Research Roundup: Recent publications and grants from Emory faculty and staff
February 27, 2026
Emory’s faculty and staff excel in academic research, conducting studies across every discipline, from the sciences to the humanities. This compilation of published research findings and the newest grant awards illustrates how Emory researchers are cutting a path toward groundbreaking discoveries. Read more Emory research news on the Emory News website.
Research publications and proceedings
Grants and awards
Research publications and proceedings
Goizueta Business School
Better peer evaluations can improve team outcomes
Organizations increasingly use peer evaluations to help decide bonus pay—but questions remain about how to design and use them to encourage effort and fairness. New research by Karl Schuhmacher, assistant professor of accounting at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, and coauthor Manuel Grieder investigates how different peer evaluation designs influence both distortion in assessments and effort among team members.
In a controlled experiment, the authors compare two approaches to peer evaluations: self-including (where team members rate themselves along with others) and self-excluding (where they rate others only). They also distinguish between formulaic use (bonuses allocated automatically based on team averages) and discretionary use (bonuses determined by a manager).
The results, published in the Journal of Accounting Research, show that self-excluding evaluations are less distorted than self-including ones, reducing biases in peer feedback. When used in a formulaic way—letting the team’s average determine individual bonuses—this design also enhances effort among participants. Under discretionary use, however, managerial biases can negate these benefits.
The study offers practical guidance for organizations seeking to leverage peer input effectively and meritocratically in compensation systems.
Read the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1475-679X.12628
How E-commerce shapes small business credit
As small businesses increasingly sell online, their access to credit may be changing in surprising ways. A new study by Tetyana Balyuk, assistant professor of finance at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, and Goizueta student Zhishuo Han investigates how the adoption of e-commerce impacts credit markets for small firms.
Using U.S. data, the researchers find that businesses that adopt e-commerce platforms experience higher sales, larger orders, and more stable revenues—indicators of greater efficiency compared with offline trade. Despite expectations that more stable cash flows might reduce borrowing needs, these digitally inclined firms actually obtain more credit after adopting e-commerce, even after accounting for improved performance.
The findings, published in Social Science Research Network, suggest that e-commerce may relieve credit constraints in two ways: by increasing expected returns for lenders through stronger sales, and by generating richer transaction data that reduce information frictions and lending costs. The study also uncovers redistributional effects, with credit shifting across industries within local markets as online commerce reshapes small firm performance and creditworthiness.
Read the paper: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5771742
New statistical tools improve fair selection in large-scale inference
From identifying top-performing hospitals to ranking schools or surfacing the most important signals in massive datasets, decision-makers increasingly rely on statistical rankings to guide high-stakes choices. But traditional methods can unintentionally favor extreme or low-variability outcomes, leading to results that are statistically valid yet practically misleading.
New research by Gareth James, the John H. Harland Dean and professor of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, introduces a statistical framework designed to make large-scale ranking and selection more balanced and meaningful.
James and colleagues propose a modified power metric that accounts for both effect size and statistical significance, along with a novel ranking index that better reflects real-world importance across thousands of heterogeneous units. Their methods control false discovery rates while prioritizing substantively meaningful differences, even when data quality and variability vary widely across groups.
The approach, published in Annals of Applied Statistics, has broad implications for data-driven decision-making in education, healthcare, and machine learning—offering researchers and policymakers more reliable tools for allocating attention and resources where they matter most.
Read the paper: https://d72cd339-a850-45df-93d2-9127658ada61.filesusr.com/ugd/53ea6fef5121bcfd3f4cfc8600687e6dbcc1df.pdf
How AI changes the way we judge human creativity
As artificial intelligence takes on tasks once thought uniquely human—solving complex problems, generating art, and producing creative work—people may also be quietly changing how they evaluate human-made products. New research explores whether exposure to AI’s creative advances shifts the criteria people use to judge human creativity.
In a new study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, Özgecan Koçak, associate professor of organization & management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School and co-authors Mitali Banerjee and Matthew Yeaton examine how engagement with AI-made art alters evaluations of human-made art. Drawing on the concept of the “AI effect,” which describes how benchmarks shift as AI surpasses previous thresholds, the research tests whether people “move the goalposts” when assessing human creativity.
Using a combination of observational data and a preregistered experiment, the study finds that exposure to AI-generated art leads evaluators to place greater value on qualities seen as distinctly human—such as authenticity, artistic intent, and personal background—while de-emphasizing criteria that apply equally to AI and humans, such as likability, formal attributes, and novelty. Analyses of Reddit discussions and Artnet reviews show a post–ChatGPT shift toward these human-specific criteria, a pattern confirmed in experimental settings.
The findings suggest that as AI becomes more creative, people increasingly treasure uniquely human elements that machines cannot replicate. Engagement with AI changes the way human work is evaluated.
Read the paper: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/w4ybcv1
Oxford College
Oxford College hosts 14th annual Georgia Undergraduate Research Conference
Oxford College of Emory University hosted the 14th Annual Georgia Undergraduate Research Conference (GURC) on November 7-8, 2025. This research conference is a state-wide undergraduate research symposium that gives undergraduate researchers the opportunity to present their research findings and learn what others have learned.
This was the second consecutive year that Oxford hosted the GURC. Daniel Walter, associate professor of German and linguistics at Oxford, served again as the board's president. Walter attended his first GURC in 2019 and has served on the GURC board for the past six years.
The GURC 2025 welcomed all fields of research and creative activities, from Anthropology to Zoology, and gave students an opportunity to submit their research to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), the largest venue for showcasing undergraduate research across 50+ disciplines, fostering career readiness, and celebrating innovation.
GURC gives students the learning opportunity to receive experience in presenting their research at a conference, as well as next steps when looking to get their research published in a journal.
Winship Cancer Institute
Researchers identify immune clues that could personalize multiple myeloma treatment
Winship Cancer Institute researchers and collaborators analyzed nearly 1.5 million cells from hundreds of patients to create the largest-ever single-cell immune atlas of bone marrow in patients with multiple myeloma. The landmark study, published in Nature Cancer, reveals that the state of a patient’s immune system at diagnosis, in addition to the genetics of their tumor, can predict how their disease will progress and respond to treatment.
By integrating immune profiles with tumor genetics, the team significantly improved the ability to predict progression-free survival. The study also highlighted specific immune pathways that may guide future treatment strategies.
The study’s co-corresponding author is Winship researcher Manoj Bhasin, professor of pediatrics and biomedical informatics and director of the Single Cell Biology Program at Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Co-authors include Sagar Lonial, professor and chair of hematology and medical oncology and Winship’s chief medical officer, and Swati Bhasin, assistant professor of pediatrics.
Grants
Emory College of Arts & Sciences
Emory chemist Yao Wang receives Scialog awards to investigate quantum matter
Yao Wang, Emory assistant professor in chemistry, has received two awards from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, The Brinson Foundation, Simons Foundation, and independent philanthropist Kevin Wells as part of the inaugural year of Scialog: Quantum Matter and Information, an initiative to promote broader interactions among sectors of the quantum science community. The awards, seven in all, grew out of a Scialog workshop bringing together researchers from traditionally distinct fields — physics, chemistry, materials science, computer science and more — that are now converging through the rapidly evolving study of quantum information and quantum matter.
In one project, Wang will collaborate with Xonglong Xie at Rice University to combine quantum metrology theory with high-precision, single-electron transistor techniques. This approach has the potential to identify entangled states in low-temperature correlated materials.
For the other project, Wang, who is a theorist, will build on the results of a recent paper from his group on electronic entanglement theory by collaborating with experimentalists Alex Frañó of the University of California, San Diego, and Fang Liu of Stanford University. The team will work on a new differential spectral technique to identify and quantify entanglement in macroscopic materials.
Emory College religion professor part of international grant studying moderate Islam in Indonesia
James Hoesterey, Winship distinguished research professor of religion, is part of an international research team that was recently awarded one of only 15 humanities grants by the Australian Research Council's 2026 Discovery Grants for a collaborative project: "Indonesia in the GlobalGeography of Islamic Knowledge.” The $415,000 grant will help fund the interdisciplinary project, which examines multiple aspects of Indonesia’s role as a home of “moderate Islam.” Hoesterey, who also serves as chair of the Department of Religion in Emory College, joins a team led by Julian Millie of Monash University in Australia to research Indonesian Islamic diplomacy in the Middle East, with research trips to Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.
Impact of AI on intellectual property law is focus of new grant
Emory College Film and Media Associate Professor Jennifer Porst recently received a grant from the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a part of their Media Industries and AI Initiative. Porst will participate in the interdisciplinary, multi-year initiative with a group of 21 scholars from 15 countries who are doing research on different aspects of the media industries and artificial intelligence. Her project, “Regulating Authorship and Creativity: IP Law, AI, and Hollywood" will examine the impact of AI on intellectual property law.
Intellectual property law relies on the ability to clearly define concepts at the heart of film and television: creativity, authorship, expression, and humanity, explains Porst, who also serves as co-director of the Concentration in Film and Media Management. As A.I. technologies complicate those definitions, her research will monitor ongoing legal cases and contextualize current debates using archival legal research.
She also will conduct extensive interviews with people in the media industry, the nonprofit sector, and in positions of government leadership to examine how the industry, the law, and our political leaders respond, how the law evolves in theory and practice, and what that means for the future of the media.
Winship Cancer Institute
Flowers awarded NCI SPORE grant for anal and cervical cancer prevention and treatment
Winship Cancer Institute investigator Lisa Flowers, professor of gynecology & obstetrics and director of colposcopy services at Grady, is co-leading a five-year, $11 million Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant with collaborators from Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and Morehouse School of Medicine to address differences in incidence and outcomes for anal and cervical cancers across different population groups. These types of cancers disproportionately affect populations at high risk of poor outcomes. The team will conduct community-engaged translational research with the goal of improving the landscape of anal and cervical cancer prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment.
Learn more in NIH RePORTER. https://reporter.nih.gov/search/-RbTWu-jTEucT4AeE0sAVQ/project-details/11199468#details
