The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences has named two recipients of the 2016-17 Outstanding Researcher Award: Christina Duncan and Casian Pantea.
“Innovative research affects our everyday lives, whether it be through education, energy, transportation, communication, healthcare or the environment,” said Gregory Dunaway, dean for the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. “The Eberly College is proud to have Casian and Christina at the forefront of breakthroughs that will improve our communities and bring national and international attention to West Virginia University.”
Christina Duncan, professor in the Department of Psychology, has been researching the broad area of pediatric psychology for over 20 years. In her lab, she researches, develops and examines family-based interventions to promote adherence to medical regimens in pulmonary disorders in youths.
“My principal goal is that the intervention research from my lab ultimately contributes in some meaningful way to improving health and quality of life in youth and their families in West Virginia,” Duncan said.
Duncan received her doctorate in psychology, focusing in clinical child specialization, from Louisiana State University in 1995. She has taught Abnormal Psychology, Clinical Interviewing, Clinical Child Practicum and Child Behavior Therapy.
Casian Pantea, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, examines the mathematical analysis of interaction network models. His research seeks to answer, “what behaviors of interaction networks are robust to different choices of kinetics and depend only on the topology of the network?”
“I am interested in structural properties of networks related to two important phenomena switch-like behavior and oscillations, two phenomena that underlie the cell cycle,” Pantea said. “Work in this direction — parameter-free analysis of biochemical networks — sidesteps parameter uncertainty, has immediate applications to model selection in systems biology, and provides design principles for networks with prescribed behavior in synthetic biology.”
Pantea received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. He teaches Mathematical Systems Biology 1, 2 and Applied Dynamics and Chaos.
