Research and Creative Achievement honors are bestowed to senior faculty in recognition of excellence in research, scholarship, and creative achievement.
Daniela Corbetta
Psychology professor Daniela Corbetta focuses on the development of human infants in their first year of life in order to understand how early sensorimotor experience affects future cognitive development. Her lab is the only infancy lab to combine two different technologies, eye-tracking and motion analysis, to conduct this important research. Corbetta’s innovative research approach has led to collaborations with engineers in computer science and robotics to see if it is possible to teach a robot how to reach and grasp by using her longitudinal infant data. She won a competitive Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation to further this research. Her research has appeared in a number of important journals and involves collaborations with colleagues from France, Portugal, and Brazil.
Steve McCallum
Steve McCallum is described as equally distinguished for his scholarship and his steady leadership. He has written more than 100 refereed journal articles and co-authored several assessment-related textbooks in his field. The American Psychological Association elected him a fellow. McCallum is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, where he served as head for twenty-two years, overseeing its transformation into a thriving community of twenty-five tenure-track faculty, three centers, and numerous adjuncts and part-time faculty.
Thomas Papenbrock
Thomas Papenbrock, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is a prolific researcher and dedicated teacher who is respected for his work by the department and the international physics community. His research in theoretical nuclear physics focuses on neutron-rich nuclear isotopes, which occur rarely enough that they serve to elucidate aspects of physics that are not as apparent in the more stable nuclei around us. His work has appeared in journals such as Nature, Physics, and Physical Review Letters. He won the Department of Energy’s prestigious Outstanding Young Investigator Award in 2007 and the senior Humboldt Fellowship in 2010. Last year, the American Physical Society elected him a fellow.
Leon Tolbert
Over the past decade, Leon Tolbert, Min H. Kao Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been a productive researcher, authoring or co-authoring sixty-six journal articles. He won four prize papers from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 2013, he was named an IEEE fellow in recognition of his research and leadership within the organization over the past decade. He is a founding member and co-principal investigator of the Center for Ultra-Wide-Area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks, or CURENT, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center that is jointly supported by the US Department of Energy and annually funded at $4 million. He is the principal investigator on a $2.65 million DOE grant to develop a traineeship in wide bandgap power electronics for graduate students. He has also worked tirelessly to advise and mentor a new generation of graduate students in his department.