WLP Dr. Kathleen Moore
Faculty Excellence Awards
In 2007, the WLP Faculty Research Award program was established by WLP members to recognize female faculty whose research and scholarly efforts focused on women. For eight years, the award provided one university-wide grant annually.
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 female 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 female 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 65 women more than $325,000 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
2025 WLP Dr. Kathleen Moore Faculty Excellence Award Recipients
USF Tampa Faculty Excellence Award
Diana Rancourt is an associate professor and director of the clinical psychology doctoral program in the USF Department of Psychology. She received her doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, completed her pre-doctoral internship at the joint University of California, San Diego and the San Diego Veteran Affairs training program, and completed a National Institutes of Mental Health-supported post-doctoral fellowship in childhood obesity at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Rancourt’s program of research investigates interoceptive (i.e., the extent to which individuals appropriately identify and respond to physiological cues) and sociocultural influences on adolescents’ and young adults’ weight-related behaviors (e.g., dieting, uncontrolled eating, muscle-gaining behaviors) across healthy and pediatric populations. Her work is interdisciplinary and draws from theory and methods from clinical, health, social and developmental psychology.
USF St. Petersburg Faculty Excellence Award
Tina Yang is an associate professor of finance at the Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance of the USF Muma College of Business. She holds a doctorate in finance from the University of Georgia. She has taught at Villanova University, Clemson University and the University of Georgia. Her research interests span a wide range of corporate finance topics including corporate governance, environmental, social and governance (ESG), innovation, institutional investors, risk management, and mergers and acquisitions. She has published in premier academic journals including Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Managerial Science, American Business Law Journal, Journal of Corporate Finance and Journal of Banking and Finance. Awards include a Financial Services Exchange Research Award, an Oxford-Yale research grant and a China National Natural Science Foundation research grant. Yang was the invited expert of the Shanghai M&A Financial Research Institute. She is the co-editor of the Financial Review, the official journal of the Eastern Finance Association, president of the 2023 Southern Finance Association, and an ECGI research member.
USF Sarasota-Manatee Faculty Excellence Award
Tingting Zhang is an associate professor at the USF Muma College of Business School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. Her research addresses human trafficking in the labor and sex industries, focusing on protecting women and girls within the vulnerable hospitality sector. Zhang served as the director of research at the Center for the Studies of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at the University of Central Florida during 2019-2024 and spearheaded the Shielding Women and Girls program. This program educates students to identify and respond to trafficking incidents effectively. At USF, Zhang has integrated artificial intelligence into the training modules, enhancing the identification and response processes. This innovation earned her the Cyber Florida PhaseZERO award in January 2025, recognizing her impactful approach to educational and protective measures focused on women and girls. Her work extends to influencing policies within the hospitality industry and ensuring compliance with anti-trafficking laws.
Valerie D. Riddle, MD Award in Health
Enola Okonkwo is a physician, educator and researcher at heart, driven by a deep commitment to improving the lives of others, particularly those who are underserved. As associate program director of the USF Health Emergency Medicine Residency Program and medical director for both the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay and Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services, she is dedicated to advancing emergency and social medicine through education, research and trauma-informed care. Her diverse research interests span from emergency resuscitation in gastrointestinal bleeding to enhancing emergency medical responses for survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. Through mentorship, interdisciplinary collaboration and the development of clinical pathways, Okonkwo strives to bridge clinical medicine with advocacy, ensuring the best possible patient-centered outcomes. Outside of the hospital, Okonkwo is honored to be
a wife and mother of four.
USF Junior Faculty Excellence Award
Christa Remington is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs at USF. Her research explores the intersection of nonprofit organizations, NGOs, grassroots groups and emergency response agencies, with a focus on enhancing post-disaster recovery efforts and mitigating the challenges faced by responders. Her work has been published in journals such as Public Administration Review, Natural Hazards and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction and has been supported by organizations including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine’s Gulf Research Program and the Natural Hazards Center. In addition to her academic work, Remington is a nonprofit consultant and serves as the emergency management research coordinator at the Center for Leadership Research and Action. She is also the founder of a program in Haiti dedicated to promoting education, leadership and community building, empowering local communities to drive sustainable change.
Instructional Faculty Excellence Award
Janet Kim Outlaw is an assistant professor of instruction, program area coordinator for literacy studies, and program coordinator for the Master of Arts in reading education program. She is a three-time alumna of North Carolina State University, where she received her doctorate in teacher education and learning sciences with a concentration in literacy and language arts. As a teacher educator, she teaches undergraduate and graduate elementary reading and writing methods courses. She serves as course lead for the reading practicum internship, in which she mentors teacher candidates in practitioner research to develop differentiated and joyful literacy interventions. Outlaw’s scholarship prepares and empowers teachers through dialogic pedagogies, practitioner research and community-engaged teacher education. Her areas of research include developing teacher facilitation of dialogic discourse for early comprehension and multimodal writing pedagogies; empowering teacher candidates in practitioner research to develop dialogic classroom literacy communities with children of all abilities; and designing community-engaged teacher education to provide mutual benefit in supporting teacher candidates and school community partners. Her research has been published in journals, such as Literacy Research and Instruction, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, and Language Arts.
