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Faculty & Staff Accolades
Trinidad Jackson named 2020 Nolen Allen Man of Distinction
Trinidad Jackson, MS, MPH, Senior Research Associate in the Office of Public Health Practice, was honored by the Center for Women and Families as their 2020 Nolen Allen Man of Distinction earlier this year. He received the award during the center’s “2020 Celebration of Service and Survival” with the Nolen Allen family in attendance. Their goal in honoring Trinidad was to “celebrate an amazing man who is a visionary in the field of violence prevention and a mentor in the lives of so many youth in our community... His tireless work is changing the lives of others and creating spaces for needed conversation.”
Dr. Muriel Harris receives UofL’s 2020 Presidential Exemplary Multicultural Teaching Award
Muriel Harris. PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences, has been selected to receive the university’s 2020 Commission for the Diversity and Racial Equality (CODRE) Presidential Exemplary Multicultural Teaching Award. In the letter from CODRE, she was commended for her “commitment to celebrating diversity, fostering equity, and striving for inclusion in our campus community and beyond.”
Dr. Harris was chosen for the honor for several reasons. As an educator, she has organized nearly a decade of student trips to Ghana and incorporate student-community engagement into her graduate courses. She also received a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship in Ghana and works with Bernheim and the Children at Play Network to enhance their relationship with diverse populations.
The Presidential Exemplary Multicultural Teaching Award is designed to affirm, value, honor, and recognize members of the university teaching staff who: (a) incorporates multicultural and global perspectives into their scholarship, teaching practices, and research; (b) accepts the educational principles that cultural literacy should be infused into the core of scholarly research and that education transmits the cumulative knowledge of human kind reflected in a global society; (c) uses educational principles and teaching practices that encourage and promote content and process, reflecting the fundamental contributions of diverse groups; and (d) encourages and engenders critical thinking, while utilizing varied educational materials strategies and texts.
Former student, Dr. Baraka Muvuka, described Dr. Harris’ teaching approach as “transformational, integrative, and multicultural because it challenges and empowers students to engage more critically in the material and to expand their perspective on diverse public health issues.”
Congratulations to Dr. Harris for this outstanding recognition!
Dr. Qi Zheng awarded National Science Foundation grant
Qi Zheng, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, has received a $150,000 award from the National Science Foundation for his collaborative research project "Quantile-based Modeling for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Data." For this three-year award, Dr. Zheng will build a unified, quantile-modeling based framework with an overarching goal of achieving effectiveness and reliability in analyzing heterogeneous data, especially when both the number of potential explanatory variables and the sample size are large. The project will address some of the key barriers in scalability to data size and dimensionality, exploration of heterogeneity and structures, need for robustness, and the ability to make use of incomplete observations.
