The Academic Minute for 2018.12.31-01.04

Academic Minute from 12.31- 01.04

Monday, December 31st
Naja Ferjan Ramirez – University of Washington
Building Bilingual Brains
Naja Ferjan Ramirez, Ph. D., is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) at the University of Washington. Naja earned her Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. Her research broadly focuses on understanding language acquisition in populations from various linguistic backgrounds. Naja conducts brain (magnetoencephalography) and intervention studies with babies who are simultaneously acquiring two languages. She is also a mother of two young children who are learning three languages (Slovene, Spanish, and English).

Tuesday, January 1st
Bodil Just Christensen – University of Copenhagen
Eating as a Tool to Avoid Regaining Weight
Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

Wednesday, January 2nd
Krista Ingram – Colgate University
Decision Making of Early Birds and Night Owls
Research interests include social behavior, chronobiology, human behavior, molecular ecology, tropical conservation genetics, and comparative sociogenomics.

Teaching interests include animal behavior, evolutionary biology, molecular ecology and the evolution of social behavior.

Thursday, January 3rd
Sebastian Deffner – University of Maryland Baltimore County
Quantum Supremacy
I was previously a Research Associate in the group of Christopher Jarzynski at the University of Maryland, College Park (2011-2014), and a Director’s Funded Postdoctoral Fellow with Wojciech H. Zurek at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (2014-2016). Since Fall 2016 I have been on the faculty of the Department of Physics at UMBC.

Friday, January 4th
Jennifer LeMesurier – Colgate University
Knitting as Protest
Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University, received her PhD in English with a specialization in Language and Rhetoric from the University of Washington. Her areas of expertise include rhetorical theory, composition pedagogy, and performance studies. Her main research focuses on how embodiment and movement practices influence the creation and reception of rhetoric, and she is currently exploring how this intersects with innovations in translingual practices. Her work can be found in such publications as College Composition and Communication, POROI, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.