The Academic Minute for 2021.07.12-2021.07.16

The Academic Minute from 07.12 – 07.16

Monday, July 12th
RonNell Anderson – University of Utah
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Characterizations of the Press
Professor RonNell Andersen Jones is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and the Teitelbaum Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Jones is a First Amendment scholar who teaches, researches and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between media and the courts. Her scholarship addresses issues of press access and transparency and the role of the press as a check on government. She is also a widely cited national expert on reporter’s privilege and newsgathering rights and a regular speaker on emerging areas of social media law and defamation and privacy issues as they affect the media. She is an adviser on the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Third Torts: Defamation and Privacy. Her scholarly work has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum.

Tuesday, July 13th
Timothy Frye – Columbia University
Weak Strongmen
Timothy Frye received a B.A. from Middlebury College in Russian language and literature, an M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.  His research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and political economy with a geographic focus on Eurasia, including, Russia, Central Asia, and Europe.  His most recent book Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia (Princeton University Press, 2021).

He co-directs the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID) at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and edits Post-Soviet Affairs and the former Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia.  He has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Bloomberg Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Wednesday, July 14th
Erin Baker – University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The Climate Value of Off-Shore Wind
Erin Baker is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs; and the Director of Faculty Diversity at the College of Engineering; and Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the Director of the Wind Energy Fellows, a follow-on from the NSF-funded IGERT: Offshore wind energy engineering, environmental impacts, and policy; and the Faculty Director of the Energy Transition Institute, which is focused on stakeholder-engaged research at the intersection of energy and technology. She has a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research from the department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, and a B.A. in Mathematics from U.C. Berkeley.

Thursday, July 15th
Garth Heutel – Georgia State University
Financial Regulation and Climate Change
Garth Heutel is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He studies energy and environmental policy, behavioral economics, public economics, and the economics of nonprofit organizations.  His research has been published in the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, The Economic Journal, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and elsewhere. He earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, and he was previously a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University.

Friday, July 16th
Phong Le – Goucher College
The Impact of the Pandemic on Traffic
Phong Le is an Associate Professor in the Center for Data, Mathematical and Computational Sciences at Goucher College. He also attended Goucher as an undergraduate, studying mathematics and minoring in music. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to returning to Goucher he was faculty at Niagara University in Niagara Falls, New York. There he co-advised the statistics program.  His professional interests range widely from algebraic number theory, cryptography, error-correcting codes, statistics and data science.