Category: Excellence Award Winners

Piper R. Thacher – 2023 Student Excellence Award Recipient

https://youtu.be/sIXvqZtjrDc

Piper’s Nomination

I would like to nominate Piper Thacher for the OSCAR student excellence award for her excellence and dedication to her research. Piper has always been excited to participate in research, especially in the field of conservation. She has worked on two major research projects which include fecal transplants to improve the microbiomes of two-toed sloths and analyzing the progesterone levels in four fin whales. In these two projects, she has learned how to conduct DNA extraction and sequencing along with immunoassays. Her fecal transplant research was originally a 5-week placement, but Piper was passionate and was able to continue the project and even publish her findings in Zoo Biology. She wanted to broaden her horizons so she decided to participate in an OSCAR project where she would have to take on a new field, endocrinology. She now spends every Friday in the lab running immunoassays. She hopes to get all her samples done for progesterone so she can look into a different hormone. She is an outstanding researcher due to her determination and passion for researching new topics.

Excellence Award Winners

Autumn Gray – 2023 Student Excellence Award Recipient

Excellence Award Winners

Dr. Changwoo Ahn – 2023 Mentoring Excellence Award Recipient

Dr. Changwoo Ahn’s Nomination

Dr. Ahn was my mentor and professor as an undergraduate student. Taking his class as my capstone was one the greatest adventures and experiences I’ve done. Doing the OSCAR research for PGF regarding soil organic matter and organic carbon taught me so many great lessons. I want to say thank you to Dr. Ahn for being so enthusiastic about environmental science and encouraging us to do hands-on experiments to write our academic research. He continues to be a great support for us to publish our research. Thank you, Dr. Ahn for everything you do for us! We appreciate you.

Excellence Award Winners

Dr. Nathalia Peixoto – 2023 Mentoring Excellence Award Recipient

Nathalia Peixoto’s Nomination

During this journey as a research assistant in neural engineering department here at mason, Professor Nathalia has exposed to many different sides of engineering. Due to her guidance and wittiness, I was able to expand my knowledge on cell culturing, ECG data, etc. I am grateful to be a part of her research and I’m looking forward to the amazing things I will learn from her. As a mentor, she is capable of unifying and leading a group of students to one goal. She even inspires us to start our own project and guides us with beginning on it. I couldn’t ask for a better mentor, thank you Nathalia!

Excellence Award Winners

Lindsay S. Shaffer – 2023 Mentoring Excellence Award Recipient (Graduate Student)

https://youtu.be/tD335wUQJ8k

Lindsay’s Nomination

Lindsay Shaffer mentored me while I was an undergraduate student and worked as her Research Assistant. She played an impeccable role in my academic success and was the prime role model of exactly what I desired in a mentor. Once I started graduate school, she continued to mentor me and help guide me throughout the program. Lindsay is someone I go to for advice, assistance, and a genuine accommodating hand. She has never failed to provide me anything I needed in assistance and always does an exceptional job, going above and beyond in her career and everything she does. Lindsay is exceptionally deserving of this award and I couldn’t be more honored to nominate her.

Excellence Award Winners

Dr. Nadine Kabbani – 2023 Mentoring Excellence Award Recipient

Dr. Kabbani’s Nomination

Dr. Nadine Kabbani is amongst the most dedicated and creative teacher and mentor in the University. Her teaching and service to the education crosses the boundaries of department and college. She has developed and taught many important courses at the intersection of neuroscience, technology, and society at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Her scientific passion extends into her laboratory where she mentors a diverse body of students.
She is true academic leader and an inspiration within the Mason Community.

Excellence Award Winners

Dr. Myeong Lee – 2023 Mentoring Excellence Award Recipient

Dr. Lee’s Nomination

Dr. Lee has been a great colleague, professor and advisor during my time at Mason. He is detail-oriented and thorough in his approach for all professional tasks. He is also very patient while mentoring and provides well constructed feedback. He is dedicated to his work and research, and is the director of his lab (Community Informatics Lab). His research and work ethic has been known in the research community, inviting many collaborations from other universities. He has received recognition and funding from state and NSF.

Excellence Award Winners

Dr. John M. Woolsey – 2023 Mentoring Excellence Award Recipient

Dr. Woolsey’s Nomination

I’m writing to nominate my colleague, Dr. John Woolsey, Director of Faculty and Curriculum Development, for the OSCAR Faculty Mentoring Excellence Award in recognition of the phenomenal work he has done over recent years to support the mentorship of undergraduate research within and beyond OSCAR and the Honors College. His unparalleled achievements in this area have fostered student learning and development and promoted diversity and inclusion in undergraduate research at George Mason University.
As a member of the Honors College faculty, I have had the opportunity to witness firsthand the incredible work Dr. Woolsey has done to champion undergraduate research. Some of this has occurred through individual mentorship, while in other cases, it has been through supporting broader structural improvements to support undergraduate research more broadly. For example, in recent years, he has worked to redesign the HNRS 110 Research and Inquiry course and foster a community of faculty who support and mentor undergraduate research in the Honors College.
When Dr. Woolsey began working full-time in the Honors College in the fall of 2014, the Honors College had experienced a period of rapid growth, doubling in size over a 5-year period (from 676 enrolled students in the fall of 2009 to 1,249 students in the fall of 2014). Further, the college has continued to grow in the intervening years, reaching approximately 2000 students this spring. This growth demanded a curriculum that could meet the needs of a growing student body with a diverse range of abilities and learning needs. This was a task that Dr. Woolsey met with impressive skill, dedication, and foresight.
Dr. Woolsey always works to center students as he mentors undergraduate research. Through the process of enhancing the research focus of the Honors College curriculum and making it sustainable for a fast-growing student population, he has expanded, sustained, and inspired the Honors College Peer Mentor (PM) program. Today, there are approximately 30 PMs each fall who serve as peer leaders for the HNRS 110 Research Methods course. These students, mentored directly by Dr. Woolsey, give back to the community by supporting incoming first-year students in learning about the foundations of inquiry, while also developing as leaders and citizens. Each year, several of the PMs join the Curriculum Development Team in the spring semester. Led by Dr. Woolsey, this group of students work to draw on recent research to enhance specific assignments in the research curriculum.
Students who have worked with Dr. Woolsey as Peer Mentors have a variety of rewarding learning experiences. Below I include a few quotes shared by those who have taken part in the program:
“Dr. Woolsey is an innovative and inspiring leader who has built an amazing program to help teach undergraduate students the importance of research and the utility of inquiry-based learning. As a PM, I have had the opportunity to work with Dr. Woolsey, and the team of PMs he has assembled, to improve and continue to develop the program to best suit incoming Honors College freshmen. He is always open to great ideas and willing to discuss how the Honors 110 curriculum can be improved. I am looking forward to continuing to work with Dr. Woolsey and the other PM’s to make the HNRS 110 Curriculum a positive and informative experience.”
“What’s unique about Dr. Woolsey is that he’s genuinely excited about advancing students’ understanding of research… Last Wednesday, he and I took a few minutes to plan what we were doing in his 110 class that day, and we stumbled on a tool on Web of Science that let you visualize which disciplines are citing a particular source. Dr. Woolsey spent probably a solid ten minutes geeking out about how helpful that would be to helping students get the concept of multiple perspectives and how evidence functions across different disciplines, because that’s how happy he is about helping students. Having known him as a professor, a research mentor, an academic advisor, and supervisor, it’s clear that he views his work as a professor to be first and foremost about his students. That’s the part he prioritizes, and to me it seems like the one he most enjoys, which I think is what helps him have such a profound impact on the people he works with.”
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dr. Woolsey as a PM for HNRS 110. Dr. Woolsey is extremely committed to making the entirety of HNRS 110 program as stimulating as possible and pushes not only the students, but us PMs, as well, to think outside the box and explore new ideas. He is one of those professors who truly strives to ensure that the 110 curriculum is tailored as best to the student’s needs so that they are further able to use the information they’ve gained outside of 110 setting. Within our PM class, Dr. Woolsey encourages us to take part as leaders in various activities throughout the semester both in the general and Honors College setting.”
“Dr. Woolsey is one of the most intelligent, funny, and actively supportive people I have ever met. I don’t think you can find someone else who cares more about getting freshmen engaged in scholarly research to see how it can them find their passions. It has been a pleasure learning from him as a supervisor and an honor to have him as an academic adviser as well. He is the first person I go to whenever I need advice on anything school related and I often come out with great life advice. I really credit Dr. Woolsey in giving me, and so many others, the confidence needed to feel like we belong in our future careers.”
Sentiments like these speak to the incredible impact Dr. Woolsey has had in implementing and organizing research mentorship within his everyday practice as a teacher and the broader research curriculum.
Finally, as Dr. Woolsey’s colleague, I can speak firsthand to the effort he has made to support other faculty in becoming research mentors. When I was a new Mason faculty member, Dr. Woolsey was one of the individuals who introduced me to the OSCAR office and URSP program. He is always generous in sharing advice and strategies for mentoring undergraduate research, and I’ve learned a great deal from him over the years. This is a role he plays for so many faculty here at Mason through the professional development activities and idea exchanges he facilitates on a frequent basis. For these reasons and more, I’m excited to nominate John Woolsey for this award.

Excellence Award Winners

Renee McCauley – 2023 Student Excellence Award Recipient

Renee’s Nomination

I strongly nominate Renee McCauley for the OSCAR Excellence Award. I met Renee in February of 2022 through the Undergraduate Psychology Honors Program. I agreed to mentor her project on, “The Intersection of Accent, Ethnicity, and Gender in Job Interviews”. I have been thoroughly impressed with her motivation to excel on the project beyond the honors course requirements, including aspirations to publish the project in a top tier I-O journal and present the work at a national conference. With this mindset, Renee has taken advantage of many opportunities to enhance her skillset. For example, I enrolled her as a user in my graduate level research methods course and she took advantage of absorbing all of the information through videos, learning resources, exercises, and even attending weekly live office hours. Renee continues to learn about the field by attending our weekly learning series, as an undergraduate student. She has been selected twice for GMU’s Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (USRP) and once for a Mason Impact MINI grant. Renee has immersed herself in research by working in Dr. Stephen Zaccaro’s lab and closely working with Steven Zhou, resulting in one publication and a few projects in progress.

The culminations of these experiences have led to several observations. First, she exhibits incredibly strong writing skills. Her thesis proposal received an “A+” and was noted by all faculty, including Dr. Jennifer Brielmaier, Dr. HoKwan Cheung, and myself, as demonstrating high writing quality. She also has three successful grant submissions under her belt, including funding from the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program for the Spring and Summer terms, as well as the Mason Impact MINI grant. During the Fall 2023 term, I invited her to contribute to an IOP commentary (with a two week turn-around time) and was impressed with her contributions and offered co-authorship. Second, Renee exhibits high levels of critical thinking skills. As a researcher, I am blown away by her attention to detail. She is working to ensure that results are not skewed due to a confound variable, whether it be length of time the candidate speaks or a particular accent being less understandable. In order to thoroughly explore the interaction of variables in her research topic, she is pursuing an ambitious 18-condition study with strong justifications for each condition! Third, Renee is an independent and hard worker. We meet weekly and I may give some direction during this time, but she follows through and produces near-finished products. Fourth, Renee is incredibly professional. She carefully drafts correspondence to a variety of audiences, including scholars in our field as well as outside of the field. While working on the IOP commentary, colleagues (a program director from another institution) noted Renee’s professionalism and how her contribution to the project was more in the scope of a collaborator vs. a student contribution.

Over time, Renee has become more certain about her educational and career goals. In a short timeframe, she decided to apply to the doctoral program and take her GREs. She has performed extremely well in coursework, the honors project, research lab, on the GREs, and more. She was one of the few selected into our prestigious doctoral program and she will continue on this trajectory of contributing to the Mason community and broader field of I-O psychology.

Please give this talented candidate your best consideration.

Excellence Award Winners

Ashley Rodriguez – 2022 Student Excellence Award Recipient

Ashley’s Nomination

In the many years I have known her, Ms. Rodriguez has pursued and excelled in a diverse set of research experiences. In Fall 2020, she completed a CRIM 498 “Independent Research Practicum” with me, studying racial differences in pretrial supervision outcomes. In the same academic year, she completed the honors seminar sequence in Criminology, Law and Society, earning her honors distinction in our Department. In Summer 2021, she applied to and was accepted into a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates at the University of South Carolina. Through this project, she gained experience conducting qualitative observations of virtual court hearings. During the same summer, she competed as part of the National Institute of Justice’s “Forecasting Recidivism Challenge” with a team of researchers (myself, Dr. David Wilson, and Dr. Peter Phalen) to apply machine learning methods to predict parolees’ likelihood of recidivism following release. Through this competition, Ms. Rodriguez helped her team earn several ranked finishes and $18,000 in prize money. Most recently, Ms. Rodriguez received a $1,000 grant from the OSCAR Undergraduate Research Scholars Program to study the effects of the presentation of pretrial risk probabilities on pretrial release decisions. She successfully navigated putting together materials for this vignette study, secured institutional review board approval, and is in the process of data collection. Through these activities, Ms. Rodriguez has produced seven conference presentations (four as first author), three research reports, and one book chapter.

Remarkably, Ms. Rodriguez has accomplished all of this while maintaining part-time employment outside of Mason and a paid research assistantship in my lab. She is an exceptional emerging scholar and has already earned herself three fully funded offers to doctoral programs in criminology. She is an outstanding ambassador for Mason, for OSCAR, and for the Department of Criminology, Law and Society. I give her my highest recommendation for this award.

out.

Excellence Award Winners

Erika Kennedy – 2022 Mentoring Excellence Award (Graduate Student) Recipient

Erika’s Nomination

Erika helped connect me with several projects and professors I did not know were affiliated with the study where we initially worked together. I was a curious but overwhelmed student researcher, unsure of how to start developing my ideas. Erika took notice of my desire to become more involved and reached out to inform me of the many opportunities my RA position offered. During the Summer Team Impact Project we worked on together, she kept in touch with undergraduate researchers to make sure that we were making headway on our projects. Erika was always available for questions, and she happily gave guidance to all of the small groups as we proposed and answered research questions. She has nearly-unlimited patience, and was always willing to give aid to myself and the other undergraduates working on the project. Throughout the summer, she was always willing to listen to my ideas and help me reframe them into actionable steps and answerable questions. Additionally, she went above and beyond to make sure that our study participants were well accommodated; she displayed immense empathy for the students who participated in our study and gave open and vulnerable interviews. She enabled us to take the lived experiences of GMU students and translate them into data showing how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted students in all domains of life; her commitment and direction played a huge role in the success of our STIP.

During and after her time as a GRA with the Health Starts Here study, Erika has mentored undergraduate students as we learned how to develop our own research project ideas. She has taken time out of her own busy schedule to ensure that we understand the nuances of proposing, researching, analyzing, and writing. Even after her time as a GRA, she has stayed involved and given many hours of her time each week to aid students who are trying to navigate the research process.

Erika’s mentorship has made my time as a student researcher incredibly rewarding. I deeply admire her intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for her field, and I hope to model those traits in the future. She has equipped me with the knowledge and skills to branch out and take on new and more difficult projects; Erika has been an incredible role model, and I firmly believe that her work as a mentor deserves recognition.

Excellence Award Winners