The Academic Minute for 2016.08.08-08.12

Academic Minute from 8.8 – 8.12

Monday, August 8th
Heather Reid – Morningside College
Commercialism of the Olympics
Heather Reid is a scholar of the philosophy of sport at Morningside College in Iowa https://www.morningside.edu/ and is the author of six books related to sports philosophy and the Olympics.

Reid, who was recently voted distinguished scholar by the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, is organizing a major academic conference exploring the philosophy of sport, to be held in September at the International Olympic Academy in Ancient Olympia, in Greece. There, she will deliver the Distinguished Scholar Lecture, which will later be published as an article in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. The title: “Why Olympia Matters for Modern Sport”. She was also recently invited to submit an article for a special issue of the journal Sport, Ethics, and Philosophy, which will focus on the concept of Athletic Heroes that compares modern “sports heroes” with ancient Greek heroes, like Heracles. Professor Reid earned her B.A. at the University of Virginia, and both her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Tuesday, August 9th
Marcus Crede – Iowa State University
Is Grit Overrated?
Marcus Crede is an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University. His research focuses on a variety of non-cognitive influences on performance in work and educational settings as well as methodological and measurement challenges encountered when measuring non-cognitive variables. He holds a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Wednesday, August 10th
Victoria Vieira-Potter – University of Missouri
Exercising Changes Gut Microbes
Victoria Vieira-Potter, PhD is an assistant professor of nutrition and exercise physiology in the College of Human Environmental Sciences at the University of Missouri. The main focus of Victoria Vieira-Potter’s research is understanding how behavioral (e.g., diet, exercise, environmental toxin exposure) and biological (aging, hormonal changes) factors influence metabolic function.

Specific areas of interest include:

• The relationship between white adipose tissue (WAT) inflammation and systemic metabolic function (e.g., insulin resistance and fatty liver)
• How diet and exercise affect body composition and WAT inflammation
• How estrogen loss and estrogen receptor signaling affect WAT metabolic function
• Sex differences in WAT metabolic function

Thursday, August 11th
Wayne Gray – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Extreme Experts
Professor Gray earned his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley in 1979. His first position was with the U. S. Army Research Institute where he worked on tactical team training (at the Monterey Field Unit) and later on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to training for air-defense systems (HAWK) (at ARI-HQ Alexandria, VA). He spent a post-doctoral year with Prof. John R. Anderson’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University before joining the AI Laboratory of NYNEX’ Science & Technology Division. At NYNEX he applied cognitive task analysis and cognitive modeling to the design and evaluation of interfaces for large, commercial telecommunications systems. His academic career began at Fordham University and then moved to George Mason University. He joined the Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2002.

Gray is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society (HFES), and the American Psychological Association (APA). In 2008, APA awarded him the Franklin V. Taylor Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Applied Experimental & Engineering Psychology. He is a past Chair of the Cognitive Science Society and the founding Chair of the Human Performance Modeling technical group of HFES. At present he is a Consulting Editor for the Psychological Review and the Executive Editor for the Cognitive Science Society’s first new journal in 30 years, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). In 2012, he was elected a Fellow by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and spent his sabbatical in research at the Max Planck Institute Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) in Berlin. Most recently, he received an IBM Faculty Award from IBM’s Cognitive Systems Institute.

Friday, August 12th
Amber Pearson – Michigan State University
Blue and Green Spaces Reduce Stress
I am a health geographer with a focus on social justice and understanding the unexpected tenacity, adaptability and resilience of the underprivileged. I have diverse regional interests from poor to wealthy countries. My work features strong geospatial and epidemiologic methods and critical development thinking.

My water research is at the intersection of spatial and social dimensions of health with a focus on water availability. My overall research goal is to understand the interactions between human-induced ecological change, political and social dimensions of access to water, and human agency/coping strategies to improve health and wellbeing while paying careful attention to health inequalities and environmental justice