Congratulations to the 2024 Recipients
Transition to the Professoriate (T3P) Scholars Award
Transition to the Professoriate, or T3P (formerly SEC Emerging Scholars), prepares selected scholars to serve as future faculty. The program provides professional development and networking opportunities for current doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers who are considering careers in higher education.
Jean Costa-Silva
Department of Linguistics, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Jean Costa-Silva is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Georgia. Jean’s primary interests pertain to Second Language Acquisition and Cognitive Linguistics. He is interested in how learners employ different linguistic strategies to describe reality.
Costa-Silva has a B.A. in Anglophone Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and certificates from the University of Oregon and the University of Cambridge.
Prior to coming to UGA, he taught English in Slovakia and Brazil for over 10 years. In 2017, he received a Fulbright scholarship and taught Portuguese at UGA. This experience motivated him to pursue a Ph.D. in Linguistics.
Costa-Silva’s tenure at UGA has been underscored by a strong commitment to research, teaching, and service. He gave invited talks abroad and presented at multiple conferences, including the Conference on Scholarly Teaching in Linguistics and the Linguistics Society of America Conference. He has also published in journals of international impact. He redesigned courses to promote critical thinking about language in Linguistics and in the Portuguese Flagship Program. For this work, he was the winner of the highly competitive Excellence in Teaching Award. He also served as the Executive Editor of Working Papers in Linguistics, and founded the Second Language Acquisition Lab. In 2023, he was inducted into the Blue Key Honors Society.
Costa-Silva is currently working towards a postdoctoral fellowship with the goal of diversifying his opportunities in higher education.
Ronnie Fulton
Department of Microbiology, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Ronnie Fulton is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Georgia. He joined the laboratory of Dr. Diana Downs in the Department of Microbiology. His dissertation research focuses on metabolic contributions by proteins in the highly conserved Rid superfamily and the consequences associated with the reactive metabolites they remove.
Fulton’s research has described the first experimental data supporting concepts proposed from previous studies. As such, his work has defined a new paradigm in metabolism and has significantly contributed to the field.
Fulton grew up in a small rural community in southwestern Oklahoma. He earned a B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Oklahoma.
Fulton has presented his work at regional, national, and international meetings, and has been recognized for his research potential as a recipient of a traineeship in Genetics from the NIH, and a departmental award for research in microbial biodiversity and physiology. Beyond his potential as a researcher, Fulton has shown devotion to education, mentorship and community engagement. He has participated in several science outreach events and has been recognized for his dedication to students in courses he has instructed. Additionally, he has rigorously mentored multiple undergraduate students in the laboratory and continues to be a resource for, and have a positive influence on, members of the laboratory and other communities on campus.
Fulton’s career goal is to become a tenured faculty member at an R1 institution where he can continue to pursue his passions for research, education and mentorship, while promoting equity and inclusion for students from underrepresented groups.
Dominique La Barrie
Department of Psychology, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Dominique L. La Barrie is a Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology and is mentored by Dr. Anne Shaffer. La Barrie’s dissertation study has two aims: (1) to examine whether the types and frequencies of ERS messages shared with youth differ between parents and grandparents, and (2) to examine if there are differences in how parents’ and grandparents’ ERS messages buffer against the harmful effects of racism. La Barrie hopes her work will provide contextual information about how youth receive ERS messages within their households and highlight how grandparents are significant socializers.
Before coming to UGA, La Barrie developed an interest in understanding how racism and racial trauma influence youth development. Upon starting graduate school, she focused on ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) as a cultural process that can help youth navigate discrimination and expand the literature to understand how family context may inform ERS, especially in Black and Latinx families.
La Barrie has served as the previous Psychology Undergraduate Mentoring Program coordinator and has been on various diversity committees at UGA. The American Psychological Association, the National Science Foundation, and the Society for Research on Child Development have recognized her contributions.
La Barrie is passionate about communicating the impact of racism and discrimination to academic and non-academic audiences, regularly engaging in speaking and outreach opportunities at UGA, locally and nationally. An ongoing professional goal is to work toward diversifying academia by recruiting, retaining, and supporting historically underrepresented minority students.
Graduate School Dissertation Completion Award
Dissertation completion assistantships are awarded to outstanding doctoral students in their final year of study on a competitive basis. These assistantships allow the student to devote time to the completion of their dissertation by relieving them of departmental teaching or research duties.
Jaminque Adams
Department of Educational Theory and Practice, Mary Frances Early College of Education
Jaminque Adams is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research pursuits are situated at the nexus of critical Black educational studies, radical Black feminist qualitative inquiry, and teacher education rooted in abolitionist principles.
Adams’ research passion stems from her own journey as a student in Detroit Public Schools and a former public-charter school teacher in the College Initiatives program at Yes Prep in Houston. As a product of Black women teachers’ labor of love, she specifically centers her research on Black women teachers’ historical and present-day labor, interiority, wholeness, and healing praxis.
Adams earned her bachelor’s in English from Spelman College followed by a master’s in African American Studies from The Ohio State University.
Her commitment to honoring the stories of Black women teachers shines through her scholarly work. In summer 2023, Adams was a summer research fellow and later selected as a graduate research assistant for the groundbreaking Black Teacher Archive Project at Harvard University where she continued to develop her knowledge about the legacy of Black women teachers. Her dissertation project specifically examines the impact of antiblack racism on Black women teachers’ labor and well-being in the K-12 teaching profession as well as their refusal and radical healing praxis.
Upon graduating, Adams will continue to celebrate and advocate for the well being and healing of Black women educators through her roles as an educational researcher, budding scholar activist, and teacher educator.
She is a proud native of Detroit as well as a lover of hot wings, all things yellow, and her family!
Donald Dunagan
Department of Linguistics, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Donald Dunagan is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at UGA, working under Dr. John Hale. Dunagan’s research interests are in computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics: language in computers, the human mind, and the human brain, respectively.
Dunagan’s research leverages artificial intelligence and computational modeling to investigate language processing in both humans and machines. His work in these domains has led him to realize the importance of the individual in language.
Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., he received an M.S. in artificial intelligence from the University of Georgia.
After finishing his Ph.D., Dunagan will pursue a postdoctoral research position in a clinical setting. He aims to apply his (research) skills and knowledge in computational techniques, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and neuroimaging to working with e.g., populations with post-stroke language disorder. Following this additional, specialized training, he plans to pursue a position as either a staff research scientist or a tenure track faculty member.
Molly E. Hale
Department of Psychology, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Molly Hale is a Ph.D. candidate in the Clinical Psychology program at UGA, studying under Dr. Cindy Suveg. Her research examines how intra- and inter-personal factors can be leveraged to buffer against the development of internalizing symptoms and improve socioemotional adjustment for all youth.
Internalizing symptoms (i.e., anxious, depressive, somatic) pose the biggest burden to the current mental health crisis for youth across the United States. Youth who struggle with internalizing symptoms face significant long-term challenges, however, those who engage in adaptive self-regulation and maintain supportive relationships notably decrease their risk for developing clinical symptoms. Using the biopsychosocial model (BPS), Hale accomplishes the goal of decreasing this risk through the examination of three key factors: 1) adaptive self-regulation, 2) close interpersonal relationships, and 3) synchrony.
Hale came to UGA with an M.S. in Experimental Psychology from William & Mary. Given her interest in the intersection of behavioral and biological factors using multilevel data, she completed the Quantitative Methodology in Family Sciences Certificate where she learned how to employ advanced statistical modeling techniques to answer research questions.
Her work at UGA has culminated in thirteen peer-reviewed publications (nine first-author), with four more under review, six publications in preparation (four first-author), and 37 conference/symposia presentations.
Upon graduation, Hale plans to continue her work as a tenure-track principal investigator at a rigorous, academic institution.
Yuchen Song
Department of Educational Psychology, Mary Frances Early College of Education
Yuchen Song is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Psychology at UGA, working under Dr. Emily Rosenzweig. His research seeks to gauge the source of academic motivation, and to sustain motivation in STEM fields through intervention programs.
In the past few years, his research agenda centers around the question of where academic motivation comes from. Following this train of thought, his most recent work examines the moment-to-moment dyadic interaction in the context of early math learning through an observational approach. Song plans to use latent class analysis to explore the heterogeneous patterns in parenting behaviors when they interact with children on math tasks, and how these behavioral patterns influence children’s subsequent emotional affect and engagement in math learning. This line of work has long-term implications in that it can directly speak to parenting behaviors that are motivating or demotivating to children’s early motivation in math.
Prior to coming to UGA, Song received an M.A in Experimental Psychology from Brandeis University.
Chris Smaga
Odum School of Ecology
Chris Smaga is a Ph.D. candidate in the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. His research is focused on understanding how the environment experienced during development has lasting effects on organisms later in life.
Using American alligators as a model, he is exploring the ecological and evolutionary consequences of temperature-dependent sex determination, including how it is disrupted by anthropogenic contaminants.
Smaga received his B.S. in zoology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he studied Snake Fungal Disease. During his final year as an undergrad, he began exploring graduate school opportunities and came across the Parrott Lab at the Savannah River Ecology Lab (SREL) in UGA’s Odum School of Ecology. The reputation of SREL for reptile research and the integrative nature of the Parrott Lab’s work on alligators intrigued him to pursue a Ph.D. in ecology at UGA.
During his time at UGA, Smaga has published 6 papers, two as first author, and has presented his work at regional, national and international conferences, where he has won several awards for best talks. He has secured funding for both research and conference travel from UGA and the Odum School and was recently awarded the Sharitz-Hatfield fellowship.
After graduating, Smaga plans to work at a university where he can split his time between teaching, mentoring students and conducting research on reptile ecology and life history.
De Yang
Department of Philosophy, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
De Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia, working under the supervision of Dr. René Jagnow. Yang’s research interests lie in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science, with a specific focus on understanding social bias and its manifestation in various aspects of human cognition.
Yang’s work integrates insights from empirical research in psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to develop a comprehensive understanding of social bias. Currently, he is engaged in three primary projects: the first investigates how visual perception can exhibit bias; the second examines biases inherent in machine learning algorithms; and the third explores the connection between social bias and the emerging philosophical topic of epistemic injustice. The overarching aim of his research is to deepen our understanding of the formation of social bias and its broader influence on society.
Before pursuing a Ph.D. at UGA, Yang earned an M.A. in Philosophy from Georgia State University and a B.A. in Political Science from the China University of Political Science and Law.
Upon graduation, Yang aspires to continue this research, seeking a position as a postdoctoral researcher or a tenure-track faculty member at an academic institution.
Linhao Zhang
Department of Human Development and Family Science, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Linhao Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at the University of Georgia.
Her research focuses on studying how child adversity influences youth development and psychopathology and how psychophysiological and neurological mechanisms impact these associations. She is particularly interested in how sleep can impact the parent-child relationship and risk and resilience behaviors.
Zhang received her B.A. in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University and her M.S. Ed in Counseling from the University of Georgia. She joined UGA in 2020 and works with Dr. Assaf Oshri and Dr. Charles Geier at the Youth Development Institute.
After earning a Ph.D. degree, Zhang plans to secure a postdoctoral fellowship followed by a tenure-track research professor position. She would like to continue contributing to the growing body of developmental neuroscience research on the role of sleep in adolescent adjustment.
