UofL honors ten faculty with selection to Ascending Star Fellowship

A University of Louisville program created to strengthen faculty scholarship and enhance national visibility welcomes ten accomplished scholars to its sixth cohort. The Ascending Star Fellowship reflects a partnership between the Office of Research Innovation and academic units across campus to help advance and elevate mid-career faculty.

Over the next year, fellows will collaborate with an external mentor and undertake a transformational scholarly project that moves their research forward. This year’s cohort includes:

Joseph Chen, J.B. Speed School of Engineering, is focused on cancer mechanobiology, concentrating on glioblastoma and the tumor microenvironment.

Gabriel Evens, School of Music, is working on compositions performed by chamber and large ensembles as an associate Professor of Jazz Piano, Composition and Arranging.

Maegen Rochner, College of Arts & Sciences, is using tree-ring records to reconstruct past climate variability, environmental disturbance and land-use change across diverse landscapes. Her research addresses questions of pressing relevance—climate extremes, forest resilience and anthropogenic influence.

 Kirsten Carithers, School of Music, is focusing largely on contemporary and recent historical music and its connections to labor, creativity and interpretation.

Lee Michael Thompson, College of Arts & Sciences, is conducting research focused on the development of advanced electronic structure methods for describing excited-state processes, strongly correlated systems and photo-initiated dynamics.

Cara Knaub Snyder , College of Arts & Sciences, will finish and promote her first single-authored monograph, Which Team Are You On: Visibility and Gender in Brazilian Soccer (University of Texas Press),as well as explore funding to promote her wider scholarship trajectory. 

Jennifer Sichel , College of Arts & Sciences, is studying practices that blur boundaries between art, criticism and activism. She is beginning research on a new project that investigates how queer theory developed in a “blaze of mourning” in the late 1980s and early ’90s during the AIDS crisis, alongside and often indistinguishable from other practices: artmaking, coalition building, eulogizing the dead, protesting and just getting by. 

Katina Kulow, College of Business, is exploring how consumers’ beliefs and social contexts shape judgment and behavior in the marketplace, an agenda that is both theoretically generative and socially meaningful. Her research spans critical contemporary domains such as charitable giving, influencer marketing, anthropomorphism and risk-related decision-making, while remaining unified by a coherent intellectual core.

Robert Kluger, J.B. Speed School of Engineering, is researching transportation-focused areas including safety, planning, simulation and data quality.

Weihua Zhao, College of Business, examines how transportation technologies, housing and land-use regulations and environmental policies interact to shape urban form, housing affordability, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

“This cohort represents an exceptional group of scholars whose work is already making a meaningful impact,” said M. Cynthia Logsdon, associate vice president for research and innovation. “Through the Ascending Star Fellowship, we’re excited to support their continued growth and help elevate their research to even greater prominence.”

To be considered for the program, faculty must be associate professor rank, nominated by their unit and show a “consistent record of scholarship with the passion and desire to achieve greater national recognition.”