Florida State University has recognized eight outstanding faculty members with the Developing Scholar Award, which recognizes the research and creative contributions of associate professors.
The recognition comes with a one-time award of $10,000 to be used to promote the awardee’s program of research and creativity during the academic year subsequent to the award’s presentation.
“We have tremendous faculty scholars at Florida State University,” said Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson. “It is a privilege to recognize these eight associate professors for their hard work and dedication to their respective fields and for the excellent contributions they have made in a relatively short time. We look forward to supporting their bright futures at FSU.”
Martin Bauer, Mathematics, College of Arts and Sciences
Bauer is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics where he specializes on infinite dimensional Riemannian geometry and its applications to mathematical fluid mechanics, data science and shape analysis. He has published more than 65 peer-reviewed articles in some of the highest ranked outlets in theoretical and applied mathematics. His research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation and the Binational Science Foundation. One of his current projects, being done in collaboration with other FSU faculty, uses mathematics and network science to uncover patterns of electrical activity of neurons in the brain that code information about the foods we eat.
Shayok Chakraborty, Computer Science, College of Arts and Sciences
Chakraborty’s research involves the development of sophisticated active learning algorithms, which automatically identify the salient and informative samples from large amounts of data for manual annotation, in order to alleviate the data annotation-related challenges posed by modern machine learning applications. In 2022, he received the NSF CAREER Award, which recognizes junior faculty for their research and educational contributions. His research has also been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Amazon Research Awards Program and Intel. Dr. Chakraborty’s paper on person-centered multimedia computing received the 2017 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Multimedia Best Department Article Award. He is a senior IEEE member.
James Frederich, Chemistry and Biochemistry, College of Arts and Sciences
Frederich’s research group is broadly interested in leveraging synthetic organic chemistry to address problems at the interface of chemistry, biology, and medicine. Frederich joined the faculty at Florida State University in July 2014. He has been consistently funded by the NIH since 2017 and has also obtained private funding from LentoBio and Ichor Biosciences. In 2024 Frederich co-founded Cyprus Therapeutics, a startup company focused on developing small molecule drugs for brain cancer. Frederich earned his doctorate in 2011 from University of California Irvine, and then moved to UCLA where he was supported as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Patrick Harran.
Hadi Mohammadigoushki, Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
Mohammadigoushki’s research revolves around flow and dynamics of complex fluids. Complex fluids are ubiquitous in both nature and industry. These systems are widely found in applications such as oil-gas, pulp and paper, food, adhesives, detergents, cosmetics and protein gels. His research group’s primary goal is to discover new phenomena in complex fluids and to investigate the connection between molecular properties and processing conditions of complex fluids. Mohammadigoushki joined FSU in 2016 after completing his doctorate at the University of British Columbia and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2020 and has also obtained research funding from the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, the State of Florida and Colgate-Palmolive.
Allison Wing, Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, College of Arts and Sciences
Wing investigates hurricane development and the role of tropical cloud systems in the water cycle and climate, specifically how the clustering of convection influences heavy rainfall events and how changes in the properties of clouds and the way they clump together affects the planet’s future warming. Wing earned her doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 before serving as a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. In 2021, NASA awarded her the New (Early Career) Investigator Award and in 2022, she received the NSF CAREER award. She was also listed among the “Brilliant 10” by Popular Science Magazine in 2021.
Rachel Yohay, Physics, College of Arts and Sciences
Yohay’s research attempts to elucidate the interactions between elementary particles at the electroweak scale. As a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), she uses data collected by the CMS detector to search for rare signatures that may portend the existence of new light fundamental scalars — essentially, cousins of the Higgs boson. Yohay is funded by the Department of Energy and has received the prestigious DOE Early Career Award. She received her doctorate from University of Virginia in 2012.
Patricia Homan, Sociology, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy
Homan is director of research and strategic initiatives for FSU’s public health program. Her research focuses on population health, gender and racial inequality, life course and aging. Her research has won multiple national awards including the 2022 National Institutes of Health Matilda White Riley Early-Stage Investigator Award, the 2022 Early Career Gender Scholar Award, and the 2021 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Article Award. Her citation count in Google Scholar shows her work was more widely cited than faculty members in most top ranked Sociology departments nationwide in the last year — with 544 citations in 2023. Two of her articles were in the top 10 most downloaded articles of 2023 in their respective journals. She received her doctorate from Duke University in 2018.
Lindsey Eckert, English, College of Arts and Sciences
Eckert’s research and teaching focus on the intersections between British Romanticism and media history. Eckert is interested in how Romantic literature was shaped by rapidly changing technologies at the turn of the nineteenth century, and she works across literary genres (poetry, novels, biography) and didactic texts (especially almanacs and pocketbooks). She was selected to serve as the Reviews Editor at the Keats-Shelley Journal and was asked to peer review work by Book History journal. She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto.