The Academic Minute for 2018.12.10-12.14

Academic Minute from 12.10 – 12.14

Monday, December 10th
Mark West – University of North Carolina Charlotte
The Humanities and STEM Disciplines as Overlapping Circles
Mark I. West is a Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has taught since 1984.  In addition to performing administrative duties, he regularly teaches courses on children’s and young adult literature.  He has written or edited fifteen books, the most recent of which is Walt Disney, from Reader to Storyteller, which he co-edited with Kathy Merlock Jackson.  His articles have appeared in various national publications, such as the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Americana, and British Heritage, as well as many academic journals.  Before entering academia, he worked as an early childhood educator and professional puppeteer.

Tuesday, December 11th
Celene Reynolds – Yale University
Title IX
Celene Reynolds is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale with research interests in social change, law and organizations, and gender and sexualities. She studies why anti-discrimination are used and interpreted differently in organizations over time. Her dissertation and book manuscript focus on Title IX–the 1972 U.S. civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education–and examine why its implementation shifted from a focus on fostering gender equity in athletics to regulating sexual harassment, including assault, on college campuses. A related article won the American Sociological Association Sex and Gender Section Sally Hacker Graduate Student Paper Award. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. She has published in Social Problems, Organization, Qualitative Sociology, and Socius.

Wednesday, December 12th
Emily Bernate – St. Edwards University
Politeness in U.S. Spanish
Emily Bernate is an assistant professor of Spanish at St. Edwards University. Her research interests include sociolinguistics and pragmatics, particularly gender differences in language and politeness norms. She has taught second-language and heritage languages courses in Spanish at the University of Houston where she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. coursework. Currently, she teaches courses in Spanish linguistics with a focus on Spanish Heritage Learners and Spanish in the United States.

Thursday, December 13th
Douglas Fudge – Chapman University
Hagfish
Dr. Fudge’s research aims to understand the biophysics of marine animals, with a focus on processes such as predator defense, feeding, and locomotion. Current projects aim to understand predator-prey interactions between hagfishes and sharks, the function and biogenesis of hagfish slime, and the development of biomimetic applications inspired by hagfish slime.

Friday, December 14th
Ekin Attila-Gokcumen – University at Buffalo
Cellular Senescence
Ekin Atilla-Gokcumen is a chemical biologist who studies lipids, a class of organic molecules that includes fats, waxes and sterols like cholesterol.

Atilla-Gokcumen is among scientists whose work has shown that lipids play a more active role than previously thought in various cellular processes, potentially influencing human health and disease. Among other topics, her research has investigated how lipids are involved in cellular aging, cellular senescence (a process in which cells cease to divide) and cell death, also known as apoptosis and necroptosis.

Atilla-Gokcumen can also discuss scientific advances that are enabling scientists to do powerful research with “omics” approaches (such as lipidomics, transcriptomics and genomics). These methods facilitate the large-scale, collective characterization and analysis of biological molecules and genes in cells and organisms.