2024 Early Career Research Award (ECRA)
Each academic year the College of Arts & Sciences recognizes and rewards faculty members with outstanding research programs in the early stages of their career. Recipients receive $500 to be used for research (not for salary) and a plaque as tokens of this recognition. For consideration, a candidate for one of these awards must be a tenure-track faculty member in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Memphis, be employed for no more than five academic years in that position, and be no more than eight years beyond receiving the terminal degree, prior to the semester of application. No past recipient will be eligible to receive the award again.
Sarah Leat, School of Social Work
Sarah Leat is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work. She came to the University
of Memphis in the fall of 2021 after earning her PhD at the University of Texas at
Arlington in May 2021.
Dr. Leat practice as a social worker for a domestic violence family justice center informs her research agenda. She focuses her research primarily on the public health crisis that is adult experiences of intimate partner violence and explores help-seeking behaviors and barriers and facilitators to accessing social services, the role of transportation networks in accessing services for survivors, and the impact of the built environment on survivors’ outcomes, specifically including domestic violence shelters. Since coming to Memphis, Leat has had the opportunity to serve at Co-PI on a grant with the Public Safety Institute funded by the Tennessee Office of Criminal Justice Programs. The purpose of the grant is to create a strategic plan to formulate a coordinated community of care for survivors of domestic violence in Memphis/Shelby County. Additionally, she is currently PI on a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grant that provides stipends to individuals with lived experience of substance use to obtain certification through the State of Tennessee to become a peer-support specialist.
Her experiences in both community-based research and human service organization leadership inform her teaching in advanced social work courses at the master’s level within the School of Social Work.
Mark Mayer, Department of English
Mark Mayer joined the University of Memphis in 2020 as an assistant professor in the Creative
Writing concentration. His first book, Aerialists (Bloomsbury USA), won the Michener-Copernicus
Prize, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize, and was an American
Booksellers Association Indie Next selection.
Mayer's current creative projects include: About, Above, Around: 50 Prepositions, a book of experimental short stories that attempt to use the English prepositions to describe the inner movements of emotion, and The Central Fire, a historical fantasy about the Pythagorean cult of the ancient Mediterranean, set within a cosmos governed by Pythagorean physics.
His fiction has been published in River Styx, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Iowa Review, and Colorado Review and anthologized in the Best American series. His peer-reviewed academic articles on feminist narrative and the racial imaginary have appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. His fiction has earned residencies and fellowships from the American Library in Paris, the BAU Institute, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Ucross, and Crosstown Arts.
Before joining the University of Memphis, he served as a Fiction Writing Fellow at Colby College and the R. P. Dana Writer-in-Residence at Cornell College. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Daniel Nascimento, Department of Chemistry
Daniel Nascimento is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and a UMRF Research professor.
He joined the University of Memphis in the Spring of 2021 after holding post-doctoral
positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory.