The Academic Minute for 2016.06.13-06.17

Academic Minute from 6.13 – 6.17

Monday, June 13
Don MacKenzie – University of Washington
Driverless Cars
Don MacKenzie joined the department as an Assistant Professor in 2013. His research focuses on the interactions of emerging transportation technologies and public policies, and their effects on energy consumption. He is currently working in three related areas: (1) modeling the charging decisions of electric vehicle drivers, and implications for electric grid loads and generation emissions, (2) assessing prospective energy efficiency and travel demand implications of vehicle automation, and (3) evaluating the effects of services such as car-sharing and online shopping on total travel demand.

Dr. MacKenzie previously did research and advocacy work on clean vehicles for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., and worked as a researcher on biofuel technologies at a startup in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a PhD in Engineering Systems and a Master’s in Technology & Policy, both from MIT. He also holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Chemical & Biological Engineering (Environmental Option) from the University of British Columbia.

Tuesday, June 14
John O’Meara – St. Michael’s College
Traces of the First Stars
My primary research focus is to attempt to better understand the universe through the study of absorption lines seen in the spectra of high redshift quasars (or QSOs).  When we pass the light from any astronomical object through a spectrograph, it is broken into its constituent colors, producing a value for the intensity of the light as a function of the wavelength of the light.  Spectroscopy is a powerful tool with which we can learn what types of atoms astronomical objects are made of, what their energies are, and how they are moving relative to us on Earth.  In the case of QSO spectroscopy, the spectrum we see contains information about both the QSO and any material which happens to also lie along the line of site.  In my research, it is the intervening material which interests me.

Wednesday, June 15
Christa Brunnschweiler – University of East Anglia
Economic Backwardness and Civil Unrest
Christa Brunnschweiler is a Senior Lecturer in Economics. She holds a PhD in Economics and an MA in Political Science from the University of Zurich.

Her research interests are in applied economics. She has mainly explored topics in economic growth and development, particularly in resource economics and conflict studies. Her work has been published in several journals including Science, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Oxford Economic Papers, and World Development. One of her articles on the natural resource curse won the 2009 biannual Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economics.

Thursday, June 16
Corinna Loeckenhoff – Cornell University
Self-Continuity
Dr. Loeckenhoff received her undergraduate degree from the University of Marburg, Germany and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the intramural research program of the National Institute on Aging before joining Cornell University in 2009. She was recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science in 2011 and received the Margret M. and Paul B. Baltes Foundation Award in Behavioral and Social Gerontology from the Gerontological Society of America in 2014. In 2013, her efforts in teaching gerontology were honored by a SUNY Chancellors Award for Teaching Excellence.

Friday, June 17
Berthold Hoeckner – University of Chicago
Wisdom, Meditation and Ballet Too
Berthold Hoeckner is a music historian specializing in 19th- and 20th-century music. Research interests include aesthetics, Adorno, music and literature, film music and visual culture, the psychology and neuroscience of music. Awards and fellowships include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1998), a Humboldt Research Fellowship (2001/2), a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2006/7), and a Faculty Fellowship at the Franke Institute of the Humanities (2012/13). He was Lead Researcher in a three-year research project on somatic wisdom at the Center of Social and Cognitive Neuroscience and is currently Principal Investigator in a new research project studying the relationship between wisdom and humility Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment, was published by Princeton University Press in 2002; Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music by Routledge in 2006. He has taught at Chicago since 1994.