Hettleman Prizes go to 5 early-career faculty
Faculty members who exemplify innovative research and future career promise receive the annual awards.
Five junior faculty members have been recognized for their research with the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prizes for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement.
The late Phillip Hettleman, a member of the Carolina class of 1921, and his wife established the award in 1986 to recognize junior faculty members who demonstrate groundbreaking and innovative research along with future career promise. The recipients of the $8,000 prize will be honored at an upcoming Faculty Council meeting and deliver presentations on their research during University Research Week in October.
Wubin Bai, applied physical sciences department, College of Arts and Sciences
Bai is a rising scholar pioneering in bioelectronic technology, especially in the realm of implantable and wearable devices and drug delivery. Bai’s goal is to create new technologies for wearable or implantable devices that can sense physiological quantities to deliver drugs or direct tissue growth and disappear when no longer needed. His developments enable dozens of microgram-dose drugs to be actively delivered with high precision.
Stephanie DeGooyer, English and comparative literature department, College of Arts and Sciences
DeGooyer’s research examines intersections between law and literature from both historical and contemporary perspectives. By exploring major issues in their sociohistorical context, DeGooyer brings to light unexpected continuities, discrepancies, and parallels between concepts and policies of immigration, notions of citizenship, nationality, refugees, and asylum in the 18th and 21st centuries. She is actively shaping public discourse on these topics through interviews and podcasts with PBS, The Nation, The Guardian and Public Books.
Julia Rager, environmental sciences and engineering department, Gillings School of Global Public Health
Rager leads a research team aimed at unraveling relationships between environmental exposures and health outcomes, with a focus on complex mixtures — made of many chemicals whose complete composition is unknown — that are becoming more prevalent in the environment. Her findings highlight the importance of regulating human exposures to chemicals based on the best available science enabled through an analysis method that combines multiple datasets to study complex biological processes.
Carl Rodriguez, physics and astronomy department, College of Arts and Sciences
Rodriguez is an emerging leader in a field that is in its infancy — black holes and gravitational waves. By carefully studying the full catalogs of gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime caused by large moving objects like black holes — that will be discovered over the coming decades, Rodriguez can learn not only about how black holes form, but how stars, star clusters and even galaxies are born and die across cosmic space and time.
Mark Shen, psychiatry department, School of Medicine
Shen discovered an early biomarker for autism — the presence of excessive cerebrospinal fluid volume in the brain — that is detectable by 6 months of age in certain babies, which is two years before they develop autism. His research since then has focused on how CSF cleans the brain of neuroinflammation and how problems with that process can lead to the development of autism in the first years of life.
