the master’s program in general psychology and the Psychology department’s associate chair. Dr. Kreuz conducts research on pragmatics, nonliteral language, and discourse. He writes for “The Conversation” and blogs for “Psychology Today.” Dr. Kreuz is the author or coauthor of six books on language and communication intended for a general audience. Two of these were published earlier this year: Failure to Communicate: Why We Misunderstand What We Hear, Read, and See, and Linguistic Fingerprints: How Language Creates and Reveals Identity. His books have been translated into Korean, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish. He is currently drafting a manuscript on the psychology of plagiarism.

Andrew Olney, Professor, Institute For Intelligent Systems and Department of Psychology

Dr. Olney presently serves as Professor in both the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis. Dr. Olney received a B.A. in Linguistics with Cognitive Science from University College London in 1998, an M.S. in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from the University of Sussex in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Memphis in 2006. His primary research interests are in natural language interfaces. Specific interests include language and knowledge acquisition (both human and AI) with applications in learning and performance support systems.