2023 College/School Research Awards

The Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science researcher of the year is John Lipor. Lipor is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is a member of the Northwest Electromagnetics and Acoustic Research (NEAR) Laboratory. Lipor received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor where he was an awardee of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. His research focuses on machine learning algorithms, design and analysis, with applications in environmental sensing and monitoring. He is a recipient of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty award, NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, and the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) award.

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences researcher of the year is Janice Lee. Lee is an assistant professor of Creative Writing in the English Department and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her research focuses on decolonizing narrative and language in storytelling, using models of entanglement to rethink narrative architecture and to tell polyphonic stories of landscape and assemblage. She is the author of eight books of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, including most recently A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in (2023), a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima; Separation Anxiety (2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award in Poetry; and Imagine a Death (2021), a novel about inherited trauma, the apocalypse, and interspecies communication. Lee's forthcoming book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of oral mythologies (such as the Korean myth of Princess Bari). Lee is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing.

The University Honors College researcher of the year is Rebecca Summer. Summer is an assistant professor of Urban Geography. She earned her Ph.D. in geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Summer's research examines historical and contemporary processes of neighborhood change in American cities with particular attention to the causes and consequences of gentrification. She is especially interested in understanding how the aesthetics and historical branding of ordinary urban landscapes–such as neighborhood commercial districts or neglected industrial sites–influence a sense of belonging in cities. Her study of the role of alleys in the history of racialized urban development in Washington, D.C., received the John Reps Prize for best doctoral dissertation from the Society of American City and Regional Planning History. She also contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning and enjoys conducting research with undergraduate students about how to best support students who have been traditionally underrepresented in academia. Her research has been published in Urban Geography, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Buildings & Landscapes, and the Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice.

The College of Urban & Public Affairs researcher of the year is Billie Sandberg. Sandberg is an associate professor of Public Administration and the Director of PSU’s Public Affairs and Policy Ph.D. program. She received her Ph.D. in public administration from Arizona State University. Sandberg’s research brings a critical framework to understanding issues of public governance with a focus on nonprofit organizations and philanthropy. Specifically, Sandberg draws on critical and postmodern theories to examine the effects of neoliberalism on nonprofit and philanthropic organizations and document how they have become more “business-like” in recent years, and how this shift affects the work experience for their staff members. She has also developed critical pedagogical frameworks for teaching nonprofit management and leadership to help practitioners and scholars build more just and equitable nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. Dr. Sandberg’s work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Administration & Society, Administrative Theory & Praxis, Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, American Review of Public Administration, Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Voluntas. She is a co-editor and contributor to the book Reframing Nonprofit Management: Democracy, Inclusion and Social Justice. Sandberg teaches graduate courses in nonprofit management and leadership, governance, and organizational behavior and change, among others. She also oversees PSU’s new Master of Nonprofit Leadership program. Prior to coming to PSU in 2012, Sandberg taught at the University of Colorado, Denver, and spent more than a dozen years working in the nonprofit sector.

The School of Business researcher of the year is Theodore Khoury. Khoury is a professor of Management and Strategy in the School of Business and a visiting professor at Vlerick Business School in Belgium. He received his Ph.D. in international management studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Motivated by a desire to understand how or if entrepreneurship can contribute to the relief of societal challenges, Khoury's research explores how institutions and social forces enable or constrain entrepreneurial actors within developing countries, refugee and diaspora situations, and nascent market environments. Currently, he is conducting studies on the collaboration strategies of humanitarian organizations serving refugee camps, social enterprise interventions in non-Western communities, agency constraints in the gig economy, and the emergence of informal economies within refugee settlements. Khoury has consulted on projects for the European Commission on the development of entrepreneurship education programs in Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Morocco, and has developed intervention-design programs for local partner Mercy Corps International and training programs hosted by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization for the EU-based African diaspora.

The College of the Arts researcher of the year is Laila Seewang. Seewang is an assistant professor at Portland State University in the School of Architecture. She received a PhD from the Institute of History and Theory of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), in Zürich. An architectural and urban historian, as well as a registered architect in New York, Seewang uses infrastructure to examine urban-ecological relationships; in particular, the legacy of nineteenth-century material networks that continue to shape how we live today. Seewang’s article “Timber Constructed: Towards an Alternative Material History” (with Irina Davidovici) for Architectural Theory Review examines narratives of "place" in architectural and landscape regionalism as direct corollaries of industrial timber histories of the Pacific Northwest.  A collaboration on a project housed at the ETH investigates how infrastructural technologies mediated between built environments of the industrial period and pastoral aesthetics of Switzerland's unbuilt, but still highly-designed, rural and alpine landscapes. Seewang is also working on a book-length manuscript that investigates how the design of public water networks in 19th-century Berlin created the preconditions for the modern municipal city.

The College of Education Researcher of the Year is Amy Parker. Parker is an assistant professor in Special Education and coordinates the Orientation and Mobility Program. As an advocate, community placement specialist, job coach, and orientation and mobility specialist, Parker has worked with individuals who are blind, have low vision, or are deafblind and their families for over 25 years, and trains students to teach visually-impaired and deafblind students. Her research interests include participatory research methodologies that create more inclusive curricula, communities, and policies for people with visual impairment and deafblindness. Parker is the lead or co-researcher on several federal grants that provide generous scholarships to College of Education graduate students. Over the past six years, she has led the interdisciplinary “Mobility Matters Summit” at PSU, which promotes inclusive design, planning, and transportation through dialogue with community advocates, professionals, researchers, transportation engineers, and agency leaders. Recently, Parker has worked with a multidisciplinary team to explore the process of wayfinding in urban environments, including engaging with youth and adults with visual impairments on PSU’s campus in order to investigate what tools support effective navigation.

The School of Social Work researcher of the year is Miranda Mosier-Puentes. Mosier-Puentes is an assistant professor of Child, Youth and Family Studies. Her research focuses on access and persistence for members of communities that face barriers to higher education, including first-generation students, nontraditional students from communities of color, and other underrepresented communities (i.e., disabled, low-income, and youth aging out of foster care). Mosier-Puentes centers student perspectives throughout her work, which is framed through critical and feminist theories and draws upon her experience with critical ethnography, focus groups, and participatory methods such as Photovoice research. While interested in student persistence and success in university settings, Miranda Mosier-Puentes is also committed to research that highlights the relational, affective, and emotional lives of students who enter a higher education system that wasn’t built with them in mind.

The OHSU-PSU School of Public Health researcher of the year is Associate Professor Ryan J. Petteway. Petteway earned a DrPH from the University of California-Berkeley and is a public health scholar, educator and poet who integrates social epidemiology, participatory research, and creative arts to advance health equity. He engages critical, Black feminist, and decolonizing theory and methods to pursue procedural and epistemic justice within public health research and practice. His current research and scholarship engages two general areas: notions of “place,” embodiment, and “placemaking” in community health and the social, economic, and political processes that govern the spatial distribution of health opportunities; and epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice within public health knowledge production processes (e.g. considerations of power and epistemic justice). Petteway’s scholarship and creative works have been honored with multiple Society for Public Health Education ‘paper of the year’ awards, a data visualization prize from the American Association of Geographers, a National Poetry Month prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Petteway’s research has appeared in a range of top-tier public health journals, including Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Urban Health, and Health Education & Behavior. His poetry has appeared in both peer-reviewed public health and traditional poetry journals, including Health Promotion Practice, International Journal of Epidemiology, Critical Public Health, Kithe, and Bellevue Literary Review.