PEOPLE
Principal Investigators & Key Personnel
Marise Parent (Principal Investigator)
Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology
Dr. Parent investigates how the brain uses memory to control eating behavior and the ways in which disruptions in these neural processes contribute to disordered eating. She also investigates how disordered eating, in turn, impacts brain function. Her research program is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. She is also the Principal Investigator on an award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation that established the Beckman Scholars Program at Georgia State University, and currently serves as a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee for the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior. Dr. Parent has a long-standing record of mentoring junior scientists in STEM and of being involved in initiatives to promote diversity in the STEM pipeline.
Corrie Fountain (Co-Principal Investigator)
Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs
Dr. Corrie Fountain is the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. Her responsibilities include faculty recruitment, retention, and support. She creates and facilitates faculty development workshops, seminars, and other trainings for faculty, manages faculty awards, and assists with the promotion and tenure process. Dr. Fountain also co-leads the mentoring initiatives for the university and consults with colleges and departments on DEI and faculty belonging. In addition to the ADVANCE-IMPACT team, Dr. Fountain also serves as a Guiding Team Member on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant – REBELS (Re-envisioning Equity to Build Excellence in Leadership and Scholarship).
Jennie Burnet (Co-Principal Investigator)
Associate Professor, and Director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Dr. Burnet’s current research explores the long-term legacies of racialized violence in the U.S. South and the cultural and psychological aspects of mass violence and their impact on women, gender, and race. Dr. Burnet is Director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Georgia State University. In 2019, she was a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. https://cas.gsu.edu/profile/jennie-e-burnet/
Megan Connors (Co-Principal Investigator)
Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Dr. Connors studies the fundamental building blocks of nature by exploring the nucleus under extreme conditions and pushing the limits of our understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory describing the nuclear strong force. By colliding heavy nuclei at relativistic speeds, the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) in New York can create a hot dense phase of matter known as the quark gluon plasma (QGP). Under normal conditions, quarks and gluons only exist in bound states but at high enough temperatures and densities like those experienced immediately after the Big Bang, quarks and gluons can behave as free particles within a QGP phase. A new experiment called sPHENIX, on which Dr. Connors has held leadership roles, starts collecting data at RHIC in 2023 to study the QGP.
To support her research, Dr. Connors earned an NSF CAREER grant as well as over $3 Million in grants from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the Department of Energy as a Co-PI. She is the faculty advisor the Women in Physics Student Organization and has served on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committees for the Department of Physics and Astronomy as well as the RHIC/AGS Users Executive Committee at BNL.
Cirleen DeBlaere (Co-Principal Investigator)
Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Counseling Psychology Doctoral Program, Faculty Associate for Professional Development for Faculty Affairs, and Senior Faculty Associate for The Graduate School
Cirleen DeBlaere examines the experiences of individuals with multiple and intersecting marginalized identities, with a particular emphasis on the experiences of women of color and sexual minority people of color. To date, her work has focused on the links of minority stressors (e.g., discrimination, prejudice, stigma) to mental health and potential intervening factors in these links. She also examines the role of cultural humility in clinical practice, supervision, and training. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.
https://education.gsu.edu/profile/cirleen-deblaere/
Jeremy Craig (Senior Personnel)
Communications Manager for the Office of the Provost
Jeremy Craig is responsible for internal and external communications related to offices and programs under the auspices of the university provost, including the Office of Faculty Affairs, ADVANCE-IMPACT, the new Office of Academic Affairs, and other departments. He also supports communications regarding the COACHE faculty satisfaction survey process. He co-built the website that has now evolved into Belonging@GSU. He formerly served as a writer and public relations coordinator for the Department of Public Relations and Marketing Communications from 2014 to 2017 and in the division of University Relations as the division’s research and science writer/PR specialist from 2008 to 2013. Mr. Craig’s previous work includes communications services at Kennesaw State University, and as a reporter for The Augusta Chronicle, in Augusta, Georgia.
https://provost.gsu.edu/profile/jeremy-craig/
Charlyn Green
Project Coordinator for ADVANCE-IMPACT, Research Coordinator for the Sustainable Futures Lab, and Project Manager for the Center for Urban Transformations
Charlyn Green is responsible for coordinating the activities of the ADVANCE-IMPACT initiative, the Sustainable Futures Lab at the Urban Studies Institute, and the transdisciplinary Center for Urban Transformations. She handles the logistics of executing the goals of projects involving multiple actors in academia, research institutions, and community organizations. Charlyn’s focus is on projects and initiatives that address the factors inhibiting happiness and actualization of potential by listening to those affected, challenging outdated ways of operating, and innovating new practices to build a happier and more exciting future.