College Research and Creative Activity Awards

Award Description 

College of Arts and Sciences 

Eugenio Di Stefano, Associate Professor

World Languages and Literature 

Eugenio Di Stefano is an associate professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of World Languages and Literature and a member of OLLAS (Office of Latino/Latin American Studies) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  

He has published articles on the politics of aesthetic form in contemporary Latin American cultural production in journals such as Modern Language Notes, Revista de estudios hispánicos, and Nonsite. He is the author of the book, The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Theory and Culture in the Post dictatorial Era (University of Texas Press). He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Dead Time: Capturing the Forms of the Latin American Present. He is also a founding editor of Forma, an online journal dedicated to rethinking contemporary Latin American culture and theory. 

College of Business Administration 

Yanhui Zhao, Associate Professor

Marketing

Dr. Yanhui Zhao (PhD in Marketing –Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His primary research interests fall within the domain of marketing strategy, including brand management, sales management, and inter-organizational relationships. His research has appeared in top-tier marketing journals such as the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Service Research, Journal of International Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, and Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. His research has been quoted multiple times by news outlets such as CNN Money and BBC News. He is a recipient of the James M. Comer Award for the Best Contribution to Selling and Sales Management Theory. In 2021, 2022, and 2024, Dr. Zhao received UNO Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship’s Distinguished Professor Awards for his achievements in research, teaching, and service.  

College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences 

Kristina Stamatis, Assistant Professor

Teacher Education

Kristina Stamatis is an Assistant Professor of Literacy in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She recently graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder with a degree in Learning Sciences and Human Development. Prior to graduate school, Kristina worked as a secondary literacy specialist, coach, and curriculum writer. Her research focuses on anti-racist teaching, storytelling, and literacy education across formal and informal educational spaces. Additionally, she is interested in the ways that jazz and other art forms can be used to further theoretical perspectives that support understandings of identity development. Most recently, her research has focused on collaborative projects supporting historically marginalized youth to create their own museum exhibits through a process of community curation. In her spare time, Kristina plays percussion and dances with a Brazilian samba band. She is also an avid backpacker, skier,and hiker, and enjoys traveling and working on the throughlines project, a storytelling project she has run since 2013.

College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media 

Mark Gilbert, Associate Professor

Art and Art History

Mark Gilbert is Associate with The School of Art and Art History at The University of Nebraska, Omaha, where he is participating faculty on UNO’s Medical Humanities program. Mark graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1991. In 2014, he was awarded his Ph.D at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.  

As an artist, teacher and researcher, he has worked on a number of high profile art-based research projects using portraiture to illuminate patient and caregiver experience of illness, recovery and care. These studies include Saving Faces at The Royal London Hospital and Portraits of Care at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. His work has been  exhibited widely in venues across Europe and the US, including the National Portrait Gallery, London.  

Marks most recent project, Portrait of Covid-19, used portraiture to explore the experience of healthcare workers during the pandemic. The project recruited participants from Omaha, New York, Houston and Washington. The resultant collection is permanently displayed in the American Medical Association head office in Chicago. 

College of Information Science & Technology 

Yuliya Lierler, Associate Professor

Computer Science

Yuliya Lierler is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She held an appointment to the Cheryl Prewett Diamond Professorship 2020 through 2023. She is a director of the Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding Lab since joining UNO in 2012. Her research contributions and interests are in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in the areas of knowledge representation and logic programming/answer set programming — a prominent subfield of artificial intelligence. Her papers appear in renowned AI venues such as AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence as well as Artificial Intelligence and Theory and Practice of Logic Programming journals. Her all-career total numbers of internationally acclaimed conference and journal peer-reviewed publications come to over sixty-five. In 2020, the Association of Logic Programming nominated and then elected her as an Executive Committee Board Member. Yuliya Lierler served as a Computing Innovation Fellow Postdoc at the University of Kentucky for two years after completing her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. 

College of Public Affairs and Community Service 

Tara Richards, Associate Professor

Criminology and Criminal Justice

Dr. Tara N. Richards is the David Scott Diamond Alumni Professor of Public Affairs and Community Service in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (SCCJ) and Co-Director of SCCJ’s Victimology and Victim Studies Research Lab. Richards’ research expertise focuses on prevention, intervention, and responses to sexual assault, domestic and intimate partner violence, and child abuse and neglect. She has received more than $3 million dollars from the National Institute of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women, National Institutes of Health, and other funders to support her research, and she has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. In addition, Richards has deep connections to violence prevention and intervention in Nebraska: she coordinates Nebraska’s Victim Assistance Academy – the state’s accredited training certification for victim service providers and allied professional – and she serves on the state’s Domestic Violence Intervention Program State Standards Committee and Douglas County’s Sexual Assault Response Team and Domestic Violence Coordinated Response Team. 

University Library 

Amy Schindler, Associate Professor

Archives and Special Collections

Amy Schindler is an associate professor in the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library. She has worked as Director of Archives and Special Collections at UNO since 2014. Her primary focus in librarianship is increasing access to archival materials and expanding the scope of UNO’s distinctive collections.   

Her research interests include community outreach utilizing archival materials, exhibits, community archives, and the evolution of archival practice.  Schindler was one of the founders of the Queer Omaha Archives in 2016, and continues to lead efforts to collect, preserve, and share Omaha and Nebraska LGBTQIA2S+ history.     

She was previously University Archivist at the College of William and Mary and Curator of Manuscripts at the University at Albany, SUNY. She has held leadership positions in the Society of American Archivists, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, and other archives organizations. She has presented at professional meetings of the Society of American Archivists, Academic Library Advancement & Development Network, Joint Conference of Librarians of Color, and other organizations. 

She earned master’s degrees in history and library and information science with an archives concentration from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee (2001) and a BA in History with a certificate in Asian American Studies from the University of Wisconsin—Madison (1998).