The University Research Center Fellows Council is an interdisciplinary group of faculty that have an established research agenda with externally disseminated scholarly work. The goal of the Fellows Council is to meet with and support faculty in their research and externally disseminated products, and to foster collaboration in and outside the University.
Dr. Jeffrey Herrick earned his doctorate in rehabilitation and movement science from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he trained in designing and assessing outcomes from community-based exercise programming for clinical and sub-clinical populations. Herrick is a rehabilitation scientist whose research has centered on the effects of chronic exercise to improve functional capacity, cognition, and sleep quality in a wide range of adult populations.
Presently, Herrick is the director and principal investigator for the University of Lynchburg Active Aging Program. Through his work with ULAAP, Herrick aims to better understand exercise program delivery and mode and their combined effects on improving functional capacity, physical fitness, sleep quality, and cognitive function in community-dwelling older adults. Herrick has successfully built relationships with community partners and has integrated Lynchburg undergraduate students into his work.
As the founding director of the University Research Center, Herrick aims for the RCl to support faculty in their efforts to design, externally disseminate, and progress their research and scholarship agendas. He has been very successful in leading community-based research initiatives that integrate experimental research with student theory-to-practice initiatives.
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Dr. Tom Bowman is originally from central Pennsylvania and received his bachelor’s degree in athletic training from California University of Pennsylvania. He earned an MEd in kinesiology and a PhD in higher education from the University of Virginia. He currently serves as a professor in the department of athletic training at the University of Lynchburg. He has taught a wide variety of classes, including upper-extremity examination, kinesiology, research design, and thesis since joining the University in the fall of 2004.
His research interests include head/neck injury in sports, protective equipment performance, and socialization in athletic training. They have resulted in a successful record of external funding, peer-reviewed publications, and professional presentations at the local, regional, national, and international levels. He is a past recipient of the Excellence in Research Mentoring Award (2018) and the James A. Houston Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2019) at the University and was recently named a Fellow of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (2022) for national and international excellence in athletic training research and scholarship.
Much of his scholarship has included mentoring student research projects at the undergraduate or graduate level, leading to several student research awards. Bowman has expertise in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research designs, as well as survey development.
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Dr. Robin E. Bates is a professor of English and program director for the minor in applied and public humanities. She also is the John M. Turner Chair in the Humanities. She holds a BA in theatre arts from Appalachian State University, an MEd in English from Georgia Southwestern State University, and a PhD in English from Auburn University. She has been in the English department at the University of Lynchburg since the fall of 2008 and has been awarded the Allen Award for Excellence in Academic Advising (2013, now the Allen Koring Award) and the Rosser Award for Excellence in Teaching (2021).
Bates’s scholarly work has explored the complex place of literature in cultural contact zones. She has studied how British literature, especially the work of early modern writers like Shakespeare, is part of the formation and evolution of national and imperial/colonial identities. Her first book, “Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland” (Routledge 2007/2008) considers Shakespeare’s constructions of Irishness and modern Irish writers’ responses.
Her work since then has shifted to investigate the construction of British national identity, most recently how mapping and the relationship to land impact the development of national/regional identity. Early modern chorographic writing such as John Leland’s “Itinerary of England and Wales,” for which Bates developed an online mapped index, plays a significant role in current projects studying British identity, landscape, and the relationship to place. Her work has been published in Papers in Language & Literature and included in the collection “Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers.” She has presented her work nationally and internationally and has been featured on the “That Shakespeare Life” podcast.
Bates serves the University Research Center as a liaison for faculty in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. Her focus is helping faculty connect to the things they most need to complete their projects: time, space, and resources. She assists with creating the URC house as a place where faculty can go to develop their work individually or in collaboration with each other. She’ll also develop writing retreats for faculty and build materials to help make efficient use of University resources. Faculty from any discipline with ideas and concerns should feel free to contact her at bates.r@lynchburg.edu.
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Dr. Jaime Brooks is an assistant professor in the biology department. She earned her BS in biomedical sciences at the University of Lynchburg (2008) and PhD in microbiology and immunology at Virginia Commonwealth University (2012). Brooks completed two post-doctoral fellowships at VCU, during which she conducted research in bacteriophage genetics and worked with the Human Microbiome Project (phases 1 and 2) to study the vaginal microbiome and its role in preterm birth.
She has established expertise with basic and advanced molecular genetic techniques, including but not limited to forward/reverse genetics, production of recombinant DNA and protein constructs, and characterization of genetic regulatory mechanisms.
Brooks’s current work is focused on developing a research program that uses molecular genetics and bioinformatics to characterize bacterial virulence and niche factors, molecular genetics of bacteriophages and the development of phage therapy, and tick-borne pathogen surveillance in Central Virginia.
Her professional goal is to expose as many students as possible to high-quality research experiences students. Therefore, while she supervises several independent research students each semester, she also focuses on adding authentic research experiences to her classes, so that any student who enrolls can participate.
These experiences include single experiments, multi-week student-driven inquiry projects, and semester-long course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). Brooks is particularly proficient in developing extended CUREs to generate novel data. To date, she has created three different CUREs appropriate to different student proficiency levels: an ecology/evolution introductory biology project, a molecular diagnostic of local tick-borne pathogens introductory biology project, and a genetics of bacterial virulence factors project in an upper-level genetics course.