WLP Dr. Kathleen Moore
Faculty Excellence Awards
Wednesday, April 15
6 p.m.
Established in 2007, the USF WLP Dr. Kathleen Moore Faculty Excellence Award program provides annual grants to USF faculty whose research and creative efforts address issues of opportunity and representation within the university and beyond.
As WLP grew and thrived, so too did this program in size, scope and impact. In 2018, recognizing the important role of our award in the progression of USF faculty, Past Chair and Lifetime Member Kathleen Moore made a generous commitment to WLP to establish the Dr. Kathleen Moore Faculty Excellence Award endowment, providing six annual awards to faculty members. Through Moore’s leadership, the awards now recognize achievements in research, instructional excellence, and the mentoring and engagement of students. To date, our grant program has awarded 71 faculty members more than $355,000 to further their research endeavors.
Our Faculty Excellence Award Program recognizes faculty research excellence in six separate award categories, each receiving a $5,000 research grant:
- Three campus-based Faculty Excellence Awards (one award per USF campus — Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee)
- One USF Junior Faculty Excellence Award
- One Instructional Faculty Award
- One Valerie D. Riddle, MD, Award in Health
Review the application process
2026 WLP Dr. Kathleen Moore Faculty Excellence Award Recipients
USF Tampa Faculty Excellence Award
Elizabeth Schotter, PhD
Associate Professor
Elizabeth Schotter is an associate professor in the USF Department of Psychology and the principal investigator of the Eye Movements and Cognition Lab. She received her PhD from the University of California San Diego, where she also conducted her postdoctoral work. Schotter's research program, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, investigates the neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlying skilled reading. Her lab advances the "co-registration" technique (simultaneous and synchronized measurements of eye tracking and electroencephalography) to better understand the "eye-brain link," how reading behaviors are related to underlying neural processes. In addition, she studies how congenitally deaf people can read successfully — and sometimes even more efficiently — than hearing people. Her research focuses on how their reading processes may be supported by visual processing advantages from deafness and/or sign language use, which may provide a pathway that circumvents the need to rely on accessing speech sounds so critical to reading success in hearing people. Schotter is deeply committed to training young scientists, and much of her work is done in collaboration with postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and undergraduate students, many of whom have received funding to support their training or research projects.
USF St. Petersburg Faculty Excellence Award
AnnMarie Alberton Gunn, PhD
Associate Chair
AnnMarie Alberton Gunn is a professor of literacy studies and associate chair in the College of Education at the University of South Florida. She is a former K–12 teacher with more than 10 years of classroom experience. Drawing on her work with children, families and educators, Gunn strengthens literacy learning in schools and communities, and advances equitable access to high-quality education.
Gunn centers her scholarship on three interconnected strands: (1) literacy practices in community-based and out-of-school contexts, including museums, after-school programs, and correctional settings; (2) literacy pedagogy in teacher education, working with preservice and in-service teachers and (3) literacy instruction in pre-K to adult education classrooms. Across these areas, she believes in partnering with communities and school districts to support teachers, children and families in meaningful, sustainable ways.
Gunn has published extensively in top tier, peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books, and has presented her work at leading national and international conferences. Her research has been supported by competitive grant funding from organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the University of South Florida, as well as through state appropriations and partnerships with local community organizations. She has received multiple national and international awards recognizing excellence in teaching, research and community-engaged scholarship, including a Mid-Career Award from the American Educational Research Association, the largest and most influential professional organization dedicated to advancing rigorous and impactful educational research worldwide.
USF Sarasota-Manatee Faculty Excellence Award
Denise Davis-Cotton, EdD
Director, Center for Partnerships for Arts Integration Teaching (PAInT)
Denise Davis-Cotton is a nationally recognized visionary leader whose career has redefined arts integration as a transformative lever for educational equity, civic engagement and systems-level change. She serves as director of the Florida Center for Partnerships for Arts Integration Teaching (PAInT) at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, where she leads federally funded research, professional development and community-engaged initiatives at the intersection of the arts, education and equity.
A writer, researcher and principal investigator on multiple grants and philanthropic initiatives totaling more than $12.1 million, Davis-Cotton is recognized for building one of the nation’s most influential ecosystems for arts-integrated teaching and learning. Through these initiatives, she has developed national, state, and regional networks of arts-integrated and school-community hub schools, making arts-integrated pedagogy, civic discourse and democratic principles tangible, personal and actionable for young people in high opportunity communities.
Davis-Cotton’s signature initiatives — including PAInT CreatED by Crayola, Circus Science (in collaboration with Circus Arts Conservatory and the Smithsonian Institute), and PAInTing the Pictures of Autism — exemplify her interdisciplinary approach, integrating literacy, STEM, the arts and social-emotional learning while centering inclusion and cultural relevance. Each year, her professional development initiatives engage more than 300 educators and 50 national superintendents, building lasting instructional capacity across the field.
Davis-Cotton, who earned her doctorate at Wayne State University, is a Milken Foundation internationally recognized educator, former national past president of the Arts Schools Network, and founder of the Detroit School of Arts.
Valerie D. Riddle, MD Award in Health
Judith Rijnhart, PhD
Assistant Professor
Judith Rijnhart is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of South Florida. She obtained a PhD in Epidemiology from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in 2021 and completed her postdoctoral training at the Amsterdam University Medical Center in 2022. Rijnhart was trained as a research methodologist with a specific focus on methods for causal mediation analysis. Her substantive research is focused on studying life-course factors that contribute to gender differences in dementia and late-life cognition. She is currently the principal investigator of an Alzheimer’s Association Research Grant on the role of gender differences in education and occupation in gender disparities in dementia and late-life cognition. Previously, Rijnhart received a Fulbright scholarship to study modern causal mediation analysis methods in Regent Professor David MacKinnon’s lab at Arizona State University. She also received an Outstanding Research Achievement Award from USF in 2024 and the Early Career Epidemiologist Methodology Track Award from the American College of Epidemiology in 2025.
USF Junior Faculty Excellence Award
Melanie Stearns, PhD
Assistant Professor and Clinical Psychologist
Melanie Stearns received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology with a specialization in clinical child psychology from Mississippi State University, and completed her APA-approved internship at the University of Mississippi Medical Center with a concentration in clinical child psychology. She completed postdoctoral research fellowships with Christina McCrae, PhD, in the MizZzou Sleep Research Lab in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri and the McCrae Sleep Research Lab in the USF Health College of Nursing, with a focus on behavioral sleep medicine.
She is currently an assistant professor in the USF Health College of Nursing and director/principal investigator of the Family, Adolescent, Child, and Caregiver Translational Sleep Lab (FACCTS Lab). Stearns’ research focuses on caregiver influences on child behavior (e.g., parental psychopathology, parenting behaviors, maltreatment), child behaviors (e.g., externalizing problems), and sleep problems in the context of parent-child sex differences. She also examines demographic and cultural factors (e.g., region, rurality) that alter sleep, parenting behaviors and the caregiver-child environment. Her current research examines sleep and tailors behavioral sleep treatments for specialized child-caregiver populations, such as children with oppositional defiance disorder and grandparents raising grandchildren.
Instructional Faculty Excellence Award
Tatsiana Shchurko, PhD
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Tatsiana Shchurko is an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of South Florida. She received her PhD in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University in 2021, following graduate training in sociology at European Humanities University. Originally from Belarus, she is a scholar and public intellectual whose research and community engagement began in East Europe, where she conducted archival research and participated in feminist and civic initiatives for many years. Her interdisciplinary background — spanning sociology, feminist theory and transnational cultural studies — shapes her research and teaching at the intersection of Black feminist thought, Indigenous knowledge production and Eurasian studies.
Her scholarship examines Black women’s intellectual traditions and Indigenous and marginalized women’s knowledge across Eurasian borderlands, tracing how these thinkers shaped global debates about empire, labor, care, sexuality and political solidarity. She is particularly interested in the relational archives that emerge when U.S. Black feminist thinkers encounter Soviet and postsocialist contexts, and in how these cross-border exchanges reframe global intellectual history. Through multilingual archival research and digital humanities methods, she argues that global knowledge production has long been shaped by women whose contributions remain underrecognized in dominant academic narratives.
Across research, teaching, and public engagement, Shchurko’s goal is to build inclusive scholarly infrastructures that reposition Black and Indigenous women as central architects of global political thought while preparing students to participate ethically and critically in transnational knowledge production.
