RESEARCH - Key Persons
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- Electrical Engineer
- a New Journey As Shared Research Facilities Director
- Community Spotlight
In summer 2021, Aamer Mahmood joined the Mountaineer family as the new director of the Shared Research Facilities at West Virginia University.
I have a background that complements really well with the SRF staff who are doing a great job at West Virginia University.
Mahmood, an electrical engineer who worked at Microsoft Station Q Purdue, succeeds Interim Director Trina Wafle, who resumed her full-time responsibilities at the WVU Energy Institute.
"I have a background that complements really well with the SRF staff who are doing a great job at West Virginia University," Mahmood said. "With a great team in place, there is a desire to move to the next step and I believe that makes this a very good position to be in."
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- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Community Spotlight
- Intersecting AI With Human Emotion
In the summer of 2022, Amirah Mitchell started working on developing an artificial intelligence program that would understand human emotion, using deep learning approach. This was after she was given the opportunity to be a part of WVU's Summer Undergraduate Research Experience. The biomedical engineering undergraduate researcher used the opportunity to start her project on how the technology could predict the emotional state of humans, whether happy, sad, angry, etc.
I knew from the start that this emotion detection program would not be able to stand alone in the idea of detecting emotion. However, for me at least, it started with machine learning, it goes deeper than this to become neural network or deep learning.
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- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Member of the Officers Team
- Treasurer
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- Community Spotlight
- Tells an Important Story
A: I think if I replayed my life 1,000 times, there is no way 12-year-old Bryan could have predicted what was to come in the next 10 years. Looking to the future, it also seems like a complete mystery. With that being said, I do know one thing for certain: In 10 years, I will have graduated from medical school and will be practicing medicine somewhere in West Virginia. I love to teach, so eventually, I hope to be at one of the medical school campuses teaching students.
Job Titles:
- Member of the OSP Leadership Team
- Pre - Award Assistant Director
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- Assistant Professor
- Community Spotlight
- Regenerating
While many researchers work with animal models like mice, Christopher Arnold, assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences studies planarians. These unique creatures, also known as flatworms, have regenerative abilities that make them ideal subjects for investigating the basis of animal regeneration.
I wanted to better understand how stem cells could be used to repair tissues and sought out an animal capable of regenerating lost or damaged body parts. I found the work of Dr. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado and became fascinated by his studies on the highly regenerative invertebrate flatworm, the planaria Schmidtea mediterranea.
Working with planarians is also a relief on Arnold's system - he's allergic to mice.
Job Titles:
- Board Director
- Chancellor and Executive Dean, WVU Health Sciences
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- Member of the OSP Leadership Team
- Award Negotiation Associate Director
Job Titles:
- Board Director
- Member of the Research Leadership Team
- Vice President for Research
- Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Southern Universities Research Association
- Education
- Professor, Vice President for WVU Research / Professor, Vice President for WVU Research
- Vice President for Research at West Virginia University
- VP of Research and Institutional Official
- WVU Vice President
Dr. Fred King, Vice President of Research, discusses the University's research initiatives and the impact of WVU faculty and students in the quality of lives in West Virginia, as well as across the United States.
Dr. King serves as the chief research officer for all of WVU.
is the Vice President for Research at West Virginia University where he is also a Professor in the department of chemistry. Professor King earned his BS degree in chemistry from James Madison University and his PhD in analytical chemistry from the University of Virginia. He held a National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associateship at the Naval Research Laboratory before joining the faculty of West Virginia University.
Prior to his appointment as Vice President for Research, he served as the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
Professor King's research in optical spectroscopy and mass spectrometry has been supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy. It has also been featured on the cover of peer reviewed journals in his discipline. His former graduate students hold positions in academia, industry, and national laboratories. He served on the Board of Directors of the Oak Ridge Associated Universities and is currently the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Southern Universities Research Association which manages the Jefferson Laboratory for the US Department of Energy.
Education
BS Chemistry - James Madison University
PhD Chemistry - University of Virginia
NRC Postdoctoral Research Associate - Naval Research Laboratory
Job Titles:
- Member of the Officers Team
- Member of the Research Leadership Team
- Secretary
- Associate Vice President for Finance, Operations, and Research Administration / Associate Vice President for Finance, Operations, and Research Administration
- AVP for Finance, Operations, and Research Administration
Dr. Stores leads operational research administration activities and initiatives.
While reporting directly to the Vice President for Research, Dr. Stores is responsible for executive oversight of the Office of Sponsored Programs, the office of Research Systems and Operational Data Service, directly leads Research Administration Data and Data Analytics, Training, and provides strategic finance support for the WVU Research Office. The AVP leads operational research administration activities and initiatives.
The research office infrastructure serves to facilitate the success of the University's research enterprise. Utilizing her experience in strategic planning and change management, she leads performance management by creating experiences for learning, coordinating stakeholder communication, and developing synergies across the research office to ensure integration, transparency, and efficiency.
Dr. Stores supports university leadership in assessing new and existing programs, partnerships, and projects by guiding strategic and data-informed decision-making processes which are inclusive and collaborative, and that optimize opportunities with campus, corporate, and community partners. She champions planning, and decision-making workflows and documentation related to business operations to advance organizational goals and assist the research community. Dr. Stores collaborates with multiple constituency groups to build relationships across the research enterprise. She leads university-wide change management endeavors, such as the process for a new electronic research administration system.
Dr. Stores has deep expertise and experience in research, research development, and research administration and enjoys developing people and organizations with acute attention to culture building and the professional development of team members. Dr. Stores has proudly served West Virginia University, an R1 land grant University, for over 16 years in multiple leadership roles including as the Assistant Vice President for Research Administration and Director of the Office of Sponsored Programs, and the Associate Dean for Research for the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. Before rejoining WVU in December 2021, Dr. Stores served Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, as the Senior Director of Operations and Training, prior to that time, she served the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland as a United States Department of Health and Human Services Emerging Leader. She has also served as a United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Fellow.
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- IRB Reliance Administrator
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- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Assistant Professor
- Community Spotlight
Gloria Negrete-Lopez, assistant professor of women's and gender studies at the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, is taking a hard look at art and how it colors perceptions of Latin American migrants. Her work addresses a range of topics including gender and feminist studies, Latinx/e studies, migration, queer and trans of color critique and culture studies. At present, she's working on a book about the artistic and cultural work of migration activists.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Community Spotlight
- Franchini: Rhetoric, Writing and Racialization
Jennifer Sano-Franchini grew up in Hawai‘i-not a bad place to call home. The new West Virginia University Gaziano Family Legacy Professor of Rhetoric and Writing and associate professor of English completed her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Hawai‘i. She left the tropics and went on to pursue a doctorate in Rhetoric and Writing, with a concentration in Cultural Rhetorics, at Michigan State. From there, she took a tenure track position at Virginia Tech. In Fall 2022, she began her first semester at Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
I plan to continue my research on the cultural politics of user experience design, Asian American rhetoric, and the rhetorical work of institutions.
Sano-Franchini's doctoral research focused on YouTube videos about the practice of East Asian blepharoplasty (cosmetic eyelid surgery). She specifically looked at the tropes through which people across cultures rationalized the decision to get or not get the surgery, as well as the temporal logics on which those tropes rely.
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- Associate Professor of Stage Movement at WVU 's College of Creative Arts
- Community Spotlight
- Movement Coach
Movement coach Jessica Morgan is one of theater's rising generation of intimacy directors, expert choreographers trained to create consensual, safe spaces onstage and off.
It was West Virginia University's 2018 student production of "Cloud Nine" that changed everything for Morgan. Caryl Churchill's play didn't involve nudity, but one scene had enough "touching and exploration," she recalled, for her to see the importance of constructing a tightly choreographed experience for the actors. She needed to control the action in a way that would be coherent and compelling to the audience and comfortable and respectful for the cast.
Morgan found that process so productive that once the show wrapped, she kept searching for resources. She discovered that two years earlier, Intimacy Directors International (since dissolved and reformed as Intimacy Directors and Coordinators), had launched. IDI developed and promoted standards for handling scenes of emotional or physical intimacy, comparable to industry guidelines that already regulated scenes of violence. At the time Morgan got involved, the #MeToo movement had begun to draw serious attention from theater, film and television to the need for certified intimacy experts.
An associate professor of stage movement at WVU's College of Creative Arts, Morgan was already a choreographer of swordplay and other stage combats when she discovered intimacy direction and underwent the extensive training required for professional certification. Over the course of numerous productions, she has helped to develop protocols and to refine best practices with IDC's support. Her current research focuses on bringing consent and boundary vocabulary and practices into actor training programs and on helping to create inclusive spaces for trans and nonbinary actors.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Research Leadership Team
- Director of WVU 's Bridge Science
- Director, Bridge Science and Technology Policy, Leadership, and Communications Initiative / Director, Bridge Science and Technology Policy, Leadership, and Communications Initiative
- Director, Science and Technology Policy, Leadership, and Communications Initiative
Dr. Centrella works with Science and Technology Policy initiatives (STP-I).
Dr. Centrella is the Director of WVU's Bridge Science and Technology Policy, Leadership, and Communications Initiative. This multidisciplinary, University-wide initiative is jointly supported by the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Vice President for Research at WVU.
Dr. Centrella is the author of many scientific publications and has served on numerous professional panels and boards. These include the Program Prioritization Panel for Particle and Gravitational-wave Astrophysics for the 2010 National Academies Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, the LISA International Science Team, and Chair of the Advisory Board for the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav).
Job Titles:
- Community Spotlight
- IRB Administrator
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- Community Spotlight
- the Conflict of Interest Office Director
Every researcher at West Virginia University has filled out a research conflict of interest form at some point before starting their projects or studies. This means that every single researcher at WVU has either indirectly or directly encountered Joy Edwards.
Research compliance has an ever-changing regulatory environment, ripe with challenges, but we hope to be a facilitator and we hope to be able to be the translator between the requirements of the federal sponsors and the WVU research community.
Edwards is the Conflict of Interest (COI) Office Director at WVU. The COI Office provides the oversight of, and procedural structure for, the University's institutional, research, faculty and staff conflict of interest policies and procedures.
She has been at WVU since her undergraduate years, when she earned a degree in journalism, and has been an employee of her department since its inception.
Job Titles:
- Interim Assistant Director
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- Assistant Professor
- Community Spotlight
Goodrich, assistant professor of space physics, has focused her research efforts on microphysics of collisionless shocks in space, wave-particle interactions in various space environments and structures that arise from plasma turbulence. She also works to develop instrumentation and data analysis techniques to measure electric fields in space.
Goodrich has been at WVU for about a semester and a half and said her favorite thing about working at the University is the freedom she has to work on the projects that she wants to pursue.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Member of the OSP Leadership Team
- Director of OSP
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- Member of the OSP Leadership Team
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- Member of the Award Initiation & Management Team
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- Board Director
- WVU Senior Associate Vice President for HSC Research and Graduate Education
Li Fan tensed as she heard the three words that would follow her for the rest of her life.
So the duo navigated their way through the Hǎo Dìqiú, Fan correcting Chenxi's pronunciation the few times she was mistaken. But despite her young age, the toddler could accurately identify the majority of the terms by simply sounding the word out. Definitions for unknown words were also established with the aide of the dictionary.
Instead, the girl was homeschooled by her which also gave Fan the opportunity to teach her daughter some communication skills. As she was being taught, the young woman found Chenxi was well-rounded in nearly all the subjects, but definitely had a preference to the Language Arts. Anything from essays to reflections she could write with ease, along with the help of her journal.
West Virginia University undergraduate Lilian Bischof wears many hats - or perhaps one big, amazing hat. But it's what's inside Bischof's head, not on top of it, that earned her a prestigious invitation to present her research in the lobby of the Capitol building in Charleston during the February 2023 legislative session, as part of West Virginia Undergraduate Research Day. Her work on clean energy generation evaluates the feasibility of producing solar and wind power at several locations in West Virginia.
The dual major in chemical engineering and business administration developed a passion for math, science and financial literacy growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia. When she graduates in May 2023, she'll join Boston Consulting Group in Pittsburgh, launching a career in management consulting.
Job Titles:
- Member of the OSP Leadership Team
- AIM Associate Director
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- Board Director
- WVU Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
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- Board Director
- Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Center Director
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- Member of the Research Leadership Team
- Associate VP for Creative and Scholarly Activities
- Associate VP for Creative and Scholarly Activities / Associate VP for Creative and Scholarly Activities
- WVU As the Assistant Vice President for Creative
Dr. Page works with faculty in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
Dr. Page joined WVU as the Assistant Vice President for Creative and Scholarly Activities in October 2013 after a 16 year career in the Department of Psychology at Oklahoma State University where she was promoted to full professor in 2010.
Job Titles:
- Member of the OSP Leadership Team
- Award Negotiation Assistant Director
Moriah Katt's artificial model of the blood-brain barrier's cells and vessels is like an ant farm. A working replica of the vascular system separating the brain from the body, Katt's model allows her to see and manipulate the inner processes of that almost impermeable membrane.
I'm especially interested in diseases of the central nervous system because blood vessels in the brain are a little bit special and different than blood vessels elsewhere.
Job Titles:
- Board Director
- WVU Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
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- Board Director
- Hiner Dean, Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources
A math and science teacher in a West Virginia middle school was teaching a unit on ratios and proportions when she decided to "shift her practice and connect to students' everyday lives," Reagan Curtis recalled.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director
- Member of the Officers Team
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- General Counsel
- Member of the Officers Team
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- Member of the Research Leadership Team
- Associate Vice President for Research Development Associate Vice President for Research Development
- Associate VP for Research Development
Dr. Murphy works with state, industrial, federal and international partnerships.
Sheena Murphy started at WVU in the summer of 2016 after serving for many years as a physics professor at the University of Oklahoma. She is a former Executive Committee member of the OU/UA MRSEC, an NSF Career recipient and a former Sloan Foundation Fellow. She is an expert in low temperature, high magnetic field studies of two dimensional electronic systems and has worked at both IBM Research and AT&T Bell Labs.
Job Titles:
- Board Director
- WVU Vice President and General Counsel
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- IRB Coordinator / IRB Reviewer
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- Member of the OSP Leadership Team
- AIM Assistant Director