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
2024 WLP Dr. Kathleen Moore Faculty Excellence Award Recipients
Patriann Smith, PhD, is an award-winning scholar and educator specializing in language and literacy. Her extensive academic journey includes a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a concentration in literacy studies specializing in multilingual education, a Master of Education in reading education, a Bachelor of Science in elementary education, and an Associate of Arts in elementary teacher training. Reflecting a diverse career, Smith has served in professorial roles across various prestigious institutions, including the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research emerges at the intersection of race, language and immigration, with an emphasis on transculturally, transracially and trans linguistically responsive literacy and assessment practices. Among her extensive body of research are the books, “Black Immigrant Literacies: Intersections of Race, Language and Culture in the Classroom” (2023), “Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence” (2024), and “Affirming Black Students’ Lives and Literacies: Bearing Witness (2023). Smith’s scholarship is characterized by a commitment to creating positive change and advancing equity in education
Miyoung Chong, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Digital Communication. Before joining the department, she was a postdoctoral research associate in the Deliberative Media Lab at the University of Virginia. She earned her doctorate in information science with data science in the College of
Information at the University of North Texas. Her research centers on minority, information and power drawing from critical informatics with a particular focus on crisis communication and social change. Her larger body of research is characterized by computational social science and data science to investigate digital media and online community engagement. She published her studies as a leading author in Government Information Quarterly, Scientometrics and Open Information Science, and in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and Journal of Business Anthropology as a collaborator. Her presentation venues include the Association for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting, iConference, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference, and Social Media & Society International Communication Conference. She wrote a book chapter titled “Social Media Analytics” and developed courses “Democratic Politics in the New Media Environment” and “Data Journalism and Social Media” at the University of Virginia.
Jeongsuk Kim, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of South Florida. She received her doctorate from the University of South Carolina (2019) and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2022).
Kim is a gender violence researcher with a particular research interest in violence against women including intimate partner violence, sexual violence and human trafficking. Her research focuses on understanding violence victimization and associated health outcomes and finding effective ways to prevent violence against women and respond to violence survivors’ adverse health outcomes. In her postdoctoral training, she participated in a community-engaged research project concerning service provision for human trafficking survivors, funded by the National Institute of Justice. Her recent research has focused on understanding violence survivors’ adverse mental health outcomes, with a particular emphasis on suicide risk.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) has been shown to be a significant risk factor for female suicide deaths. Immigrant IPV survivors are especially vulnerable to suicide risk due to the compounding pressures of acculturation stress, social isolation and limited resources. Most existing interventions have focused on racially homogeneous samples of white, non-immigrant women, while immigrant women have been underserved in suicide research.
Ashley Curtis, PhD, is an assistant professor in the College of Nursing at the University of South Florida and director of the Cognition, Aging, Sleep and Health (CASH) Lab. Her research focuses on bidirectional associations between sleep and cognition in healthy and pathological aging populations, and how sex-related mechanisms (biological sex, menopausal transition) interact with other factors (pain, alcohol use, inflammation) to impact these associations. She also investigates effects of cognitive training on cognition, sleep and associated functions. Curtis is highly published (47 manuscripts and five book chapters) and has received funding from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation, Sleep Research Society Foundation, TRIUMPH Initiative and USF Women’s Health Collaborative. She serves on editorial boards of Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, Behavioral Sleep Medicine and Sleep Health.
Curtis received her doctorate in psychology (brain, behavior and cognitive science) from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, where she studied sex differences in risk factors of neurodegenerative disorders, and the Sleep Research Lab at the University of Missouri.
Nancy Diaz-Elsayed, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of South Florida in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests include system and process modeling, technology development for smart and sustainable systems, and the role of industrial symbiosis in the design and growth of urban environments. Diaz-Elsayed led the documentation of best practices for recruiting and mentoring doctoral students in STEM for USF’s Sloan University Center of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM). Moreover, she led two cohorts of the Girls Rise Up program at USF — a program which engages third-12th grade students in engineering education through a dance-infused curriculum. She is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and SME (Society of Mechanical Engineers), and she serves on the organizing committee for the Women in Advanced Manufacturing (WIAM) Forum for the ASME Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference. Diaz-Elsayed is the recipient of a 2022 Sandra L. Bouckley Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award from SME, a 2022 Luminary Award from Great Minds in STEM, and a 2021 William R. Jones Outstanding Mentor Award from the Florida Education Fund. She holds a Master of Science and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Seden Dogan, PhD, is a visiting assistant professor of instruction and internship coordinator at the USF School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. Dogan earned a doctorate and master’s degree from Akdeniz University. Her research interests include how employees and customers perceive emerging technologies, particularly service robots, 3D food printers and holograms. Her research has been published in internationally refereed journals, including the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, The Services Industrial Journal and Tourism Management Perspectives.
