UNCG Research congratulates Professor Stuart Dischell and Associate Professor Mitch Croatt, our 2017-2018 Research Excellence Award winners.
Professor Stuart Dischell receives the Senior Research Excellence Award for his work in the field of poetry.
Dischell’s first book, “Good Hope Road,” was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1992. The American literary awards program publishes only five books of poetry each year.
Since then, he has published five more books in some of the most prestigious poetry series in America. The first four were selected for the Penguin Poets Series. His latest, 2017’s “Children with Enemies,” was released by University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Poets series.
The professor of English has also published dozens of poems in leading periodicals including The Atlantic, Slate, and Plougshhares. His work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, has been reviewed by national outlets such as The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune, has been anthologized in textbooks, and has been selected for collections edited by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and Garrison Keillor.
Throughout his career, Dischell has received several awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, one of top honors open to artists in America. He has also given hundreds of readings at prestigious venues including the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Dartmouth University and the L.A. Times Book Festival.
Dischell, who holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a BA from Antioch College, is known not just nationally but internationally. He gives frequent readings and lectures abroad, and in 2015 he completed a residency at the Ledwig-Rowohlt Foundation’s Chateau Lavigny in Switzerland, joining writers from Canada, Denmark, Ireland, and India. These connections have allowed Dischell to bring internationally renowned writers to UNCG, benefitting the campus’s MFA program in creative writing as well as the Greensboro community at large.
Over the last 26 years, Dischell’s reputation has also drawn many talented students to UNCG. His students have gone on to receive prestigious publication awards of their own, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize and the American Poetry Review’s Honickman Award. In 2013, he received the College of Arts and Sciences Senior Teaching Excellence Award.
Recently, Dischell’s “Good Hope Road” was reissued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press, in celebration of the volume’s 25thanniversary. The press’s Classic Contemporaries Series features early books by the most important American poets.
Be on the lookout for an interview with our Senior Research Excellence Award winner in the spring 2019 UNCG Research Magazine.
Dr. Mitch Croatt receives the Junior Research Excellence Award for his scholarship in chemistry.
Croatt is a rising star in the field of synthetic organic chemistry, which is dedicated to the creation of new molecules and the development of new methods to make existing molecules more efficiently. The work has applications for environmental monitoring, healthcare, materials and technology, green energy, and more.
One of Croatt’s major areas of focus is at the interface of biology and chemistry, where he works with biologists and medicinal chemists to design new drugs to treat medical issues ranging from cancer to pain and fungal infections.
Croatt joined UNCG eight years ago, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Zurich. Since coming to UNCG, he has published 20 highly cited papers in a variety of high impact journals. Of those, 17 were produced in the last five years.
Over the same five-year period, he gave 36 invited research talks, and his lab received $818,792 in external funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, and the American Chemical Society.
The associate professor is known as an outstanding mentor and educator. In 2014, he received an NSF CAREER award, the organization’s most prestigious research grant for early-career faculty. Recipients of these awards display great potential in both research and education. So far, Croatt has mentored 3 postdoctoral scholars, 6 PhD students, 5 master’s students, and 35 undergraduates.
He has also developed a game for desktop and mobile devices designed to help students in a difficult area of organic chemistry — understanding and identifying functional groups in organic molecules. In 2015, he received UNCG’s James Y. Joyner Alumni Teaching Excellence Award.
Croatt holds a PhD from Stanford University and a BS from the University of Minnesota. In the fall of 2017, he was named head of UNCG’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Be on the lookout for an interview with our Junior Research Excellence Award winner in the fall 2018 UNCG Research Magazine.
The campus-wide Research Excellence recognition program was established in 1988 on the principle that creating and diffusing knowledge is a formal obligation of the University. Work by awardees contributes in an exemplary fashion to this end. Each year, a scholar at the rank of professor receives the Senior Research Excellence Award and a cash honorarium of $7,500, while a scholar at the rank of assistant or associate professor receives the Junior Research Excellence Award and $4,500.
Awardees are selected based on the importance of their contributions to the field, the originality of their work, the execution of their research, the pattern of their research productivity, and the academic reputation of the journals, publishing houses, exhibitions, and professional presentations in which their work has appeared.
Read more about the UNCG Research Excellence Award here.
For a list of prior recipients, click here.
