The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences has selected 19 exemplary faculty members as the 2025-26 recipients of its Robert C. and Sandra Connor Endowed Faculty Fellowship.  

Their areas of expertise span the natural sciences, humanities, fine arts and social sciences, and the funds from the Connor Fellowship are intended to help each rising academic further their research and professional pursuits.

This recognition comes with a $7,000 award, which fellows use to facilitate travel, expand research initiatives and support classroom activities.

"I'm proud to recognize these dedicated faculty members, whose commitment to teaching, research and creativity embodies the heart of Fulbright College," said Brian E. Raines, dean of Fulbright College.

"Through the fellowship that shares their names, Bob and Sandra Connor are expanding research and academic innovation, which is central to the college's growth and our impact as a major public good in Arkansas, the U.S. and globally. The Connor Fellowship facilitates innovation in every single department and school in the college."

Robert and Sandra Connor established the Connor Endowed Faculty Fellowship in 2004 to provide essential faculty development opportunities to up-and-coming academic experts in the college. These faculty members are selected annually by a college committee, including the dean, for their contributions to the college and their departments.

Since its inception, the resulting endowment has enabled Fulbright College to recognize 248 Connor Fellows and counting, awarding more than $943,500 in support. Many previous Connor Fellows are now university and department leaders, serving in top administrative roles or prominent teaching and research positions with impressive publication records.

Connor Faculty Fellows

Congratulations to our 2025 Fulbright College Connor Faculty Fellows!

Taylor Hermes, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology

Hermes is an assistant professor and leader of a Partner Group in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Hermes specializes in Central Eurasian archaeology, specifically the history of horse riding and domestication. He has worked at field sites in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Kyrgyzstan, and received funding from renowned institutions, including the National Geographic Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Planck Society and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Hermes will use fellowship funding to support his students' research travel, summer compensation and technology needs.

Calista Lyon, assistant professor, School of Art

Lyon is an Australian photographer, artist and assistant professor of photography and expanded media. Using an expanded photographic practice, she creates installations and lecture performances that explore knowledge and memory as a form of critical resistance. The funding from the Connor Fellowship will be used by her, in part, to support Summer School: State of the Sky, an interdisciplinary arts-centered education program at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along with other teaching, research and service endeavors at the university.

Amy Poe, assistant professor, Department of Biological Sciences

Poe's research focuses on understanding the fundamental mechanisms that regulate developmental behaviors. Her research group, the Poe Lab, uses fruit fly larvae and adult flies as a model system to determine the molecular and circuit mechanisms regulating rhythmic behaviors like sleeping and feeding. Poe received the Alavi-Dabiri Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation Bridge to Success Grant and was named a Sleep Research Society Outstanding Early Investigator. Funding from the Connor Fellowship will enable her to obtain the necessary resources, like advanced computational and imaging equipment, to support undergraduate research in her lab.

Bin Dong, assistant professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Dong is an assistant professor of analytical chemistry and the leader of the Dong Research Group. This group develops newly advanced optical microscopy imaging and spectroscopy systems and investigates dynamic processes in functional materials and biophysics. His work has been published in various academic journals, including Nature Cell Biology, Chemical Society Reviews and Analytical Chemistry. He plans to use fellowship funding to facilitate his lab's efforts to address critical issues ranging from energy shortages to cancer treatments. The lab's work aims to profoundly impact drug delivery approaches, disease treatments, catalysts and functional materials.

Meredith Neville-Shepard, assistant professor and development director, Department of Communication

Neville-Shepard is an assistant professor and development director for the Department of Communication. Her research focuses on how popular entertainment and media shape the political landscape, with publication in journals like the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Women's Studies in Communication, Feminist Media Studies and American Behavioral Scientist. Shepard has received numerous outstanding article and research awards from the National Communication Association, the Southern States Communication Association and the American Forensic Association. Connor Fellowship funding will facilitate her current research on media presentations of feminism and female empowerment, allowing her to produce academic publications in respected venues and share her work at conferences.

Megan McIntyre, assistant professor and program director, Department of English

McIntyre is an assistant professor and program director for the Rhetoric and Composition program. She leads courses in Technical Composition, Ethics and Generative AI in the Humanities, Composition Pedagogy, and Research Methods. The Connor Fellowship funding will allow her to extend her current work on the impact of generative AI on the teaching of writing. She plans to produce an edited collection of reflections on AI use, a co-authored monograph about the need for careful engagement with digital technologies and an empirical study used to understand the adoption of emerging technologies in college classrooms. 

Vincent Chevrier, associate research professor and vice chancellor for research and innovation, Department of Geosciences

Chevrier is an associate professor and the vice chancellor for research and innovation whose research interests include planetary sciences, geochemistry, thermodynamics and mineralogy. His work has been published in prestigious journals like Planetary and Space Science, Icarus and the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets. His Connor Fellowship funding will support a new research project aimed at determining the effects of shock metamorphism on the infrared spectral properties of common rock-forming minerals. This project will allow undergraduate students to participate in a research training experience, learning industry-standard research methods. Additionally, the data collected from these efforts will be put towards a proposal for NASA's Planetary Data Archiving, Restoration and Tools (PDART) program.

Justin Gage, assistant professor, Department of History

Gage is a historian of the American West who studies Native American mobility and anticolonial activism, intertribal relationships and settler colonialism. Gage's first book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us, was awarded the 2021 Outstanding Western Book prize by the Center for the Study of the American West, the 2021 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures and the 2024 Smithsonian National Postal Museum Book Award. He will use the Connor Fellowship funding to complete his next book on late-19th-century Native American correspondence with white Americans. This work relies on thousands of letters written by Native Americans housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Hampton University Archives in Hampton, Virginia.

Jiahui Chen, assistant professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences

Chen's research focuses on implementing mathematical methods in biophysics, using topological and geometrical data analysis and machine learning algorithms with their modeling of and application to biomolecules. His work has been featured in prominent publications like the Journal of Computational Physics, Computers in Biology and Medicine and the Journal of Molecular Biology. Support from the Connor Fellowship will be used by him to fund student researchers, cover publication costs and foster collaboration through travel and inviting visiting researchers to the university.

Sophie Brady, assistant professor, Department of Music

Brady is an assistant professor of musicology who researches the history of 20th-century experimental music, focusing on connections between the European and African continents. She is the author of Towards a Global Avant-Garde: African Experimental Music and the Radiophonic Imagination, and her publications have appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Funding from the Connor Fellowship will help her to begin work on a new project titled Afro-Gregorian Modernities: Senegalese Decolonization and the Reinvention of Sacred Music, which explores relationships between the Vatican Radio and Senegalese liturgical music.

Jenna Donohue, assistant professor, Department of Philosophy                                

Donohue is a philosopher specializing in moral and political philosophy, especially moral complicity and justice. Her work has been published in journals like the American Educational History Journal and Philosophy in Review. Currently, she is developing her book project, Reconceiving Moral Complicity. Connor Fellowship funding will allow her to complete this work and present portions of the book for scholarly feedback. 

Tamara Snyder, assistant professor, Department of Physics

Snyder is an assistant professor and member of the MonArk Quantum Foundry. Her current research delves into the pedagogical practices within the field of physics, uncovering what students value in the laboratory experience and how these experiences can be improved. The Connor Fellowship funding will allow her to purchase software and equipment to facilitate new teaching techniques, as well as fund travel to physics teaching conferences to learn from and collaborate with instructors outside of the university.

Valerie Hunt, associate professor and associate director of the public policy Ph.D. program, Department of Political Science

Hunt is an associate professor and an associate director of the Public Policy Ph.D. program within the university's Graduate School and International Education. Her research focuses on discrimination, intersectionality, policy analysis, institutional transformation, community development and empowerment. Her work has appeared in several journals, including Race, Class, & Gender; Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare; American Indian Quarterly; and the Arkansas Law Review. She will use funding from the Connor Fellowship to complete a research project examining equitable workforce practices across the United States, producing a series of manuscripts for conference presentations and a publication evaluating occupational segregation and pay inequality.

Grant Shields, assistant professor, Department of Psychological Science

Shields is a scholar of executive control processes and episodic memory, focusing on the effects of acute stress on cognitive processes. He is also the director of the A SCAN lab, which aims to uncover how stress, affect and related factors influence cognition and health. Shields received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, a Rising Star recognition by the Association for Psychological Science and the Dirk Hellhammer Distinguished Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology. The Connor Fellowship will allow him to continue researching how stress and emotions influence health, helping him acquire the necessary supplies to assay hormones like cortisol in ongoing studies.

Hyesu Yeo, assistant professor, School of Social Work

Yeo's research focuses on the aging experiences of older employees in the workplace, examining how these experiences impact their well-being in retirement. Her work improves environments that help mitigate declines in financial, physical and cognitive wellbeing after retirement. The Connor Fellowship will support a specific facet of this research for her, focusing on the changes in cognitive ability and physical activity during the transition to retirement.

Bobbie Foster, assistant professor, School of Journalism and Strategic Media

Foster is an assistant data journalism professor and a media literacy committee member. Her work centers around internet memes, media literacy and digital culture studies. Foster will use the Connor Fellowship funds to advance her media literacy studies, with a focus on digital competencies for journalists. This includes travel to the International Media Literacy Research Symposium in Rome in 2026 and developing additional curriculum and classroom resources for faculty who wish to integrate more media literacy training in their classes across the university.

Maria Scaptura, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and Criminology                                                                                   

Scaptura is an assistant professor whose work examines masculinity and sexual dominance in men's sexual health, aging and expressions of violence. Her work has been published in Crime & Delinquency, Men & Masculinities and Feminist Criminology. Connor Fellowship funding will allow her to expand her research by launching an original self-report survey on identity, stalking and aggression, alongside employing and mentoring students within her department on this project.

David Reed, assistant professor, Department of Theatre

Reed is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre, leading courses on movement, stage combat and various other disciplines. He also serves as fight director and choreographer for several shows at the U of A, as well as others across the country. Reed is also one of only 66 practicing "Fight Directors" recognized by the Society of American Fight Directors. He plans to use the Connor Fellowship funding to support his research on theatrical movement, eventually sharing his scholarship with peers at relevant conferences and academic gatherings.

Annie Doucet, assistant professor, Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Doucet is a French professor and a member of the Gender Studies Program. She is currently working on a monograph discussing the 14th-century mystical text Scala Divini Amoris, or The Ladder of Divine Love. Connor Fellowship funding will allow her to travel to the British Library to study the original text in person as she aims to close the gap in scholarly understanding of the devotional lives of medieval women in the south of France. The fellowship will likewise facilitate her travel to the Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society in Montpellier, France, where she will present her research.

This story also appeared in the Fulbright REVIEW publication.