The Academic Minute for 2020.11.30-2020.12.04

The Academic Minute from 11.30 – 12.04

Monday, November 30th
Nancy D. Campbell – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Naloxone
Professor Nancy Campbell is the Department Head in the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She is a historian of science, technology, and medicine who focuses on legal and illegal drugs, drug science, policy, and treatment, harm reduction, and gender and addiction. Her most recent book is OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020).

Campbell also studies the ethics of human subjects research; social movements; and the fruitful convergence between neuroscience and addiction research. She has published two books on gender: Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World with Elizabeth Ettorre (Palgrave, 2011) and her first book, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2000), which was about how drug-using women figured in drug policy discourse from the 1910s to the 1990s.

Tuesday, December 1st
Nishtha Langer – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Women in IT More Likely to Be Promoted than Men
Nishtha Langer is an assistant professor of business analytics at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She teaches graduate and undergraduate students on aligning firms’ information technology (IT) strategy and business strategies for sustained competitive advantage, exploring new markets, and enabling grounded management and economic principles through the use of IT and business analytics.

IT’s organizational and societal impact is multidisciplinary and wide-ranging. Professor Langer is deeply influenced by the interdisciplinary research ethic of Herb Simon in “following the problem” in analyzing the value of key IT investments and resources. Her research benefits from her rigorous academic training at Carnegie Mellon University, combined with over five years of IT experience in India and the U.S. Using theory and techniques from different disciplines such as economics, operations management, marketing, analytics, and organizational behavior, she is interested in empirically analyzing how firms can use their IT capital and IT human capital most effectively. More recently, her research examines the biases in IT labor markets and the societal and business value of social media platforms such as Twitter.

Wednesday, December 2nd
Timothy D. Golden – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Telecommuting
Timothy Golden’s research focuses on remote work, telework, telecommuting, and virtual interactions. He has conducted research in these areas for over 20 years, during which he has investigated a range of related topics, including performance, professional isolation, work-family conflict, the nature of job tasks, career success, exhaustion, coworker relationships, and knowledge sharing, to name a few. His research has appeared in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Academy of Management Perspectives, Human Relations, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Managerial Issues, Journal of Business and Psychology, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, and New Technology, Work and Employment, among others. Golden has received numerous distinctions for his research, including winning four Best Paper Awards. He has frequently been interviewed in the business press, appearing in hundreds of media outlets worldwide, some of which include The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNN, MS NBC, U.S. News & World Report, Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat, Reuters, The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Scientific American, and New York Times Magazine, among others.

Thursday, December 3rd
Kristin Bennett – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
COVIDMinder
Kristin P. Bennett is the Associate Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Application and a Professor in the Mathematical Sciences and Computer Science Departments and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on extracting information from data using novel predictive or descriptive mathematical models and data visualizations, and the applications of these methods to support decision making and to accelerate discovery in science, engineering, public health and business. She has 25 years of experience and over 100 publications in these areas.  As an active member of the machine learning, data mining, and operations research communities, she has served as present or past associate or guest editor for ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Naval Research Logistics, Machine Learning Journal, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, and Journal on Machine Learning Research. She served as program chair of the Eleventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

Friday, December 4th
Malik Magdon-Ismail – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Modeling Infection Rates for Pandemic Control
Dr. Magdon-Ismail has been a Professor of Computer Science since 2000. After degrees at Yale and Caltech, Dr. Magdon-Ismail was a research scholar at Caltech before joining Rensselaer as Assistant Professor of Computer Science. His interests are in decision making from data in complex systems, including machine learning, computational finance and social and communication networks. He enjoys poker, bridge, squash, tennis and badminton.