Category Archives: Honors and Awards

Winner of OPE Career Enhancement and Postdoctoral Travel Awards

The Office of Postdoctoral Education at UAB has awarded me two Fall 2013 awards: the Career Enhancement Award and the Postdoctoral Travel Award. The Career Enhancement Award is designed to fund extramural training activities. In my case, I have used the $1500 award to attend the Statistical Horizons Meta-Analysis course this summer. The Postdoctoral Travel Award is intended to fund travel to a conference to present scientific work. This $500 award will be used to travel to the Obesity Society meetings in Atlanta this fall. My gratitude to the OPE for supporting my career development.

Awarded NORC Pilot Grant to Develop Mechanical Turk Capacity at UAB

Consider a rodent study that uses a high fat diet to induce obesity. What do the results represent? Do they model the effects of all high fat diets in humans? Do the results provide insights into the effects of obesity? Or should we limit the scope of inference to consider only that specific diet within rodents?

The use of language in communicating research results can influence the way others interpret them. Analyzing the use of language in research reporting can be a time-consuming task, though, which can be difficult to automate because it often requires human judgment. The Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has recently awarded me a $25,000 Early Career Study Award to explore using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to crowdsource the evaluation of language used in scientific publications.
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First place: Nutritional Epidemiology Postdoc Poster Competition

As a follow up to being announced as one of the finalists for the Nutritional Epidemiology Postdoc research competition at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual meetings during the Experimental Biology meetings, I was named the winner of the poster competition. My work, titled “Sound advice or biased reporting? Breakfast as a strategy to reduce or prevent obesity or weight gain,” was presented at the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Interest Section business meeting alongside some fantastic work. The competition received a record number of submissions and I am honored to receive this recognition.Thank you to my co-authors Drs. Michelle M Bohan Brown and David Allison.

First place: 2013 Public Health Research Day

Public Health Research Day Award

The UAB School of Public Health celebrated Public Health week with activities such as Public Health Research Day. Awards were distributed for the top three posters from faculty, staff, postdocs, and students. I was honored with first place in the postdoctoral category. Congratulations to the other winners!

 

 

 

Finalist in ASN’s Epi RIS research competition

The Nutritional Epidemiology Research Interest Section of the American Society for Nutrition has named me one of three finalists in the post-doc category of their research competition scheduled at the Experimental Biology Meetings in Boston.

3rd Place in inaugural AlPHA poster competition

Alabama Public Health Association (AlPHA) held their meetings at UAB this April and held inaugural poster session. Having won the post-doctoral division of UAB’s Public Health Research Day on April 2nd, I was invited to present my work on breakfast and obesity at AlPHA’s session on April 4th, and was awarded third place in the poster competition.

Winner: 2012 Back of the Envelope Award

2012 Back of the Envelope Award

Back of the Envelope Awards from the University of Alabama School of Public Health support small, creative research projects that are solicited on the back of a number 10 envelope. To keep with the informal proposal theme, envelopes are slipped under the dean’s door for submission. I was awarded a Back of the Envelope award in the Trainee category with a submission titled “Macronutrient confounding with thirst.”