Dr. Bob Poage has been named the winner of the 2019 Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor Award.  The Pembroke Undergraduate Research and Creativity Center Council (PURCC) announced the award on April 3rd and, one week later, the Council celebrated Dr. Poage's (Associate Professor in Biology) award during the Thirteenth Annual UNC Pembroke Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium.

This recognition rewards individuals who make significant contributions to forwarding undergraduate research, creative scholarship, and entrepreneurial scholarship. It highlights demonstrated excellence in supporting undergraduate researchers, encouraging mentoring relationships with undergraduate students, and conveying the campus' high regard for contributions made by the academic and research community at UNC-Pembroke, particularly if a mentor supports and influences students’ educational and career paths. Exemplary mentors can demonstrate continued success in helping students produce tangible results that may include peer-reviewed publications; student presentations, awards, or scholarships. Excellent undergraduate mentors support students through their availability, attentiveness, encouragement, and understanding. In many disciplines, this mentoring is done by faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students. 

Dr. Poage arrived at UNCP in 2003, and he has been at the forefront in promoting and encouraging undergraduate research ever since. His scholarly expertise in neurobiology; skill in teaching the scientific method’s application in the classroom, lab, and to extra-curricular research mentees; and role as co-PI on the RISE grant let him nurture and mold biology students at UNCP as they develop, execute, and disseminate their own research projects. His former students and mentees note that his insistence on regular face-to-face contact, encouragement in settings both formal and informal, and interest in them as people are all powerful motivators and examples to them as early career researchers and academics.  Also, his work as a member of the PURCC Council (2006-2017), with RISE, and with COMPASS students impacts hundreds of students from across campus. Additionally, Poage advises Maynor Honors College theses regularly and has contributed to science education in the surrounding areas in ways that advance UNCP’s goal of acting as an agent of change regionally. His students have sought and received internal and external funding, presented their work on campus and off, and his research activities are broad—they not only advance his personal scholarly interests but also consider the role and implications of undergraduate research in the curriculum. Poage, thus, is a figure whose work emboldens research and creativity among his colleagues from across campus and encourages their mentorship of undergraduate researchers.