Faculty Spotlights

Anna Shavers (second from left) speaks with students in the University of Nebraska College of Law. Shavers has served as acting dean of the law college since May 2019 and is the recipient of this year's Fulfilling the Dream Award.
Anna Shavers (second from left) speaks with students in the University of Nebraska College of Law. Shavers has served as acting dean of the law college since May 2019 and is the recipient of this year's Fulfilling the Dream Award.

Nebraska would not be the same without the incredible faculty at the university. This section highlights faculty that have been featured across campus in the last month for their research achievements, academic work, and journey to Nebraska.

Meet some of Nebraska’s incredible faculty, including those who are conducting life-changing research, being tapped as global experts, and earning university awards.

Shavers honored for focus on expanding diversity, inclusion
In honor of her decades-long commitment to diversity and inclusion at Nebraska, Shavers was presented with the 2020 Chancellor’s Fulfilling the Dream Award on Jan. 22. The annual award celebrates an individual who has contributed to the university or Lincoln community by promoting King's goals and vision. Her course subjects include immigration law, refugee and asylum law, human trafficking, international gender issues and the intersection of gender, race and class. Shavers was also named the College of Law’s associate dean for diversity and inclusion in 2018, putting an official title on the work she's done over many years.
Read More

Faculty startup Virtual Incision receives another $20M investment
Virtual Incision, a Nebraska Innovation Campus-based medical device company founded by University of Nebraska faculty, announced earlier this month it raised $20 million in Series B+ investment funding. The venture capital funding will support regulatory and clinical programs leading to commercialization of the company’s surgical robot platform, called MIRA, which stands for “miniaturized in vivo robotic assistant.” The first-of-its-kind robot aims to transform abdominal surgeries – particularly colon resections – from open, highly invasive surgeries into minimally invasive, laparoscopic procedures with significantly shorter recovery times.
Read More

Screening method could speed development of new antibiotics
Antibiotics — the bacteria-killing compounds that many bacteria themselves produce when waging civil war — have saved at least hundreds of millions of human lives since the first type, penicillin, was introduced in the 1940s. But bacterial species eventually evolve to resist even the most potent antibiotics, annually killing more than 35,000 people in the United States alone. Nebraska chemist Liangcheng Du and colleagues recently devised a method for rapidly testing which factors — particularly the cultures in which bacteria are grown — most influence the level of antibiotics the bacteria will yield.
Read More

Walker is Nebraska's 10th American Mathematical Society fellow
For Nebraska’s Mark Walker, inspiration that helped prove a longstanding and complex mathematical conjecture came while watching Thursday Night Football. The discovery — amplified by a career dedicated to mathematics education and research — recently led the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Willa Cather Professor of Mathematics to being named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Read More

To submit a faculty or staff feature for the next edition of the Global Nebraska newsletter, please contact Courtney Van Hoosen in the Office of Global Strategies at cvanhoosen2@unl.edu.