Congratulations to our 2024 Research Excellence Awards winners, Dr. Esther Leerkes and Dr. Sally Koerner. Hear about their remarkable accomplishments in their own words at the UNCG ResearchCON 2025 Research Celebration and Reception on Thursday, April 10.
Dr. Sally Koerner, associate professor of biology, receives the Early Career Research Excellence Award for her transformative scholarship in grassland ecology.
Dr. Koerner is internationally recognized for her research on grassland ecosystems and how global change impacts biological diversity, with studies ranging across South Africa, the Great Plains of the United States, and North Carolina. Her findings have fundamentally changed scientific understanding of grassland ecology, for example demonstrating that while grazing produces vastly different effects on biodiversity across the globe, a universal mechanism – how the dominant plant species responds – controls the response. Koerner’s critical work also includes timely explorations of how fire and drought impact plant community dynamics.
Koerner has authored over 65 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals – including six in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – with over 3,900 citations. Many of her lead-authored publications have garnered more than 200 citations each, and in 2024 alone she was cited over 600 times. Koerner has also produced four nationally archived data sets. Nominators say this level of productivity would be stellar for a late-career researcher in the field and is stunning for an early career ecologist.
Equally exceptional in her field when it comes to external funding, Koerner has served as PI or co-PI on projects securing close to $9.8 million in awards, many representing collaborations with leading scientists across the world. Since Koerner joined UNCG in 2017, she has brought $1.2 million to the university, with major funding from the NSF and USDA.
Koerner currently serves as her department’s director of undergraduate studies, and since she arrived at UNCG in 2017, she has served on 10 campus-wide, College of Arts and Sciences, and departmental committees while mentoring a prodigious number of students – 10 graduate and over 80 undergraduate. She has guided her students to exceptional achievements, including prestigious USDA predoctoral fellowships and highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Her publications frequently feature graduate and undergraduate co-authors, and she ensures her students travel with her to research sites and conferences, contributing meaningfully to research that advances the field. She has been recognized with seven awards since 2018, including a Bernard-Glickman Dean’s Professorship and a Joyner Teaching Excellence Award, and serves on the editorial board of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Dr. Esther Leerkes, Jefferson-Pilot Excellence Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, receives the Senior Research Excellence Award for her deeply influential contributions to the study of parenting and infant development.
Currently the associate dean for research in the School of Health and Human Sciences, Leerkes has built an influential body of work across two decades. She is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking studies on maternal sensitivity to infant distress as a predictor of child social emotional outcomes. Her findings have paved the way for subsequent studies linking early infant experiences to child emotional regulation, academic performance, and mental health. In recent years, Leerkes published a unifying framework that redefines measures of maternal psychosocial and biological risk identifying novel targets for parenting interventions. Additionally, the developmental psychologist is also known in her field for studies on the intergenerational transmission of parenting, infant temperament, and child development research that contextualizes the experiences of Black families, and for her advocacy for expanded considerations of race and ethnicity in future studies.
Succeeding on every NIH submission where she has served as lead PI, Leerkes has secured over $13 million in external funding and has authored 127 peer-reviewed publications. Her work has been cited over 11,800 times, with 108 of her papers receiving at least 10 citations, 52 cited more than 52 times, and her groundbreaking 2009 publication in Child Development cited nearly 700 times.
As one of the top 2% most-cited scientists globally, and one of only 58 scholars in developmental and child psychology to attain this distinction, Leerkes has profoundly shaped the field. However, her impact does not stop at the laboratory door. For example, measures she designed for interventionists to assess maternal emotions, cognitions, and behaviors pre and post intervention have been translated into 15 different languages.
The eminent researcher has achieved this level of scholarly excellence while serving as an associate dean for research for the past 8 years; mentoring 15 PhD students, two master’s students, and 75 undergraduate students; and serving on 18 departmental, 8 HHS, and 20 campus-wide committees and taskforces. Committed to supporting future scholars, Leerkes has allocated $1 million toward graduate student stipends at UNCG, funding not just her own advisees but other students as well – an additional 15 graduate students not primarily under her mentorship have collaborated with Leerkes for data collection and authorship opportunities. She has also served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Behavioral Development, Parenting: Science and Practice, and Family Relations, and as consulting editor for Child Development and American Psychologist and as a grant reviewer for NIH and NSF.
Announcement by Sangeetha Shivaji
Photos by Sean Norona and Jiyoung Park
About the feature photo: Led by Dr. Esther Leerkes, UNCG iGrow and its spinoff studies are an interdisciplinary investigation tracking children from the womb to age 5 to examine the biological psychosocial, and social factors that can raise obesity risk and more.
