NSF and NASA EPSCoR Research Fellows Webinar for New Mexico

Bio: Chinonye "Chi-Chi" Nnakwe Whitley, Ph.D. is a molecular biologist and her studies of DNA repair and DNA damage signaling pathways offer insights toward the molecular biology of neuroscience, immunology and cancer biology. Dr. Whitley obtained her B.S. in Biochemistry with Departmental Distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her Ph.D. in Pathology from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Whitley joined the Office of Integrative Activities in September 2017 and serves as a Program Officer for the NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). She currently manages a $107M portfolio of 26 standard grants and cooperative agreements, and focuses on building basic science research infrastructure, promoting economic development and broadening participation in STEM.

Prior to her current role, Dr. Whitley was an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the NSF in the Computer Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate where she worked on innovation policy programs such as I-Corps™ and SBIR / STTR. After obtaining her doctoral degree, Dr. Whitley was a management consultant for the health-care consulting company Campbell Alliance (now inVentiv), where she facilitated product launches and conducted pricing studies of pharmaceutical products. Later, she was appointed the inaugural Director of Graduate Diversity Initiatives in the Office of the Provost at the University of Chicago. In this role she led in-reach and outreach programs to promote diversity and inclusion in higher education and the research workforce. She fostered multi-institutional partnerships that led to initiatives like the SPINES Neuroscience Symposium with the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and the National Research Mentoring Network-CIC Academic Network (NRMN-CAN) with the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Bio: Dr. Lisa Cliggett is Professor of Anthropology and former department chair at the University of Kentucky. She received her PhD from Indiana University in Anthropology and held a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Population Studies at the University of Pennsylvania before joining UK in 1999. She is an economic and environmental anthropologist and has conducted field research in Zambia, Central Africa, since 1992. She examines questions of environmental change, livelihood security and development impacts in Gwembe Tonga communities who were displaced from the Zambezi river by the building of Kariba Dam in 1958. In 2023, she joined NSF as a rotating program director in the EPSCoR program, Research Capacity and Competitiveness (RCC) Section, in the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA), and currently serves as Co-Lead for the EPSCoR Research Fellows competition.

Bio: Dr. Hongmei Luo is a Luke Barry Shires Endowed Professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at New Mexico State University (NMSU). She received her Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Tulane University and then worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a postdoctoral research associate, before joining NMSU in Fall 2009. Her group research focuses on epitaxial oxide and nitride thin films for superconductors and magnetism, nanomaterials for lithium-ion batteries, and electrocatalysts for fuel cells and electrolyzers. In 2023, she joined NSF as a rotating program director in the EPSCoR program, Research Capacity and Competitiveness (RCC) Section, in the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA), and currently serves as Co-Lead for the EPSCoR Research Fellows competition.