The Academic Minute for 2016.2.29-3.4

Academic Minute from 2.29 – 3.4

Monday, February 29
Justin Mankin – Columbia University
Declining Snowpacks
Mankin is a climate scientist jointly appointed at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies under the Earth Institute. His research aims to advance understanding and responses to global warming’s impacts on people. He focuses on two of the major sources of uncertainty in climate impacts assessments: the chaos innate to the climate system and the complexity of how people respond to climate stress. His hope is that his research can help inform the adaptation and risk management decisions that people undertake in response to the uncertain threats from climate change. Prior to earning his PhD from Stanford University, he served as an intelligence officer. He also holds degrees from Columbia University (BA, MPA) and the London School of Economics (MSc).

Tuesday, March 1
David Badre – Brown University
Executive Functions
David Badre received his B.S. from the University of Michigan in 2000, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in 2005. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined Brown’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences as Assistant Professor in 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. He is also an affiliate of the Brown Institute for Brain Science and a trainer in the Neuroscience Graduate Program. His lab at Brown focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of memory and cognitive control with an emphasis on frontal lobe function and organization. Dr. Badre serves on the editorial boards of Psychological Science, Cognitive Science, and Behavioral Neuroscience, and he is Section Editor covering “Executive Function and Cognitive Control” for Neuropsychologia. His research is supported by NINDS and NIMH at the NIH and has been recognized by early career awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Neuroscience, a James S. McDonnell Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award.

Wednesday, March 2
Anna Sosa –  Northern Arizona University
Traditional Toys vs Electronic Toys
Anna Sosa completed her PhD in Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington in 2008.  Prior to joining the NAU faculty in 2009, she worked as a school-based Speech Language Pathologist in Washington State.  Her research focuses on the relationship between lexical and phonological development in young children with typical and delayed speech and language development.   She supervises graduate students in the NAU clinic in the areas of evaluation and assessment of infants and toddlers and phonology and articulation intervention.

Thursday, March 3
Paul Hopwood – University of Exeter
Burying Beetles as Parents
Paul Hopwood is an Associate Research Fellow at the College of Life and Environmental Sciences in the University of Exeter in the UK. He is interested in the evolution of parental care, particularly the way that parents adjust their behavior depending on unpredictable elements of the environment in which they provide for their offspring.

The team with whom he works uses burying beetles as a model system to study these questions. Burying beetles are attentive parents and both sexes feed their offspring by regurgitating food in response to begging (in a similar way to birds feeding begging chicks). There is strong competition from other adult beetles for small carcasses suitable to be used as nurseries for a brood of developing larvae. When there are sneaky competitors present often it is not clear to parents whose biological offspring they are tending. This leads to some fascinating evolutionary conflicts of interest over how much energy each parent should invest in caring in order to maximize her or his relative reproductive success (i.e. fitness).

Burying beetles, like many other animals, alter their parental behavior in response to differences in the number or size or sex of competitors. By manipulating this ‘social environment’ it is possible test whether individual beetle parents respond in the way that mathematical theories predict they should.

Paul has two small children that he tries not to manipulate (too much).

Friday, March 4
Jessica Gall Myrick – Indiana University
Cat Videos
I am an assistant professor at the Indiana University Media School. I received my Ph.D. in Mass Communication and a certificate in Interdisciplinary Health Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013.

Prior to returning to graduate school, I worked in a variety of communications/journalism positions. I was a multi-platform broadcast journalist, a freelance magazine writer, a newspaper opinion columnist, and was the director of experiential education and recruitment for the IU School of Journalism.

In addition to currently working at IU, I am an alumna of the school. I hold a B.A. (Political Science, 2005) and a M.A. (Journalism, 2007) from Indiana University. While attending IU, I earned a Big Ten championship and three All-American honors as part of the cross country and track teams. Today, though, my running pace is much more leisurely.

When I’m not researching or teaching, I enjoy spending time with my husband, Scott, and pug dog, Biscuit. I’m currently learning to play the ukulele.