UNCG Research congratulates Professor Olav Rueppell and Associate Professor Joanne Murphy, our 2019-2020 Research Excellence Award winners.
Professor Olav Rueppell receives the Senior Research Excellence Award for his work in the fields of social insect genetics and evolutionary biology.
The Florence Schaeffer Distinguished Professor of Science is widely recognized at the international, national, and regional levels for his research, which has contributed significantly to our understanding of pollinator behavior and health. His current major projects focus on honey bees, an organism critical to the success of agricultural crops and thus the production of billions of dollars’ worth of human food.
Dr. Rueppell has received more than $5.5 million dollars in research funding from agencies including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Army, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the N.C. Biotechnology Center. He has also published 89 peer-reviewed articles in prominent journals and ten book chapters.
His many accolades include the National Science Foundation’s Ideas Challenge Winner for Basic Research to Enable Agricultural Development, the Mid-Career Mentoring Award from the Council of Undergraduate Research in the biology division, and the James I. Hambleton Award from the Eastern Apicultural Society of North Carolina. He is considered a leading scholar in his field.
Rueppell is also known for his considerable work mentoring students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has worked with more than 60 UNCG undergraduates in his lab, has served as co-PI on several large NSF-sponsored programs providing research experiences to undergraduates, and received the 2016 UNCG Thomas Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. Five of his undergraduate mentees have won UNCG Excellence Awards and a sixth won the national White Research Award. Nearly half of his peer-reviewed publications include undergraduate co-authors. Rueppell has also mentored seven postdoctoral researchers, and graduated twelve M.S. students and two Ph.D. students at UNCG, one of whom received the University’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.
Rueppell was also instrumental in the creation of the new UNCG Plant and Pollinator Center at Gateway Research Park. The center serves as a hub for research on plants and pollinators that has local, regional, national, and international implications, as well as a space for student training and community engagement.
Associate Professor Joanne Murphy receives the Junior Research Excellence Award for her scholarship in Aegean archaeology and archaeological methods and theory.
Dr. Murphy has published broadly on topics relating to the Greek Bronze Age, including mortuary and religious activities, production and prestige, and archaeological methods, with numerous other writings under review. Of particular note is her work on the tombs at Pylos. Her conclusions, which connect these tombs and associated burial goods to the development of Mycenaean palaces, are groundbreaking in the field of Late Bronze Age archaeology.
Murphy’s work has been published by several highly reputable academic presses, including Oxford and Routledge. She has also served as a lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America, giving ten public lectures at universities across North America.
She is recognized for her broad collaborative work and rigorous pursuit of funding. In 2015, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Outside of the Classics discipline, Murphy was involved in the creation of the Transforming the Humanities program, a partnership between UNCG and NC Central University with $200,000 in funding from the Mellon Foundation. The program supports humanities research and collaboration, with special attention on engaging minority students.
In addition to these accomplishments, Murphy regularly mentors students, supervising eight undergraduate researchers since 2014. She received the 2018 Thomas Undergraduate Research Mentor Award and was nominated by the University for the National Council of Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. With funding from the Institute of Aegean Prehistory, she also directs a field school in Kea every summer, leading undergraduate students in hands-on field research.
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.
Article by Hope Voorhees
