Academic Minute from 2.22 – 2.26
Monday, February 22
Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon – University of Pennsylvania
Slacktivism
Sandra González-Bailón is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, and research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. She completed her doctoral degree in Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and her undergraduate studies at the University of Barcelona. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, and computational tools, with a special interest in dynamics of political communication and social change. She is currently working on a book titled Decoding the Social World: When Data Science Meets Communication (under contract with MIT Press).
Tuesday, February 23
Timothy Amukele – Johns Hopkins University
Drones Improving Medical Access
Dr. Timothy Amukele is an assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also the medical director of the Makerere University-Johns Hopkins University laboratory in Kampala, Uganda; the Laboratory co-Investigator for the Johns Hopkins Malawi Clinical Trials Unit in Blantyre, Malawi; and the associate director for clinical pathology programs for Pathologists Overseas Inc.. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Pathology. His research interests are twofold: the quality and impact of clinical laboratories in developing countries, and chronic diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.
Wednesday, February 24
David Hugh-Jones – University of East Anglia
Honesty Across Cultures
David Hugh-Jones is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Economics. He holds a PhD in Government from the University of Essex where he was based as a Lecturer in the Department of Government before joining UEA. His research interests include Experimental Economics, the Economics of Conflict and Public Economics. He has published his work in top journals in Economics (like Games and Economic Behavior) and Political Science (like the Journal of Conflict Resolution). David is the PI of an ESRC Research Grant on “The norm of honesty: empirical studies on school pupils and the UK population”.
Thursday, February 25
Spike Lee – University of Toronto
A Cultural Look at Moral Purity
Spike W. S. Lee is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is interested in the embodied and metaphorical nature of human thinking, which often leads to quirky effects (e.g., physical cleansing helps people move on by “wiping the slate clean”; when people “smell something fishy,” they become suspicious and invest less money in a trust-dependent economic game). Specifically, he explores how the mind interacts with the body in multiple ways; why mind-body relations are often predicted by the metaphors we use; when and how metaphors influence judgment, affect, and behavior; what cognitive principles govern these metaphorical effects and how they vary by experimental, social, and cultural context. He holds a PhD and MS from the University of Michigan and a BSSc from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Friday, February 26
Nikos Solounias – New York Institute of Technology
Giraffe Necks
Nikos Solounias is a professor of anatomy at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine. An expert in modern and paleontological ungulate anatomy and biology, he has more than 40 years of experience in the research and teaching of mammalian anatomy and evolution. Dr. Solounias has published more than 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has been awarded four NSF grants. He received his B.S. in Biology from Cornell University and an M.A. in Biology-Embryology from Clark University. He earned his Ph. D. in Geology-Paleontology from the University of Colorado, Boulder and has held postdoctoral positions at Yale, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins universities. He studied anatomy and embryology at the Harvard Medical School.
