VCU news

Gordon Archer, M.D., senior associate dean for research and research training, School of Medicine

Archer has been appointed to the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center's Board of Scientific Counselors.

The NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., is sometimes known as America's research hospital. It is the nation's largest hospital devoted entirely to clinical research, and its Board of Scientific Counselors assists its directors in evaluating the quality of the center's intramural research programs. According to the NIH, to assure that the board’s evaluations will be most useful to center leaders in their decision making, the board must be composed of individuals who themselves have outstanding scientific credentials and who are committed to providing rigorous, objective reviews.

Archer has an active research program investigating the genetic basis of bacterial resistance to antimicrobial agents with focus on antibiotic resistance in staphylococci.. His research program on staphylococcal diseases has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1976, including an NIH MERIT Award in 1994. He also serves as director of the School of Medicine's M.D.-Ph.D. Program.

Briana Mezuk Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Epidemiology and Community Health, School of Medicine

Mezuk was recently given the 2014 Barry Lebowitz Early Career Scientist Award by the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP) for her paper titled, “Comorbidity between major depression and type 2 diabetes in mid-life: Exploring causal effects using a twin design.”

Mezuk’s research is focused on understanding the interrelationships between mental and physical health. She describes this type of work as standing at the intersection of multiple disciplines that each has its own language, assumptions and methodologies.

“Communication across disciplines, while acknowledged as an important component of the scientific process, is fundamental to translating research into improvements in population health and clinical care across the lifespan,” Mezuk said.

James Bennett Jr., M.D., Ph.D., Bemiss professor, Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, and director, VCU Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Center

Bennett will travel to Sheffield in the United Kingdom in April as a visiting scientist at the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience. The Sheffield Institute is one of the world-leading centers for research into neurodegenerative disorders of the motor system.

The institute brings together state-of-the-art laboratories and equipment with a collaborative, multidisciplinary environment, including experts in basic neuroscience, clinical neurology, neuropathology, computational biology and clinical trials methodology.

Bennett also recently received $200,000 in funding from the Alzheimer’s Drug and Discovery Foundation and the Foundation for Mitochondrial Medicine to further research gene therapy for Alzheimer’s disease.

He is studying a novel human mitochondrial protein shown to increase mitochondrial function in cell and pre-clinical models. The protein has shown to restore memory function while increasing mitochondrial function in brains, suggesting it has great potential to do the same in humans with impaired cognition and early Alzheimer’s disease.

“Novel therapies that can correct defects in mitochondria functioning have the potential to impact many different diseases,” Bennett said. “Thanks to funding support from ADDF and FMM, I’m able to continue my research into one of these novel therapies and determine possible implications for its use in a variety of areas, from early childhood genetic diseases to late-life neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”

Zewelanji Serpell, Ph.D., an associate professor of developmental psychology, College of Humanities and Sciences

Serpell was part of a research team that found facial recognition technology could detect students' level of engagement in real time just as accurately as human observers.

The study, "The Faces of Engagement: Automatic Recognition of Student Engagement," was led by scientists at the University of California, San Diego and Emotient, a San Diego-based provider of facial expression recognition, and was published Tuesday in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

UCSD and Emotient announced the study's findings in a news release Tuesday. For more information, visit Computer Software Accurately Predicts Student Test Performance.

Ronald Humphrey, Ph.D., professor, Department of Management, School of Business

Humphrey’s research study, “Leading with Emotional Labor,” was placed on Emerald’s ten key articles that should be featured on any business and management student’s reading list. Emerald is a group publisher of academic and scientific journals that specializes in business-related fields, with more than 300 journals and thousands of books published.

Humphrey wrote “Leading with Emotional Labor” in 2008 along with Jeffrey Pollack and Thomas Hawver, who both received a Ph.D. in management at VCU. Originally published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology, the article discusses the importance for leaders of being conscious of their emotional displays and how those displays affect their ability to lead and others around them.

“It is not always easy for leaders to shown their followers the face that they need to see,” Humphrey said.

Humphrey’s article made the list after being highly downloaded by students across the United States in 2013 and 2012. Reading the article allows students to gain a better understanding of how to manage their negative feelings in a leadership capacity and to display positivity in order to keep morale and effort up, especially during crisis situations. It also provides the first-ever theoretical model that describes how leaders perform emotional labor.

Alongside articles dating back to 1998, Humphrey is honored to be featured on a list that is recommended to business students across the country. He hopes that students enjoy the article and find it useful in both their academic and professional careers.

In addition to having an article featured, Humphrey also published a leadership textbook in 2013. “Effective Leadership: Theory, Cases, and Applications” combines traditional and progressive theories to provide a complete understanding on leadership. The text provides relevant case studies and a “Put in Practice” feature, where learning objectives are applied to real-world scenarios.