The Academic Minute for 2017.3.13-3.17

Academic Minute from 3.13 – 3.17

Monday, March 13th
Jennifer Mueller – University of San Diego
Leadership Resisting Creativity
My research examines the biases people have against creative ideas and creative people. I wrote a paper, “The Bias Against Creativity” that went viral and was downloaded more than 65,000 times. Before joining the faculty at the University of San Diego School of Business, I taught for seven years at the Wharton School. I live in the Solana Beach neighborhood of San Diego and enjoy mountain biking, backpacking, and fussing over my dachshund, Sammy.

Tuesday, March 14th
Kishwar Rizvi – Yale University
Iran and Global Exchange in the Early Modern Period
Kishwar Rizvi is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University. She is currently writing a book on cultural production during the reign of Shah Abbas and global early modernity. Among the achievements in the Shah were the establishment of a cosmopolitan new capital city, Isfahan, and global exchange centered on Safavid Iran. Elites patronized new architecture and commissioned beautiful works of literature and painting.  Together, these productions serve as representation of Shah Abbas and provide insights into his role in world history.

Professor Rizvi has written on representations of religious and imperial authority in Safavid Iran, as well as on issues of gender, nationalism and religious identity in the modern Middle East and South Asia. She is the author of The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which won the 2017 Charle Rufus Morey Distinguished Book Award from the College Art Association. Her earlier publications include The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: History, religion and architecture in early modern Iran (I. B. Tauris, 2011) and the anthology, Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and politics in the twentieth century (University of Washington Press, 2008).

Wednesday, March 15th
Yanmei Zheng – University of Florida
Free Will
Yanmei Zheng earned her Ph.D. in Marketing at the University of Florida. Her major research interests are intrinsic motivation and agency, with a focus on their implications for consumer choice and consumer welfare. Her research projects examine how to sustain consumer engagement, and how consumers conceptualize agency, culpability, and merit.  Her work has been published at the Journal of Marketing Research. Her other research interests include consumer decision making, context effects, and the role of knowledge in consumption-related domains.

Thursday, March 16th
Dorothy Dunlop – Northwestern University
Older Adults, Exercise and Arthritis 
Dr. Dunlop is a health services researcher with expertise in statistical methodology. Her applied research interests include the investigation of physical activity to prevent disability in older adults and to understand the consequences of arthritis and other musculoskeletal disorders. She co-authored a book on statistical methodology; she has published and applied statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data. Dr. Dunlop is the principle investigator on an NIH-funded epidemiologic study on the relationship of physical activity to reduce disability and an NIH-funded study to evaluate the cost effectiveness of a physical activity intervention. She has served on data safety monitoring boards, on executive committees of federally funded clinical trials, and on the editorial boards of medical journals.

Friday, March 17th
Brian Blais – Bryant University
Zombies, Influenza and other diseases
Dr. Brian Blais received his Bachelor’s in Physics at Wesleyan University and his PhD in Physics at Brown University studying mathematical models of the brain under his long-time mentor and collaborator Nobel Laureate Dr. Leon Cooper.  He has worked at Bryant University, in Rhode Island, for the past 17 years studying topics in computational neuroscience, statistical inference, and dynamical systems.  In addition he has worked to use popular culture to help motivate and inspire learning, demonstrating his passion for bringing technical scientific topics to everyone.