Provost’s Research and Scholarship Award Winners

It has been 13 years since the Provost’s Research and Scholarship Award program first launched. This program expanded last year and now offers awards across two career stages and two disciplinary categories. There were many outstanding nominations this year, and from that pool of distinguished nominees, five NSU faculty were recognized on Monday, November 13 in the Levan Center. This year, an added recognition for each winner was provided by NSU Business Services; each winner received a one-year membership to the NSU Faculty Club, valued at $300.

Arts, Business, Humanities, Law, and Social Sciences

For the Assistant Professor Award, two faculty members are honored in this category.

Assistant Professor Award – Amanda Furiasse, Halmos College of Arts & Sciences is an Assistant Professor of Digital and Medical Humanities in the Department of Humanities and Politics. Her scholarly work is at the intersection of religion, artificial intelligence, and cybernetic medicine, with recent publications in journals of religion, social issues, and culture. Her scholarly efforts extend beyond academia in her role as senior producer and podcast director for the Political Theology Network’s Podcast and as Co-Director for the Contagion, Religion, and Cities Project at the Center for the Study of Religion and the City. A recent grant award from Florida Humanities features her podcast work again, this time to launch a futurist podcast called Florida 2100: Tales of Tomorrow.

Assistant Professor Award – Amy Ellis, College of Psychology, is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the Trauma Resolution and Integration Program. She seeks to understand the impact of trauma on underserved populations in regard to health disparities, such as affectional and gender minorities, as well as Latine individuals, and male survivors of sexual abuse. Her work in collaboration with external colleagues has been funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and National Institute of Justice. In addition to academic publications, she disseminates her work through various news sources for broader audiences such as The New York Times, Psychiatric Times, Medium, and The Conversation. Her service to the NSU community includes training for campus units like the public safety department and Psychological Services Center as well as supervising students who see clients with various psychological difficulties.

Professor Award – Bahaudin Mujtaba, H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship, is a Professor of Human Resources and International Management. He is the author and coauthor of books dealing with diversity, ethics, and business management, and his contributions to his field are significant. During the past thirty years, he has worked with managers and human resource professionals in almost 20 countries, and this diverse exposure has provided him with many insights in cross-cultural management from the perspectives of different firms, people groups, and cultures.  With an extensive publication record and thousands of citations covering topics such as business, change, culture, ethics, diversity, and others, his work is highly collaborative with over 50 different coauthors drawn from NSU, the United States, and abroad. His books and guidance are sought and frequently used by companies, professors, and the media.  He served as a cultural consultant for the movie Kite Runner and in 2018 did pro bono training and development work in Afghanistan on topics of adult learning, leadership, and ethics.

STEM and Health/Medicine

Assistant Professor Award – Lisa Robison, College of Psychology, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and in her short time at the university already has funded collaborations with researchers in NSU’s Colleges of Pharmacy and Osteopathic Medicine. Her multidisciplinary work spans many topics, such as determining how lifestyle factors like exercise, diet, stress influence brain health and risk for mood disorders, addiction, and dementia. Since 2020, she has published 12 papers in journals with an average impact factor of 7.56. This widespread recognition can be further quantified with more than 1,000 citations of her publications and an impressive h-index of 21. Her work has garnered media attention, being featured on Newsweek and other news outlets.

Professor Award – Robert Smith, Dr. Kiran C. Patel College of Allopathic Medicine, is an Associate Professor in the department of Medical Education and researcher in the NSU Cell Therapy Institute. His work on antibiotic resistance contributes to our understanding of how bacteria resist antibiotics as populations. He has received funding as a PI or Co-PI on projects from the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health totaling over $2 million. One of these grants funded research equipment that has been used by over 4,000 NSU students and faculty. He has supervised over 65 undergraduate and graduate students, engaging many in his lab’s research projects and publishing with several of these students. As editor for the journal PLoS One and chair of NSU’s Faculty Research Advisory Council he helps to shape and support the research and scholarship in his field and others.

Congratulations to all the winners on their impressive achievements.

Posted 11/26/23