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2021 Research and Creative Achievement

Research and Creative Achievement honors are bestowed to senior faculty in recognition of excellence in research, scholarship, and creative achievement.

Peter Liaw

Peter Liaw graduated from National Tsing Hua University (BS), Taiwan, and Northwestern University (NW, PhD). Peter is most grateful to his PhD Advisor (Prof. Morris Fine), research group members, colleagues, Westinghouse, NW/UT/ORNL, NSF/DOE/DOD/industry, his parents, and family for their constant/excellent supports and inspirations.

What does being a Volunteer mean to you? How has UT empowered you to make a difference in a way you might not have imagined elsewhere?

UT has provided an excellent environment for me to interact with many wonderful students and colleagues to continue to learn and grow.


Fangxing “Fran” Li

Fran Li is a James McConnell Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the UT campus director of the CURENT center. His research area is in electric power systems. He is presently serving as the editor-in-chief of IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy.

What does being a Volunteer mean to you? How has UT empowered you to make a difference in a way you might not have imagined elsewhere?

I am earnestly grateful for this recognition and for being part of the Volunteers family. Being a Volunteer, I found that UT provides a very diverse and inclusive place where I can concentrate on my research works to explore numerous scientific and engineering challenges related to the operation, resilience and economics of electrical power infrastructures. I sincerely thank UT, Tickle College of Engineering, Department of EECS and the CURENT research center for their continuous supports and many unique opportunities that can be hardly found elsewhere.


Althea Murphy-Price

Althea Murphy-Price is an associate professor in the School of Art and has been nationally recognized for her creative work in fine arts. Murphy-Price’s work has been acknowledged for its non-conventional approach to the traditions of printmaking. Utilizing lithography, stenciling methods, photography and 3D printing, her work can be described as representing a broad survey of the medium that redefines what it means to practice print in the 21st century.

In the past 5 years she has exhibited in a total of 26 exhibitions thought out the country which include, the Print Center of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Kent State University Museum of Art, Kent, Ohio; the California College of the Arts in Oakland; the Central Library of Cantabria in Spain, and her currently solo exhibit at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama. Her creative work and projects have been featured in the university’s Torchbearer magazine, Higher Ground, and Prism: The School of Art Newsletter.

She is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Grant for Faculty Research, the Student/Faculty Research Award, and a Professional and Scholarly Development Award to support her most recent creative project, ‘Beauty Experiment,’ inspired variety of artistic approaches to explore the relationships between science, mental health, beauty, and self-perception.

What does being a Volunteer mean to you? How has UT empowered you to make a difference in a way you might not have imagined elsewhere?

I feel grateful to be part of a liberal arts institution in which one feels surrounded by a wealth of knowledge and scholarship. It fuels ones desire to succeed and continuously inspires my creative interests.


Sara Ritchey

Sara Ritchey is associate professor of history at UT. Her research and teaching focus on gender and religious life in the late middle ages and the ways that we continue to encounter vestiges of the Middle Ages today. She is the author of Holy Matter and Acts of Care, both from Cornell University Press, and is a co-editor of the journal postmedieval.

What does being a Volunteer mean to you? How has UT empowered you to make a difference in a way you might not have imagined elsewhere?

Being a Volunteer means having the opportunity to learn from students, staff, and faculty colleagues with life experiences and perspectives completely different from my own; the conversations and relationships I’ve had as a member of the UT community have enlarged my world immeasurably.