Research Notes | Georgia Southern Magazine

Shifting Parental Perceptions of Children’s Weight

Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health

Three faculty members in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health were featured in “Pediatrics,” the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics for a collaborative study that studied parents’ perceptions of their children’s weight. Andrew Hansen, Dr.P.H., Yelena Tarasenko, Dr.P.H., and Jian Zhang, M.D., Dr.P.H., examined height and weight data of about 3,000 children, ages six to 11, between 1988 and 1994, and a similar cohort from 2005 to 2010. In the 2005-10 survey, 78 percent of parents perceived their overweight daughter as “about the right weight” and 83 percent of parents said the same about their overweight boys. Earlier, in the 1988-94 survey, 61 percent of parents perceived their overweight girl to be “about the right weight,” while 78 percent of parents said the same for their overweight boys. The surveys’ results signal a generational shift of parental perceptions about children’s weight. The researchers noted that parents’ failure to recognize their child as overweight might account for the poor results of pediatric obesity prevention and control.

Biology Professor Presents at United Nations Meeting

College of Science and Mathematics

Department of Biology Professor Subhrajit Saha presented his agroecological research before an international symposium hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in September. He was among more than 50 experts from around the globe who made presentations at the forum in Rome, Italy. With the threat of global warming, agroecology is being recognized more and more as a climate-smart method of producing high quality food. Saha’s participation in the symposium also exposed Georgia Southern’s research initiatives to a global community of researchers, policymakers and international agencies and organizations.

Professor Honored

College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Chad Posick, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, is the recipient of the “New Scholar Award” in the Victimology Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. The award recognizes the achievements of scholars who show outstanding merit early in their career. Posick is currently in his second year at Georgia Southern and his research has been published in “Psychology of Violence,” “Justice Quarterly,” “Journal of Interpersonal Violence,” and the “Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice.” His primary research interests include the intersection of victimization and offending, the role of emotions in human behavior, and measurement issues in criminology and criminal justice.

Prestigious Journal Accepts Professor’s Paper

College of Business Administration

Associate Professor for Quantitative Analysis Xinfang Wang, Ph.D., recently received confirmation that her paper, “Efficiency and Equity Tradeoffs in Voting Machine Allocation Problems,” has been accepted for publication in the “Journal of Operational Research Society.” This subject was particularly timely during the recent election season. Efficiency and equity are the two crucial factors to be considered when allocating public resources such as voting machines. Currently, voting machine allocations look at either efficiency (ease of assignment) or equity (number of voting machines for a given precinct). The study examines the tradeoff between the two competing objectives. The new model quantifies the sacrifice in efficiency in order to achieve a certain improvement in equity and vice versa. Using data from the 2008 United States Presidential election in Franklin County, Ohio, the research demonstrates that our model is capable of producing significantly more balanced allocation plans, in terms of efficiency and equity, than current practice or other competing methods.

$2.2 Million in Grant Funding

College of Health and Human Sciences

The School of Nursing recently received more than $2.2 million in grant funding, which will help establish a Center for Nursing Scholarship and Research, introduce a new graduate level Chronic Illness Certificate Program and provide scholarships to students pursuing a Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) degree. The University System of Georgia awarded one grant and two came from the Health Resources Services Administration.

Professor Awarded NSF Research Grant

Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Information Technology

Department of Electrical Engineering Professor Danda Rawat, Ph.D., has been awarded a $228,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to support his research of “Real-Time Opportunistic Spectrum Access in Cloud-Based Cognitive Radio Networks (ROAR).” The grant will allow Rawat to develop a testbed to design and evaluate projects that use the Cloud to address the challenges of providing wireless spectrum access over large geographic areas. The project could influence the implementation, evaluation and development of future wireless systems.