College Research and Creative Activity Awards

Award Description 

College of Arts and Sciences 

Sam Hunter, Professor

Psychology

Sam Hunter, Ph.D. is a Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and is also a Regents-Foundation Professor, senior scientist, and director of Academic Research at the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Education and Technology (NCITE). He is a fellow at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the National Strategic Research Institute as well as a former fellow at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State, where he spent 14 years of his career, achieving the rank of full professor and serving as director of the IO Psychology Ph.D. program. His work focuses on leadership and innovation, considering the malign and benevolent application of each. He has published more than 124 peer reviewed journal articles, books, and book chapters.

He has received more than $12 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Naval Research, and the UK Home Office. As a consultant, his partners and clients have included USAID, United Airlines, Lockheed Martin, NATO, Johnson and Johnson, Epic Games, and Oakley. His work has been featured in Fortune Magazine, Fastcompany, MSN, The Washington Post, and CNN.

College of Business Administration 

Zhihao (Max) Yu, Assistant Professor

Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Zhihao (Max) Yu, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of marketing. He is a behavioral researcher studying digital interaction design, social media strategies, and human-robot interaction. His research has been published in top-tier marketing and advertising journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Advertising. He serves on the editorial review board of the Journal of Business Research, and his research and interviews have been featured in the Harvard Business Review and the American Marketing Association. Yu received the University Committee on Research and Creative Activity (UCRCA) research award in 2025 and has been awarded the College of Business Administration Summer Research Fellowships in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. He also received the UNO Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship’s Distinguished Professor Award in 2023 and 2025 for his achievements in research, teaching, and service.

College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences 

Gwenael Layec, Associate Professor

Health and Kinesiology

Gwenael Layec, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the School of Health and Kinesiology. He completed his doctoral work in Marseille (France) at the Center for Magnetic Resonance in Biology and Medicine (CRMBM), a leading European center for translational research using Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopic methods. Building upon this foundation, he gained further expertise with clinical populations during his time in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah, before establishing his first laboratory at UMASS Amherst. His research now focuses on the mechanism by which some stressors (oxidative stress and environmental pollutants) lead to vascular dysfunction and metabolic dysregulation, with the aim to identify pathways for therapeutic intervention. He investigates drug-based and lifestyle strategies (e.g. heat therapy) to improve mobility and health in clinical populations, with the overarching goal of reducing disease burden. As co-director of the Vascular and Metabolic Phenotyping Research Laboratory, he aims to cultivate a collaborative environment where his trainees can conduct impactful, high-quality research.

College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media 

Christine Beard, Professor

Teacher Education

Christine Erlander Beard, DMA enjoys an active international career as a performer, pedagogue, and musical activist. An internationally acclaimed piccolo specialist, she has performed extensively across North and South America and Europe, and regularly serves as a guest artist on the international flute festival circuit. Second Prize winner in the 2019 American Prize Competition’s Professional Soloist division, Beard’s engagements in 2025 alone include appearances in Costa Rica, Japan, Argentina, Canada, and in nine states across the USA. Passionate about collaborating with composers and using her artistic platform as a voice for activism, she has commissioned and premiered dozens of new works from composers across the globe. She established the #flutistactivist initiative in 2019 to commission composers to write music with social (in)justice themes, as well as to curate programs focused on music by marginalized/censored/persecuted composers including music of the Holocaust.

A regular substitute player with the Omaha and Sioux City Symphonies, she will join the artist-faculty in the pre-college division of the Zodiac Music Festival in Côte d’Azur, France, starting in summer 2026. She joined the faculty at UNO in 2002 and has received numerous awards during her tenure, including UNO’s Outstanding Graduate Mentor (2011), the UNO Outstanding Research or Creative Activity Award (2019), and holding endowed professorships for the past 12 years. She involves her students in her research and creative activity as often as possible, proudly sharing the world stage with them and providing opportunities to engage with and learn from artists she has befriended during her 23-year career.

College of Information Science & Technology 

Dario Ghersi, Associate Professor

Interdisciplinary Informatics

Dario Ghersi earned his M.D. from the University of Genoa, where he focused on studying immune system dynamics with agent-based modeling, and earned his Ph.D. in computational biology, designing algorithms to identify and characterize protein-binding sites. As a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, he combined network-based and structural approaches to explore protein function, with a special focus on cancer mutations. He is now associate professor of biomedical informatics and graduate program chair in the School of Interdisciplinary Informatics. His current research centers on developing and applying computational tools that integrate multi-omics, clinical, and imaging data to study tumor progression.

College of Public Affairs and Community Service 

Teresa Kulig, Associate Professor

Criminology and Criminal Justice

Teresa C. Kulig, Ph.D. is an associate professor and Elizabeth Reynolds and Beverly Reynolds Professor of Public Affairs and Community Service in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (SCCJ), where she also serves as co-director of the Victimology and Victim Studies Research Lab. Kulig’s research focuses on the nature and control of sex and labor trafficking, the measurement and theories of victimization, public opinion on responses to victimization, and the social construction of crime. She has secured nearly $3 million from the National Institute of Justice, The Howard G. Buffett Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and other funders to support her research. She has published more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and other writings on victimological topics, and was awarded the 2024 Faculty Researcher of the Year for the Division of Victimology (American Society of Criminology). She has worked closely with community partners addressing victimization and human trafficking to design and implement rigorous research, including leading projects on a national review of multidisciplinary teams addressing child sexual exploitation, a labor trafficking assessment in Nebraska, a collaboration with law enforcement to inform sex trafficking interventions with vulnerable youth, and an evaluability assessment of five service areas within a large child advocacy center.