Junior Faculty Research Award Competition Recipients for 2016-2017 Announced

The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs has announced the recipients of the 2016-2017 Junior Faculty Research Award Competition. The competition was open to all Texas A&M University-Commerce full-time, tenure-track faculty members. The competition recognizes junior faculty for outstanding research consisting of a systematic study directed toward fuller scientific knowledge or understanding of the subject studied. Funding is provided for innovative research and each award consists of a $1,000 cash prize and a plaque. Funds come from the Faculty Research Endowment, which was established to support faculty research.

This year's A&M-Commerce winners include Dr. Lin Guo of the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics Dr. Christian Hempelmann of the Department of Literature and Languages and also director of the Ontological Semantic Technology Lab at A&M-Commerce. Drs. Haydn Fox (Associate Dean of Biological & Environmental Sciences), Unal Sakoglu (Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Information Systems) and Arlene Horne (Vice Provost for Research) commented on the work of this year's awardees.

“Dr. Guo's primary area of expertise is in phytoremediation of contaminated water,” said Dr. Fox.  “In the two years Dr. Guo has been with the university, she has established her research lab, submitted several grant proposals and has published six high-impact journal papers related to phytoremediation of acid mine drainage (AMD).”

“I have known Dr. Hempelmann since early 2013 when we started working together on the creation of the multidisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Computational Linguistics,” said Dr. Sakoglu. “This certificate has recently been approved and has several students pursuing it. We started collaborating on research as well, in the ongoing project that started from work by Dr. Varadraj Gurupur, now at University of Central Florida and still a collaborator. The project put the initial work in medical informatics on a new basis by creating a medical ontology per Dr. Hempelmann’s expertise as pursued in his lab.”

“These two junior faculty members represent what A&M-Commerce is known for, which is outstanding scholars.  We are very grateful to have them at A&M-Commerce. This award could not have gone to more deserving faculty members. I would like to congratulate each of them on their outstanding work,” said Dr. Horne.