2016-2017 Chancellor's Council Distinguished Teach & Research Awards

The 2016-2017 Distinguished Research Award Recipients Are:

• Michael Ballou 
  Michael Ballou, a nutritional biologist and an associate professor with Texas Tech University's  Department of Animal and Food Sciences, was named Associate Dean for Research on June 1, 2014. Ballou will provide primary leadership for CASNR's graduate and research program development, including graduate student recruiting initiatives, responses to request for proposals, and research team building. In the past Ballou's research has centered on understanding how the innate immune responses of animals at various physiological states are involved in resistance to diseases and modulation of innate immune responses through management and nutrition practices.
  
  Prior to joining the Tech faculty, Ballou served as an associate instructor and graduate research assistant at the University of California-Davis. He received his bachelor's degree in animal science, and his doctorate in nutritional biology from the University of California-Davis. "Michael Ballou plays a vital and transformative role in creating a research community that CASNR will become in the years ahead," said Michael Galyean, dean of Tech's College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. He will continue to maintain active graduate education and research programs in their home departments, he said.
• Yoojin Chae 
  Yoojin Chae is an associate professor in Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on children's memory and abilities as witnesses. In particular, she has devoted to a wide range of research on children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility, trauma and memory, attachment and memory, language and memory, forensic interview techniques, and adults' evaluations of children's autobiographical memory. For instance, Dr. Chae has examined event memory and suggestibility of maltreated children in relation to trauma-related psychopathology (e.g., dissociation, PTSD, depression). She has also conducted a series of studies to explore the link between attachment and memory for distressing events, and has recently expanded her work to the study of children's visual attention during encoding as a possible mediator of the attachment-memory relation. In addition, she has studied the effects of different interviewing techniques and narrative skill on low-SES children's eyewitness memory. She is also further investigating adults' ability to detect children's true and false memory reports which has notable implications for the legal system.
  
• Harvinder Gill 
  Harvinder Gill is an associate professor and Whitacre Endowed Chair of Science and Engineering in the Whitacre College of Engineering Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University. The Gill Lab is directed by Dr. Harvinder Gill. Dr. Gill and his colleagues in the laboratory perform fundamental and translational research in the fields of drug delivery, vaccines, immunotherapy, and nanomedicine to help address some of the pressing biomedical challenges facing human health. Our research integrates the knowledge and tools from various disciplines including engineering, chemistry, biology, immunology, recombinant engineering, and micro-nano-technology.

• Michael Jordan
  Michael Jordan is an assistant professor in Ethnology and the Anthropology Undergraduate Program Director at Texas Tech University. His specializations include museum anthropology, material culture, intangible cultural heritage, ethnohistory and expressive culture of the Plains Indians, and western Folklore.