The Academic Minute for 2018.11.05-11.09

Academic Minute from 11.05 – 11.09

Monday, November 5th
Nathan Grawe
The Great Recession and Higher Education
Nathan is a labor economist with particular interests in how family background–from family income to number of siblings–shapes educational and employment outcomes.  Many of his works study whether access to financial resources significantly limit these important measures of success.  Nathan’s most recent publication, Demographics and The Demand for Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) examines how recent demographic shifts are likely to affect demand for higher education and explores how colleges and policymakers may respond to meet institutional and national goals.  His current work studies how the taxes implicit in financial aid formulas alter female labor force participation.

Tuesday, November 6th
Jeffrey Snyder
Bias Incidents on Campus
Professor Snyder is a historian of education who studies the modern United States. His work explores the intersections between the history of education and broader trends in U.S. cultural and intellectual history, examining questions about race, national identity and the purpose of public education in a diverse, democratic society.

He is the author of the book Making Black History: Race, Culture and the Color Line in the Age of Jim Crow. His scholarship has appeared in academic journals such as History of Education Quarterly, Schools and Teachers College Record. He also writes frequently on educational policy, campus politics and academic freedom in newspapers and magazines such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Republic.

Snyder holds a Ph.D. from New York University, an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. from Carleton College.

Wednesday, November 7th
Rika Anderson
Hydrothermal Vents
Rika Anderson ’06 is an environmental microbiologist interested in how microbes and their viruses evolve, adapt, and diversify. She is currently using bioinformatics approaches to investigate how marine microorganisms evolve in response to the extreme environment of deep-sea hydrotherapy vents. She is particularly interested in understanding what this can teach us about the origin and early evolution of life on our planet. She teaches Genomics and Bioinformatics and part of Introductory Biology.

Thursday, November 8th
Liz Raleigh
Transracial Adoption
Liz Raleigh, assistant professor of sociology (University of Pennsylvania, PhD) is a sociologist of race and the family. Her research focuses on how the supply and demand for babies shapes the pipeline and market for children available for adoption. As a mixed methods scholar, Raleigh conducts quantitative research using nationally representative data sets but also enjoys collecting people’s stories and analyzing qualitative interviews. She teaches as array of courses on the changing conception of family, racial categorization, acculturation amongst Asian immigrants, adoption and assisted reproductive technologies, and social statistics.

Friday, November 9th
Julia Strand
Presence and Timing of Speech
Julia Strand is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carleton College.  She holds a B.A. in Psychology & English from Tufts University, an M.A. and PhD. from Washington University in St. Louis, program Brain, Behavior, & Cognition, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience and Neuroengineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

She teaches courses including Introduction to Psychology, the Psychology of Spoken Words, Sensation & Perception, and Perceptual & Cognitive Expertise. Her research focuses on how humans are able to turn sensory information about speech into meaningful representations. Topics of research include how cognitive abilities influence language perception, what traits of words promote easy recognition, how word recognition abilities change with age, and how visual information (seeing the talker) influences language processing.