"Selecting individual awardees from such an outstanding pool is a difficult but gratifying task. It's exciting that such impressive and internationally recognized scholars are working with students and colleagues here every day at ISU."
Dr. Paul Garris is a neuroscientist who studies the communication between brain cells (neurotransmission) and how such processes are related to phenomena like Parkinson’s Disease, stroke, sexual behavior, the effects of psychoactive drugs, and the experience of reward. His work has appeared in the most prestigious journals in neuroscience and the most prestigious journal in all the life sciences, Nature, and has attracted substantial funding from granting agencies and foundations, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Defense, which provided Garris and collaborator Byron Heidenreich (a Research Initiative Award winner) with over $1 million to study the early phases of Parkinson’s Disease, work that also has implications for understanding the actions of neurotoxins and the mechanisms of brain adaptation to disease and injury, thereby having applications for defense against biochemical weapons. Garris work has been at the center of a burgeoning interdisciplinary neuroscience program at Illinois State, with collaborations in Philosophy and Chemistry in addition to Psychology on campus, and an exciting partnership with the Central Illinois Neuroscience Foundation (CINF), which has resulted in unique, cutting-edge learning opportunities for ISU students and a very generous gift from four local physicians to support education and research in neuroscience at Illinois State. As Garris’s department chair notes, Garris "is a model of a visionary, inventive, and innovative faculty member who continues to strive for improvement, excellence, and distinction."
Dr. James Reid is a specialist in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novel. His primary interests as he explores these texts and others is the rhetoric of consciousness. He finds and studies the multiple readings that literary or social texts make possible, and he teaches his students to bring the same critical analysis skills to their work. He has many publications in a variety of high-level journals, but he has really made his mark with two excellent books, both published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press. The first, Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The Temporality of Lying and Forgetting (1993), focuses on nineteenth-century novels. It questions older definitions of the realist novel, which emphasized how it ignored reality. Instead, his penetrating study demonstrates that the realist novel meditates on the discursive relationships between language and reality, and it earned widespread praise from reviewers. His more recent book, Proust, Beckett, and Narration (2003), focuses on the work of two of the most important twentieth-century novelists, Proust and Beckett. It is the first book-length work to compare them, and it focuses on their use of first-person narration. This comparative and critical study offers a fresh perspective on the relation of such narration to the fictional consciousness represented in the voice of the narrator of the novel. As his colleague, Distinguished Professor Willard Bohn, writes in his letter of nomination on Reid’s behalf, "Professor Reid displays a keen intellect and a restless, searching mind."
Dr. Michael Stevens is a counseling psychologist. Throughout his career, Stevens has sought to bring conceptual clarity and methodological rigor to a variety of topics that others have found difficult to tackle. Early on, he subjected claims of the existential psychologists—often criticized as unscientific—to empirical scrutiny. His studies of topics such as death anxiety and openness were framed as special cases of coping with stress, and his work in the 1980s anticipated some more recent developments in the field. He also has published on a variety of women’s and adolescent health issues, including post-partum depression, eating disorders, pain management (including childbirth pain), and substance abuse. More recently, he has emerged as a leader in the burgeoning field (in the U.S.) of international psychology. His scholarly work in this area adopts a constitutive, multidisciplinary approach to developing psychological means of understanding and ameliorating such global concerns as terrorism, environmental degradation, HIV/AIDS, and human trafficking. This work has made him an internationally-recognized expert in these topics. He is the lead editor of the just-published Handbook of International Psychology, and he is the lead editor of a CD-ROM, Psychology: IUPsyS Global Resource. This cumulative reference tool is produced by the International Union of Psychological Science in order to help disseminate psychological knowledge globally. He has garnered honors ranging from an invitation to review funding proposals by the Department of Homeland Security, to Fulbright Fellowships, to being the namesake of a psychology library at the "Lucien Blaga" University in Sibiu, Romania, where he helped a small group of psychologists who had survived the repression of the Ceaucescu regime to redevelop the field after that regime’s fall.
In addition to announcing this year's Outstanding College Researchers, the RPRC also announced its nominees for the University reseach awards. The committee nominated Dr. Subho Basu (History), Dr. Byron Heidenreich (Psychology), Dr. Lucien Ionescu (Mathematics), Dr. Elizabeth King (Geograph-Geology), and Dr. William Perry (Biological Sciences) for the Research Initiative Award. Dr. William Cupach (Communication), Dr. Michael Plantholt (Mathematics), and Dr. James Skibo (Sociology-Anthropology) are the College's nominees for Outstanding University Researcher.