Robert Agnew, Criminology

"Describe an event in the last few weeks that angered you. Now explain how you dealt with that anger." This is how Robert Agnew, Professor and Chair of Sociology, introduces his students to his general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Understanding why some people turn to crime in response to particular pressures and negative emotions, while others do not, is one of the central themes of his intellectual work. Read more >

Lawrence Barsalou, Cognitive Psychology

Lawrence Barsalou has been studying how people think about chairs. In the process, the Emory cognitive psychologist has joined the growing number of researchers who are using neuroscience to pioneer a new understanding of the mind. Although the use of standard behavioral measures for the last fifty years has revolutionized our understanding of how the mind works, new techniques in neuroscience, such as functional magnetic imaging, are adding converging evidence and producing major new insights. Read more >

Valérie Biousse, Neuro-ophthalmology

Some view the eyes as windows to the soul. For Valérie Biousse, Cyrus H. Stoner Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Neurology, the eyes are more like windows to the brain.

Neuro-ophthalmologists identify and diagnose diseases of the brain by looking at the eye. It is a relatively young field of specialization, and Biousse is one of only two neuro-ophthalmologists at Emory (one of five in the state of Georgia). Read more >

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Nicholas Boulis, Neurosurgery

As a Yale undergraduate double majoring in philosophy and biology, Nicholas Boulis contemplated what it means to be human. As a member of the National Guard during the first Gulf war, he spent time at Walter Reed Hospital doing neurosurgery rotations. Those experiences, combined with his travels to Nicaragua during the Contra War, helped shape his decision to become a surgeon. "I wanted to be doing, as well as thinking," Boulis says. Read more >

Dubois Bowman, Biostatistics and Neuroimaging

Can you imagine mapping the mind in action?  DuBois Bowman, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, is doing just that.  He develops statistical methods for analyzing brain functioning from an expanded spatial-temporal vantage point.

The human brain can be represented by hundreds of thousands of tiny volume elements or "voxels" (a few cubic millimeters in size), with each containing a localized measurement of brain activity.  The activity in each voxel is constantly changing and voxels associate with one another in intricate ways. Read more >

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Victor Corces, Epigenetics

Victor Corces, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Chair of Biology, is thinking about accordions and flowers.

Corces specializes in epigenetics. While geneticists study the transmission of information within DNA, epigeneticists ask how that DNA is arranged and organized in the nucleus. While genetics examines content, epigenetics prioritizes form. Read more >

Linda Craighead, Eating Disorders and Weight Concerns

Looking good is important. But Linda Craighead also believes in the old adage: what matters most is on the inside. A clinical research scientist and psychologist, Craighead wants to better understand and treat eating disorders and weight concerns. She promotes a healthy body image, encourages good eating habits, and wants to make the "thin ideal" a thing of the past. Ask her, and she will tell you that thinking about how you look is normal—but it can become a problem when you spend too much time thinking about it, to the detriment of your health or social life. Looking good has its place...and it's not at the front of the line. Read more >

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W. Edward Craighead, Psych and Behavioral Sciences

If a parent suffers from a mood disorder, his or her child has up to a 50% chance of developing the same illness. W. Edward Craighead, Emory's first Rex Fuqua Chair in Child Psychiatry, wants to know why — and what can be done about it. Read more >

Marie Csete, Stem Cell Biology

When Marie Csete says something's in the air, she means it.

After two decades as an anesthesiologist, Csete wrote a Ph.D. thesis that overturned conventional wisdoms about oxygen's effect on stem cells. For decades, scientists have placed their tissue samples in the "room air" of a laboratory. Csete showed, however, that what researchers were taking for granted as harmless was in fact toxic. "Room air is 21% oxygen, but the oxygen level in the body tissues is about 3%," she says. Read more >

Frans De Waal, Primate Studies

In the last twenty years, Frans de Waal has helped change the way we think of animals, particularly the way we understand apes and monkeys.

Previously, researchers focused entirely on aggression and competition in animals. The animal world was supposed to be a Darwinian jungle—a harsh and ruthless fight for survival in which only the strong ruled. Animals, like Wall Street brokers, weren't supposed to be nice. Read more >

Mahlon DeLong, Neurology

Neurologist Mahlon DeLong’s efforts to understand the causes of Parkinson’s disease have taken him from the research lab to the bedside of patients. Along the way, he has made unique, award-winning contributions to knowing the origins of the disease, as well as alleviating the suffering of those afflicted with it.

In the early 1990s, researchers understood that Parkinson’s was caused by the brain’s loss of cells that manufacture the neurotransmitter dopamine. Read more >

Doug Eaton, Cell and Molecular Signaling

"Why in the world would anybody want to be a research scientist?" asks Doug Eaton, a professor of physiology and director of the Center for Cell and Molecular Signaling.

The answer, quite simply and perhaps unexpectedly, is because it is fun, he says. Read more >

Mikhail Epstein, Cultural Studies

When Mikhail Epstein was still living in Moscow, he imagined what it would be like to work at an American university. He dreamed of an academic community in which people came from all over campus—theology, physics, history, statistics, biology—to share knowledge and intellectual imagination.

During his experience with Emory's Gustafson seminars in the late 1990s, he finally found the type of community he was dreaming about. Read more >

Martha A. Fineman, Law

Woodruff Professor of Law, Martha Albertson Fineman, believes it is her scholarly responsibility "to challenge deeply held, relatively unexamined assumptions that underlie the way American society is organized and operates." In her books, she explores issues such as the nature and function of the family as a societal institution, the economic and political consequences of welfare and divorce reforms, and the meanings of "dependency" in American society and politics. Read more >

Frances Smith Foster, English and Women's Studies

It's one of the last places you'd expect to find a literary theorist trained in New Criticism. Frances Smith Foster, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies, has been spending time in the history archives. Says Foster: "I'm interested in what domestic life was like during slavery. I'm looking at nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, and letters written by African Americans in the years leading up to the American Civil War."

Foster advocates "new wave scholarship" that cuts across traditional humanities and social science fields. Read more >

Sander L. Gilman, Cultural Historian

Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Sciences, is reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind and Dr. Phil's The Ultimate Weight Solution.

A cultural, medical, and literary historian, Gilman studies a multitude of subjects: visual stereotypes of the mentally ill, the racial and ethnic implications of aesthetic plastic surgery, German Nazi culture, and the history of diets and dieting. That's just for starters. Read more >

Elizabeth Goodstein, Rhetoric and Cultural Theory

Elizabeth Goodstein’s interdisciplinary teaching and research have made the ILA a perfect academic home for her. Given her background in rhetoric and cultural theory and her wide-ranging interests, she’s pleased to be part of an institute that allows her to explore their full interdisciplinary range. "As someone who came out of an interdisciplinary graduate program, I feel extremely fortunate to be able to teach in one," comments Goodstein, "because there aren¹t very many places like the ILA." Read more >

David Gowler, Biblical Studies

Located in the town of Oxford, Georgia, only a forty-five-minute drive from Emory's Atlanta campus, Oxford College is an integral part of a world-renowned research university. As the birthplace of Emory University, it consists of a community of learners dedicated to an outstanding liberal arts intensive education for undergraduates in their first two years.

Dr. David B. Gowler came to Oxford College in fall 2000 as the Pierce Professor of Religion, one of the distinguished chairs of Emory University, because he was attracted to Oxford College's Liberal Arts Intensive environment. Read more >

Kate Heilpern, Emergency Medicine

Katherine L. Heilpern, M.D., refers to the emergency room as a mirror for society's problems. Individuals who are uninsured or underinsured. Overuse of guns. Underuse of seatbelts. Drinking and driving. Drug-resistant staph infections. The problems of chronic illness. A large emergency room in an urban hospital—like Grady Memorial—sees it all. So too the emergency departments of Emory Crawford Long, Emory University Hospital and Emory Johns Creek. All of these are under the direction of the Emory Department of Emergency Medicine. Read more >

Alexander Hicks, Social Welfare

When Alexander Hicks, a professor of sociology with a joint appointment in political science, sat down to write a history of government social programs in affluent and democratic countries, his personal experiences may have given him a special feel for the subject matter.

In the early 1960s, while he was attending middle school, Hicks lived in Chile. At that time, this South American country shared many of the social and political characteristics of European nations in the early twentieth century that would become central to the research for his latest book. Read more >

E. Brooks Holifield, American Church History

How does 'authority' function in a clerical context? E. Brooks Holifield, Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History, challenges traditional assumptions about the rise and fall of influence among the Christian clergy across American religious culture.

In his forthcoming book, God's Ambassadors, Holifield argues against those who depict the twentieth century as a period of unambiguous decline in clerical authority. A historical look at the American clergy reveals that challenges to their authority have a long history. Read more >

Debra Houry, Emergency Medicine and Partner Violence

Most victims of partner violence are not aware that their situation isn't "normal." According to Debra Houry, Assistant Professor and Director for the Center of Injury Control, "People don't recognize that they're victims of violence, they don't know to develop a safety plan, they don't know to tell friends and family about it." Advocating for these patients, and devising creative solutions to the barriers that many face, is one of the central missions of Houry's clinical and scholarly research. Read more >

Harvey Klehr, Politics and History

With the support of a senior fellowship from the Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2007-2008), Klehr has completed Spies: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Espionage in the United States (forthcoming, Yale University Press). Working with co-author Haynes and a former KGB officer who obtained unprecedented access to KGB files, Klehr has written a book that he believes will answer "just about all the open questions on Soviet spying in the United States from the 1930s and 1940s." Not only does the new study explain in detail what the Soviet Union was doing to gain access to American secrets, but it also provides an unprecedented window into the private lives of spies. Read more >

Michael Kuhar, Drug Addiction

For the last twenty years, neuropharmacologist Michael Kuhar has been at the forefront of research on the chemistry of cocaine addiction. Although he doesn't believe there will be a single, magic bullet for treating drug addicts, his pioneering work has led to a deeper understanding of how cocaine harms the brain, as well as how we might develop new medications for addicts.

In 1987, Kuhar and his research team were the first to identify the molecular site of action of cocaine which causes increases in the brain's levels of dopamine, a chemical that helps brain cells communicate. Read more >

Howard Kushner, Applied History of Medicine

Everyone loves a good mystery, and Howard Kushner is no exception. The Nat C. Robertson Distinguished Professor of Science and Society in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory College, with a joint appointment in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education at the Rollins School of Public Health, Kushner is forging new ground in the applied history of medicine. Collaborative in nature, this innovative field brings together academic scientists, health care providers, and public health practitioners to solve medical mysteries.
Read more >

Allan Levey, Brain Disorders

What do the populations of Iceland (approx. 290,000) and metro Atlanta (3.5 million) have in common? Very little. Which is one of the reasons why Emory neurologist Allan Levey, who is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, recently teamed up with Icelandic researchers to study the links between genes and diseases. Read more >

Steven Levy, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Steven Levy, MD, Bernard C. Holland Professor of Psychiatry, landed his very first job by accident. Fortunately, it worked out well; he's been at his first job for more than 30 years, and he's still happy with it. "I love it here," he says. Two of his children went to Emory. His wife, who has three degrees from Emory, is on the faculty. Both of his nephews went to Emory. "We're a very Emory family," Levy comments. Ironically, Levy originally had no plans to apply for a position. He did so at the suggestion of a friend who interviewed for an Emory job. The friend did not end up at Emory, but Levy did. Read more >

Dennis Liotta, Organic Chemistry

Louis Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared mind. For Dennis Liotta, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Chemistry, that's a fitting description of drug discovery in the basic sciences.

Emtriva is one of the most advanced HIV fighters on today's market. In Liotta's words, hard work and "a certain amount of serendipity" led him and colleagues Raymond Schinazi and Woo-Baeg Choi to discover the compound in the late 1980s. Read more >

David Lynn, Chemistry and Biology

How do we define life? David Lynn, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology, studies the molecular structures of living systems. When molecules make mistakes during self-assembly, or 'mis-fold' and replicate incorrectly, these misfires can inform our understanding of the biomolecular chemical processes that we understand as life.

Lynn's research group at Emory focuses on biomolecular chemistry, molecular evolution, and synthetic biology. Read more >

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Joseph Manns, Psychology and Neuroscience

Having trouble remembering where you put the keys? Try your hippocampus, a structure in the brain that plays a key role in memory. The hippocampus is the research focus of Joseph Manns, Assistant Professor of Psychology, as he works at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. Read more >

Kenneth Minneman, Pharmacology

In the spring of 2002, five Emory faculty members within the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center were recognized as being among the world's most highly cited scientific researchers. To Kenneth Minneman's surprise, he was one of them - and one of only 108 highly cited scientists worldwide in the pharmacology category.

Since he joined Emory in 1980, Minneman has been researching adrenergic receptors -- key components of signaling mechanisms in the brain and cardiovascular system. Read more >

Charles Nemeroff, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

What are the long-term neurobiological consequences of childhood sexual abuse? Charles Nemeroff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, argues that early life traumas sensitize the developing brain in permanent ways. Using brain imaging scans and other research tools, the Nemeroff lab has isolated a sub-type of depression that appears unique to adults who suffered abuse or neglect as children.
Read more >

Shuming Nie, Nanotechology

The poet William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. Shuming Nie sees it in a quantum dot.

Exploring the human body at the molecular level, Nie designs and engineers technologies on the scale of the nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter, a measurement approximately 50,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Nanotechnology has the potential to improve the lives of patients suffering from cancer and other diseases. It promises to improve early detection of cancer, increase the accuracy of cancer diagnoses, and make cancer treatments more effective. Read more >

Laura Otis, English, History of Science

Laura Otis is fascinated with science and passionate about literature. But it is the intertwining of the two that commands her greatest interest and attention. Relationships—between science and literature, biological elements and people, people and animals, academic departments and disciplines—are at the core of Otis's opus. In the many different facets of her work, this scholar is repeatedly driven to explore the connection between something...and something else.
Read more >

Sally Radell, Dance

As founder of the Dance Program, Sally Radell is committed to empowering her students by giving them tools to succeed in the dance profession—or whatever they choose to do. Dance is a skill capable of helping students succeed in many different arenas. Radell strives to ensure that students know how many options are available to them. "When I found dance my life changed. We all need to find our vehicle," she concludes. Read more >

Les Real, Disease Ecology

Once a disease gets established somewhere, can scientists predict where it will spread and how fast?

That simple question encapsulates the vastly intricate research of Les Real, who is the Candler Professor of Biology and the director of the Center for Disease Ecology at Emory University. Read more >

Thomas Remington, Parliamentary Law in Russia

Running a democracy may come natural to American politicians. For the last two hundred years, our country has grown up with the rules and procedures for introducing bills, reaching compromises, and passing new legislation.

But as Thomas Remington has learned, these concepts are fairly new for parliamentarians in Russia. After all, for the last 1,000 years, Russia has been under some form of authoritarian rule, whether by czars or Communist party officials. Only since Gorbachev's reforms in the 1980s have Russian parliamentarians been given the opportunity to debate and pass laws in an environment of real electoral competition. Read more >

Michael Rich, Political Science

In January 2000, Emory created the Office of University-Community Partnerships (OUCP), which is designed to integrate better Emory's teaching, research, and service missions with an emphasis on serving the greater Atlanta community.

Michael J. Rich, an associate professor of political science, became the first director of the OUCP. Working with the community is an area in which Rich has quite a bit of expertise. Read more >

Raymond Schinazi, HIV/AIDS drug research

Dr. Raymond Schinazi is an explorer. His passion lies in discovering new lands, conquering new-found territories, and vanquishing foes. But for Dr. Schinazi, the lands aren't geographical; and the enemies aren't human. He explores viruses that attack the human body, and has discovered drugs that endeavor to disarm one of today's most dangerous enemies: HIV/AIDS.
Read more >

Stephanie Sherman, Professor in Genetics

What is the genetic etiology of mental retardation and other linked disorders? Stephanie Sherman, Professor of Genetics, is moving toward an answer. Sherman seeks to determine why certain errors during the formation of egg and sperm cause miscarriages or, for those women whose pregnancies make it to term, mental retardation and birth defects in their infants. This research centers on Down syndrome. Sherman also studies Fragile X syndrome, a form of mental retardation whose etiology is tied to a single gene. Read more >

Jagdish Sheth, Marketing & Global Business

"Why do good companies fail?"  Imagine Duane Ackerman, CEO of BellSouth Corporation, posing that question a few years ago to his advisor Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing at Emory.

To answer could require writing a book – which is exactly what Sheth did. Read more >

Niall W. Slater, Classics

Once upon a time there was a young man named Lucius who journeyed far and wide seeking adventure and magic. Then, one day, he met a witch. Impressed by her powers, he decided to try to imitate her. He cast a spell and accidentally turned himself into a donkey. In that form he was forced to wander the world, suffering, learning and observing human nature, until one day the goddess Isis appeared and told him to eat some roses. He did, and immediately was transformed back into a human being. Read more >

Arlene Stecenko, Pulmonology and Cystic Fibrosis

Arlene Stecenko wants to halt the progression of two diseases that devastate patients and perplex scientists: Cystic Fibrosis Diabetes and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.

Since arriving at Emory in 2002, Stecenko has held numerous titles and responsibilities. She is the Marcus Professor of Pediatric Pulmonology and Director of the Division of Pulmonology, Allergy/Immunology, Cystic Fibrosis and Sleep in the Department of Pediatrics. Read more >

Ora Strickland, Nursing Research and Family Health

Ora Strickland is in the business of correcting false assumptions. As Professor of Nursing in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Strickland participated for more than ten years in the Women's Health Initiative, a national study that made headlines with its findings about hormone therapy and other health issues that affect women. The author of the first nursing measurement textbook (soon to be printed in its fourth edition), Strickland is currently exploring two distinct areas of nursing research that long have intrigued her: expectant fathers and the menstrual cycles of women. Read more >

Sharon Strocchia, Social and Cultural History of the Renaissance

Sharon Strocchia is a Renaissance woman who casts her eye over history, religion, gender, sexuality, health, medicine, and art. But no matter where her gaze falls, she views her subjects through the lens she finds most fascinating—that of the European Renaissance.

Strocchia, who received her B.A. from Stanford University and M.A./Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, began her career as a scholar of the social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy. Read more >

Elaine F. Walker, Psychology and Neuroscience

Is it possible to predict the risk of developing a major mental illness? Elaine Walker, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, answers this question by investigating early signs of schizophrenia and major depressive disorders from childhood to young adulthood. Currently, Walker's research focuses on adolescence because this is a critical developmental
period for the emergence of behavioral signs of risk for schizophrenia.

Over the past ten years, Walker has studied adolescents manifesting a syndrome called schizotypal personality disorder (SPD). Read more >

Patricia Whitten, Menopause

Professor of Anthropology Pat Whitten has tapped into an area of research quite relevant to baby boomers as they move into and through middle age. Her research topic is menopause, and she is exploring the possibility that phytoestrogens, a plant chemical found in foods such as soybeans, can be used as natural treatments for menopause or as anticancer agents.

It has been suggested that these dietary estrogens may be doing something quite beneficial for women in Japan, who reportedly lack the hot flashes characteristic of menopause in Western populations. Read more >

Isabel Wilkerson, Journalism

Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, a professor of ethics, and a historian. Above all, she's a teller of stories. She is known for her narrative reporting, referred by some writers as 'the journalism of empathy.'

"Storytelling is as old as fire," she says. "People will always want to hear a good story." Read more >

John Witte, Law and Religion

When John Witte was chosen in early 2001 to deliver the sixth Distinguished Faculty Lecture at Emory, he could have talked about family law, legal history, or the First Amendment and comparative religious liberty.

Then again, as the first professor from the law school to be selected to give the faculty lecture, he could have talked about the Law and Religion Program, which he has directed since 1987. Read more >

Carol Worthman, Sleep and Mental Health

Understanding the biological and emotional nuances behind puberty, depression, sleep, and even the long-term health effects of middle-class lifestyles are a few of Carol Worthman's latest research projects. She is a biological anthropologist who also draws from psychology to understand how culture affects human development and health.

Worthman's cross-cultural work on human sleep was featured in a recent Discovery Channel documentary, Understanding Sleep, and has received so much attention that she is pushing to complete The Other Third of Our Lives: The Cultural Ecology of Human Sleep. Read more >

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Jacob Wright, Hebrew Bible

What role does war play in shaping the identity of a people and the memories of a nation's history? Jacob L. Wright, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible, is exploring this question for the case of ancient Israelite society. Read more >

Kathryn Yount, Social Demography and Global Health

How does gender inequality affect health disparities between men and women across the life course and in different cultural contexts? Kathryn Yount, Associate Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health and in the Department of Sociology, has designed an innovative mixed-methods approach to answer this question. Read more >