The Academic Minute for 2016.1.04-01.08

Academic Minute from 1.04 – 1.08

Monday, January 4
Cristine Legare – University of Texas at Austin
Imitation and Innovation
Cristine Legare is an associate professor of psychology and the director of the Cognition, Culture and Development Lab at The University of Texas at Austin. As a cognitive scientist, her research examines the evolution and development of cognition and culture.
Legare studies the interplay of the universal human mind and the variations of culture to better understand cognitive and cultural evolution. Much of her research has been conducted in southern Africa, though she is currently conducting fieldwork in Brazil, China and Vanatu. Her work, which draws on insights from psychology, anthropology and philosophy, has appeared in a number of journals, such as Developmental Psychology, Cognition, and Evolution and Human Behavior.

Tuesday, January 5
Maria Aysa-Lastra – Winthrop University
The Great Recession and Latino Immigrants
Dr. Maria Aysa-Lastra is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Winthrop University. Her research focuses on the causes of migration as well the integration of immigrants in their host societies. She has dedicated her efforts to study the underlying causes of human migration from Latin American to the United States and Spain, and how foreign-born Latinos adapt to the American and Spanish contexts. She has published her research in Journal of Refugee Studies, Rural Sociology, International Journal of Population Research, Journal of Family Violence, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Norteamérica, Revista Internacional de Sociología, Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas and Estudios Demográficos y de Desarrollo Urbano. She has also contributed several book chapters, and co-edited two volumes: Immigrant Vulnerability and Resilience: Comparative Perspectives on Latin American Immigrants during the Great Recession, and Colombian Presence in the United States. Profile of the Immigrant Population. Dr. Aysa-Lastra has been invited to talk about Latino/Hispanic identity (WLRN-Under the Sun) and the importance of education among Latinos (UNIVISION).

Wednesday, January 6
Leo Fleishman – Union College
Anoles
Leo Fleishman is a professor in the Biology Department at Union College, where he teaches courses in Introductory Biology, Animal Behavior and Animal Physiology.  His research explores how animals perceive the world, and how their sensory perception  influences  the evolution of their communication signals.   He is currently studying how color- and motion-vision influence the evolution of visual signals used by lizards native to Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.  He has authored over 30 peer-reviewed publications and has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation.  Prof. Fleishman has a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University and a BA in Biology from Tufts University.

Thursday, January 7
Michael Kraus – Yale University
Bobcat Populations
Professor Kraus’ research interest include how people perceive and explain the attainment of social status, how these status perceptions influence emotions and behavior in both cooperative and competitive settings, and how emotions guide group behavior. In particular, Professor Kraus’ work explores how people born into lower socioeconomic status families tend to engage in social judgments and behaviors suggesting that they value social connections more highly than their higher socioeconomic status counterparts, and how early physical contact (e.g., high fives) between teammates on professional basketball teams predicts enhanced team performance over time. His work appears in journals such as Psychological Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Emotion, and has been covered in the popular press by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the Wall Street Journal.
Professor Kraus received his BA in psychology and sociology, and his PhD in social psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Before arriving at Yale SOM, Professor Kraus was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Friday, January 8
Martin Krieger – University of Southern California
Structure of Cities
Martin H. Krieger is professor of planning at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. He is trained as a physicist, and has taught in urban planning and policy at Berkeley, Minnesota, MIT, Michigan, and USC. His nine books are about mathematical modeling, environmental policy, and about theories of planning and design. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the National Humanities Center. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.