The Academic Minute for 2015.11.9-11.13

Catch up with The Academic Minute from 11.9 – 11.13

Monday, November 9
Christopher Salas-Wright – University of Texas at Austin
Immigrants and Crime
Dr. Christopher Salas-Wright is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from Boston College and completed an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies. Dr. Salas-Wright’s research interests include: adolescent substance use and violence prevention; the epidemiology of high-risk and antisocial behavior; and the role of cultural processes in the development of Latino youth. Since 2012, Dr. Salas-Wright has authored more than 70 scholarly publications that have appeared in journals such as Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Addictive Behaviors, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, and Annals of Epidemiology. His research has been featured numerous media outlets, including: Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, USA TODAY, and NBC News. Prior to his graduate training, Dr. Salas-Wright lived for several years in San Salvador, El Salvador where he worked in the fields of youth development, addictions treatment, and international higher education.

Tuesday, November 10
Miriam Solomon – Temple University
Precision Medicine
Professor Solomon works in the areas of philosophy of science, social epistemology, medical epistemology, medical ethics and gender and science. She is the author of Social Empiricism (MIT Press, 2001), editor of several special journal issues, and author of many journal articles.  Making Medical Knowledge, a book on the epistemology of medicine, exploring medical consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine, was published with Oxford University Press (UK) on April 2, 2015.Professor Solomon is active on the Temple University Hospital Ethics Committee and serves on the Executive Committee of the College of Liberal Arts.

Wednesday, November 11
Gregory Cunningham – St. John Fisher College
Penguin’s Sense of Smell
Dr. Gregory Cunningham is an Associate Professor of Biology at St. John Fisher College, a small liberal arts college in Rochester, New York.  He received his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of California at Davis, studying the development of olfactory (sense of smell) behaviors in three species of seabirds.  Following this he spent a short period of time at the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology in Cape Town, South Africa where he studied olfaction in African penguins.  He then took his position at St. John Fisher College, where he continued his studies on African penguins, while also studying Common paraques in Costa Rica.  When not traveling for research, he studies local songbird populations, and Red-tailed hawks.  He is an expert on avian olfaction.   He is interested in how birds use their sense of smell to aid in foraging, to find their nest, and in social interactions.  Most recently he teamed with Dr. Francesco Bonadonna from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France to study olfaction in King penguins.

Thursday, November 12
Emilia Flint – Black Hills State University
Athletes and Group Culture
Dr. Emilia Flint joined the Black Hills State Universityfaculty in 2010. She teaches Introduction to Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Introduction to Clinical Psychology, Human Potential and Performance Psychology, and Sport Psychology. She also supervises undergraduate student internships around the Black Hills Region. Dr. Flint received her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of North Dakota and has specialized training in rehabilitation counseling and sport and exercise psychology.
Prior to joining the faculty at BHSU, Dr. Flint worked full-time for a college counseling center in Ohio and consulted with and treated NCAA Division I athletes. Furthermore, Dr. Flint has experience working with a wide range of psychological disorders through previous jobs at a hospital and an outpatient clinic. Recently, Dr. Flint took her research team of ten students to the Special Olympics World Winter Games in South Korea. While there, these students got to attend the Global Development Summit on Ending the Cycle of Poverty and Exclusion for People with Intellectual Disabilities and meet some powerful world leaders.

Friday, November 13
Yvette Cozier – Boston University
Obesity & Racism
Dr. Cozier is an investigator on the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS), a prospective follow-up of over 59,000 African American women begun in 1995. Dr. Cozier’s overall research focus is on the influence of psychosocial factors in the development of sarcoidosis, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.  She has published several analyses of perceived racism in relation to hypertension, breast cancer incidence, weight gain, and mortality in the BWHS.  In addition, she has published analyses of neighborhood socioeconomic status, including median household income and segregation, on the risks of hypertension, and diabetes.  For the past several years, Dr. Cozier has been studying selected risk factors for sarcoidosis in the BWHS, including reproductive factors and genetic polymorphisms.  She has also assessed the role of attitudes about spirituality and religiosity in health promotion and disease prevention efforts among Boston-area residents and clergy.