People

Dan Royall, Associate Department Head, Professor of Geography, Environment and Sustainability

Email: pdroyall@uncg.edu

Recent research projects relate to sediment budgets, erosion and sedimentation records preserved in lakes, the recovery of watersheds from disturbance, soil loss measurement and prediction, and the influence of biota on watershed processes.  In addition to geomorphological interests, Dr. Royall has a research background in Quaternary paleoecology and geology.

Jerry Walsh, Professor and Associate Department Head of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Email: jlwalsh@uncg.edu

Field: Inorganic Chemistry

Dr. Walsh’s research includes projects in chemical education directed toward professional development programs for teachers and enhancement of science education.

Dr. Walsh’s scientific laboratory research involves synthesis of ligands, synthesis of metal coordination complexes, characterization of the species formed, investigation of spectral and photochemical properties of the coordination complexes, and electrochemical characterization of these species.  Research objectives were directed toward development of coordination complexes that were efficient light absorbers that are capable of multiple electron transfer events and could be used as dye sensitizers or photoredox catalysts.  Redox active ligands that showed synergistic interaction with the metal center were studied.

Kim Petersen, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Email: kspeters@uncg.edu

Field:Organic Chemistry, Asymmetric Methodology Development

Dr. Petersen’s research group is focused on solving important synthetic problems using basic principles of organic chemistry.  In particular the research group is interested in the development of new methods for the asymmetric synthesis of biologically important molecules and in the design and synthesis of new drug targets.

Liam Duffy, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Email: liam_duffy@uncg.edu

Field: Physical Chemistry

Dr. Duffy’s Research is in Molecular Reaction Dynamics Probed Via Pure Rotational Spectroscopy.  Dr. Duffy and his students have designed, built and tested a unique instrument for probing molecular reaction dynamics via pure rotational spectroscopy. The technique takes advantage of high frequency microwave sources in the millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelength region to probe the products of gas phase reactions.  The ultimate goal of this research is to deduce the molecular electronic states involved in the transition state of a chemical reaction by measuring the speed, direction and internal energy of the products, much the same way an officer attempts to determine the cause of a car accident by studying the wreckage.

Malcolm Schug, Professor and Department Head of Biology

Email: mdschug@uncg.edu

Dr. Schug’s research interests are in the field of evolutionary genetics and animal behavior. He studies a variety of animals and use genetic, behavioral, and molecular methods to test hypotheses aimed at understanding the mechanisms of natural selection in natural populations. Presently his research is focused on the effects of natural selection on molecular genetic variation in a species of fruitfly, Drosophila ananassae, from the South Pacific Islands and Asia. He is interested in the interactions between natural selection, migration, genetic drift, and chromosomal crossing-over during adaptation and speciation.

Maya Chhetri, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics

Email: m_chhetr@uncg.edu

Dr. Chhetri studies nonnegative solutions of nonlinear boundary value problems, both ODEs and PDEs. Study of coupled system of Elliptic PDEs with Dirichlet boundary conditions, where reaction terms are asymptotically linear or superlinear at infinity, using bifurcation theory has been the recent focus of Dr. Chhetri’s work. Dr. Chhetri has also been working on extending existence/uniqueness/multiplicity results that are known for positone problems in bounded domains to so called exterior domains. Dr. Chhetri is also learning how to apply optimal control theory in population models.

Prashanti Manda, Lecturer of Computer Science

Email: p_manda@uncg.edu

Dr. Manda’s research interests primarily include natural language processing, bioinformatics, and ontologies. Her research program at UNCG focuses on developing efficient and scalable methods to mine scientific literature and recognize key biological concepts described in relevant ontologies. Her work introduces novel deep learning algorithms that have been shown to outperform traditional machine learning algorithms at the task of ontology-based literature tagging. She is also interested in mining large volumes of scientific literature in various domains such as bioinformatics, and honey bee health, to understand and uncover trends of research topics. With funding from Microsoft Azure research in 2017, she is conducting a Big Data analysis of approximately 155 million publication records to quantify the impact of scientific research across domains. Dr. Manda’s prior work has focused on developing algorithms for data mining and data analytics applied to large data stores of biological ontology data.

Promod Pratap, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Email: prpratap@uncg.edu

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Pratap’s research has focused on the energetics of membrane ion transporters – specifically, the sodium and potassium pump. This membrane protein converts chemical energy into electrochemical potential energy stored in transmembrane gradients of sodium and potassium. In a human at rest, this pump uses approximately 25% of the body’s total energy budget. The pump is also the target of digitalis, a drug administered to increase the strength of heart muscle contractions.  Pratap uses various spectroscopic techniques (ensemble fluorescence and FTIR spectroscopy, and single-molecule fluorescence fluctuations) to examine various steps in the pump’s reaction cycle with the overall goal of determining the pump’s energy conversion efficiency.

Steve Tate, Professor & Graduate Program Director of Computer Science

Email: srtate@uncg.edu

Dr. Tate’s research is in the area of computer security, with recent projects in both hardware-assisted security and mobile agent security. Recently he has begun looking at issues in software security, and in particular looking at secure and robust implementations for cryptographic and security-oriented software – the goal of this work is to respond to the rash of security vulnerabilities we have seen lately (such as Heartbleed, the Apple “goto fail” bug, and the GnuTLS vulnerabilites) by developing tools and techniques for detecting and eradicating these vulnerabilities.

Dave Remington, Associate Professor in Biology

Email: dlreming@uncg.edu

Dr. Remington conducts research on the genetics of life history evolution in plants. The genes responsible for evolution of complex patterns of growth form and resource allocation have key roles in shaping how plants respond to new environments such as those brought about by changing climates. However, these processes have received much less study than those regulating other important adaptive traits such as flowering time. He has been using the rock cress Arabidopsis lyrata as an experimental organism for this research. He has discovered that A lyrata is highly variable in resource allocation properties, and its extensive genomic resources make it uniquely valuable for studying these traits. Mapping of genes affecting variation in complex traits (quantitative trait loci, or QTLs) has provided insights on genetic co-regulation of resource allocation traits and their relationship to fitness in different environments. He has been making and testing models of trait networks in order to gain insights on the cause-effect mechanisms by which QTLs coordinately regulate developmental processes, and thus give rise to correlated patterns of variation in multiple traits.

Ramji Bhandari, Assistant Professor of Biology

Email: rkbhanda@uncg.edu

Dr. Bhandari’s research interests are to elucidate mechanisms underlying gene environment interactions and developmental origins of adult-onset and transgenerational health abnormalities. He takes comparative, molecular, cellular, and bioinformatics analysis approaches and utilizes cell/tissue culture and animal models (fish and rodents) in research. Current projects include epigenetic programming of embryo, germ cells and somatic cells, crosstalk between environment and epigenome and between epigenome and phenotype, epigenetic inheritance of phenotypic traits, CRISPR-dCas9-mediated epigenome editing, epigenetic responses to environmental stressors, mainly pharmaceuticals, pesticides, plasticizers, cannabinoids, and engineered nanoparticles.