We Welcome New Faculty
The College of Applied Health Sciences has added three outstanding scholars to its faculty.
Zhuowei (Joy) Huang has joined the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism. She completed her doctoral degree in Hospitality
and Tourism Management at Purdue University. Prior to joining RST, she was a research assistant in the Purdue Tourism and Hospitality
Research Center. Her current research examines the consumer-based brand equity concept in the tourism and hospitality field. She is
generally interested in consumer behavior, with a focus on brand management in the travel and tourism industry, as well as festival
and special event management, the impacts of globalization on the travel and tourism industry, and current trends and issues related
to tourism development in emerging markets such as China. The recipient of a Ross Fellowship and a Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship
at Purdue, Dr. Huang has nearly two dozen co-authored articles and papers in print in leading journals and conference proceedings
in the tourism field. Her work earned the prestigious international Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in 2010.
The Department of Speech and Hearing Science has added two professors to its faculty. Raksha Anand Mudar was a research assistant
professor at the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she completed her doctoral degree in Communication
Sciences and Disorders. She is interested in the effects of normal cognitive aging and brain diseases including Mild Cognitive
Impairment, Alzheimer's disease, and frontotemporal dementia on higher order
semantic functions. Dr. Mudar uses a combination of behavioral methods, event-related potentials, and functional magnetic resonance
imaging in her research. Through her research she hopes to identify early markers of brain pathology thereby improving early detection
capabilities and opportunities to examine treatment response to novel neuroprotective agents. A recent recipient of an Alzheimer's
Association New Investigator Research Grant, Dr. Muda has published scholarly papers in
leading journals related to gerontology and cognitive neuroscience, and has presented her work at international conferences such as
Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting, International Neuropsychological Society Annual Meeting, Gerontological Society of
America Annual Meeting, and many others.
Aron K. Barbey completed his doctoral degree in Psychology at Emory University. Prior to joining SHS, he was a research fellow
at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the National Institutes of Health and an adjunct professor of
psychology at Georgetown University. His research investigates the cognitive and neural bases of executive control, reasoning, and
decision making. A recipient of the Early Scientific Achievement Award from the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Barbey has an
extensive list of scholarly publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the
Journal of Neuroscience, Trends in Neurosciences, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, among others, as well as
presentations at conferences of the Society for Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Cognitive Science Society.
He has also contributed chapters to such books as the Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience, the Neural Representation of Belief
Systems, and the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience.