Research Excellence Awardee

Byron J. Powell, PhD, LCSW, is dedicated to enhancing the quality of health and social services through advanced methods in implementation research and practice. He serves as co-director for multiple centers including the Brown School’s Center for Mental Health Services Research, the Institute for Public Health’s Center for Dissemination & Implementation, and the Dissemination and […]

Husain Lateef, PhD, focuses on culturally responsive research to enhance social work practices, interventions, and preventive measures for youth of African descent. His scholarship advances theoretical understanding and scientific exploration of Afrocentric constructs, aiming to improve the success of Black youths’ transition from adolescence to emerging adulthood. In 2023, he founded the Afrocentric Youth Development […]

Dennis Zhang, PhD, researches data-driven business decision making. He uses machine learning, causal inference and structural estimation with data to improve business decisions. Zhang published nearly two dozen scholarly articles during his first eight years at Olin. His work has led to two Olin Awards, which recognize scholarly research with timely, practical applications. He has […]

Sydney E. Scott, PhD, conducts research on the psychology of consumer decisions, with a particular focus on moral judgment, naturalness and sustainability, and health decision-making. She investigates questions such as when and why consumers prefer natural products and how consumers try to improve and maintain their health. Her research has been published in distinguished journals […]

David Queller, PhD, aims to uncover how cooperative behaviors emerge and persist despite the competitive nature of evolutionary processes. Dr. Queller collaboratively conducts empirical studies on cooperation among social amoebas and their bacterial symbionts, as well as the conflicts between amoebas and their bacterial prey. He employs genomic studies to understand past adaptations and experimental […]

The research of Carly N. Wayne, PhD, focuses on international relations, conflict, and behavioral approaches to politics. She specializes in the psychology of global political violence and conflict, examining the behavioral micro-foundations underpinning war and political violence across and within societies. Her research crosses subfield lines, adapting theories and tools from the fields of American […]

The research of Douglas Flowe (PhD) focuses on criminality, illicit leisure, and masculinity and how they converge with issues of race, class, and space in American cities and the carceral state. He is the author of the award-winning book Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York, which received the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American […]

Hong Chen (PhD, MS, BS) has been advancing the bold new interdisciplinary field of NeuroSonics by integrating breakthroughs in neuroscience and ultrasonics to develop noninvasive ultrasound technologies that deepen our understanding of brain function and transform the diagnosis and treatment of neurological diseases. Her work has garnered support from multiple funding agencies and drawn the attention of […]