Four CLAS faculty are among those being honored with this year's Research Awards. From left, Anne Thompson, Lisa Bates, Liu-Qin Yang, and Bright Alozie.
From workplace wellbeing to housing justice, from microscopic marine life to African history, researchers in Portland State's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are making an impact in their respective fields and at PSU.
Three faculty are among those being honored with the university's 2026 Research Awards: Anne Thompson, an associate professor of biology, with the Early Career Research Award; Lisa Bates, a professor of Black Studies, with the Public Impact Research Award; and Liu-Qin Yang, a professor of psychology, with the Graduate Mentoring Excellence Award. Bright Alozie, an associate professor of Black Studies, was named the college's 2026 Researcher of the Year, which this year honored a faculty member in the humanities.
The annual awards recognize outstanding contributions to research, scholarship, mentorship and community partnership.
"These awards reflect the breadth and depth of the remarkable work happening at Portland State," said Rick Tankersley, vice president for Research and Graduate Studies. "Each of this year's honorees embodies our mission to let knowledge serve."
The honorees will be celebrated at PSU's Research Awards ceremony on May 8.
Anne Thompson
Early Career Research Award
As a microbial oceanographer, Thompson's work examines the tiny cells (bacteria) that live in the open ocean, and much like what plants do on land, the bacteria her lab studies supports food webs and makes oxygen in ways that support habitability and stability of the Earth as we know it.
"I'm really proud of all the work my group has done to figure out what types of organisms eat the bacteria we study," she said. "This project has been wonderful because it reflects a wonderful collaboration with Kelly Sutherland, a biology professor at University of Oregon, and has been an opportunity to support several graduate students, undergraduates and research staff in my lab."
Thompson's innovative approaches have earned her international recognition, including a prestigious Simons Foundation Early Career Award and the American Society of Microbiology’s Distinguished Lecturer Award. With over $3.1 million in external funding and 32 peer-reviewed publications, her research record stands out for an early-career scientist.
She's the principal investigator on a three-year, $450,000 Partners in Science program that will pair K-12 science teachers with faculty researchers for two consecutive summers of immersive research. Thompson previously received the Research Faculty Research Award in 2022.
"I am so grateful to receive this honor," she said. "It means so much to me because it recognizes the hard work not just of myself but of my students, members of my lab and of course the generous support of the university and my department in creating a supportive environment that makes research possible in the context of teaching and service."
Lisa Bates
Public Impact Research Award
As a city planner by training, Bates' research aims to build cities that support all communities to live in vibrant, healthy, life-sustaining places — and especially to ensure that those who have been historically excluded and marginalized have the right to be in and to shape place.
Her community-centered work on housing policy, gentrification and equitable development has directly influenced public policy in Portland and beyond.
"There is a long history of research on public policy and social issues that has been done from an 'expert' only perspective and led to terrible consequences in communities that can't be undone," Bates said. "By working together, we can iterate on theory and explanations, find data that comes from different perspectives and develop proposals for what to do differently to make positive change."
For Bates, it's important that she's accountable to the communities she works with.
"I'm responsible to stick with it as we work through questions and revise our thinking, responsible to report out to the wider public in a way that is true to the knowledge we've built and responsible for turning research into real action," she said.
A project Bates is particularly proud of is Evicted in Oregon, which for the first time allows Oregonians to see how many community members are facing eviction as a specific form of housing instability. The project team has worked to explain how many Oregonians get evicted, how the evictions process works and what barriers tenants face in court, the cascading life impacts of being evicted and which landlords are most responsible.
"I work at PSU because it is a university that recognizes the value of public impact as a primary purpose of research, not just as a nice side effect, and it is great to be recognized internally among so many great examples of engaged scholarship," Bates said. "At the end of the day, I wouldn't get this recognition if it weren't for 'the public' who work with me, teach me and stay in relationship with me. The highest honor is that community members, professional colleagues and mentors who have far too often been harmed by people in my role — a university researcher — see me as someone they want to keep working with and that is itself an award."
Maude Hines, professor and chair of Black Studies, praised Bates for embodying PSU's commitment to Let Knowledge Serve..
"Despite the national attention it garners, Dr. Bates' scholarship is deeply rooted in Portland communities, displaying a sustained commitment to public engagement, knowledge transfer and translational research," she said. "She studies communities with whom she shares affinities and investments, with an understanding that we are all experts in our own experience. Her work is not only in communities, but with and for them."
Liu-Qin Yang
Graduate Mentoring Excellence Award
Yang's research aims to understand how and why employees and leaders stay engaged and motivated while being stressed out — and what organizational management policymakers and applied scientists like herself can do to improve employees' work lives and overall health and wellbeing. Her leadership of the Occupational Health Psychology-Total Worker Health Training Program, supported by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has made PSU a leader in occupational health science worldwide.
Yang has mentored 37 doctoral students as a committee member and served as primary advisor for 18 of them while also mentoring over 50 undergraduates. Yang says she's humbled by the award.
"As I've always shared with students I work closely with, I feel privileged to be able to work with so many talented and motivated students from such diverse backgrounds," she said. "My students' growth, development and successes are a core part of my career's meaningfulness and impact."
She says she strives to be adaptive and open-minded as her students each require different types, forms and levels of mentoring support at different stages of their development.
"My philosophy of mentoring is 'Better to mentor with my heart than with my brain,'" she said.
Bright Alozie
CLAS Researcher of the Year
Alozie's research sits at the crossroads of colonial and postcolonial African history, the African diaspora, gender, memory, oral histories, methodologies, social movements and decolonial thought.
He called the award deeply humbling, a joyful validation that his work as a professor and researcher matters and fuel to continue to engage in scholarship that is rigorous, community-rooted and humanistic.
"This honor belongs to the African and African diasporic communities whose stories I work to tell. … Without them, there is no scholarship; without their stories, there is no me," he said. "There is so much more work to do, so many more voices waiting to be heard, so many more archives to enter and communities to sit with — and this recognition makes me want to do all of it with even greater passion and purpose."
Alozie says that at the core of his research is asking a simple but radical question — Whose voices have been left out of the historical record and what happens when we put them back in? — and then listening.
His book, African Voices in Ink, sheds light on the petition-writing practices of everyday people in colonial Igboland, Nigeria, offering fresh insight into African resistance, rights discourse and decolonization.
As a FIFA Research Scholar, he's been combing through the global soccer body's archives for a project on how African administrators, federations and activists navigated the politics of global football governance. More locally, he's been sitting with African immigrant communities in Oregon, recording their voices, stories and triumphs as part of an Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellowship.
"Ubuntu teaches us that I am because we are," Alozie said. "Every piece of this work is part of that larger web, and I am immensely, humbly grateful to be in it."
Hines, professor and chair of Black Studies, called Alozie a prolific researcher and devoted professor who cares deeply about his research and his students.
"He has built strong community relationships and burnished PSU's reputation in Portland and internationally," she said. "He is an inspiring mentor with a dizzying publication and grant application record difficult to achieve in the humanities, especially at this time. The Black Studies department could not be prouder of our colleague."