The Academic Minute from 08.29 – 09.02
Monday, August 29th
Catherine Bondonno – Edith Cowan University
Leafy Greens and Heart Disease
Dr Catherine Bondonno is a research fellow in the Institute for Nutrition Research at Edith Cowan University. The overall aim of her research is to identify strategies that will form part of a dietary pattern approach to achieve and maintain cardiovascular and cognitive health. To date, her research has focused on the cardiovascular and cognitive benefits of dietary nitrate (from vegetables) and flavonoids (from fruit).
Tuesday, August 30th
Vikash Gayah – Penn State University
Improve Traffic Flow in Cities by Banning Left Turns
Dr. Vikash V. Gayah is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Central Florida (2005 and 2006, respectively) and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley (2012). Dr. Gayah’s research focuses on urban mobility, traffic operations, traffic flow theory, traffic safety and public transportation. His research approach includes a combination of analytical models, micro-simulations and empirical analysis of transportation data.
Wednesday, August 31st
Ryan Romine – Shenandoah University
A Radical Investment in Learning through Collaborative Exploration in the Arts
Bassoonist, educator, and administrator Ryan D. Romine is Assistant Dean for Recruitment at Shenandoah Conservatory (Winchester, VA, USA), where in the past three years he has overseen the recruitment of three of the largest incoming classes in the Conservatory’s history. He is also a co-creator of Shenandoah Conservatory’s groundbreaking collaborative learning venture, ShenCoLAB. As a bassoonist, he has dedicated himself to a career of presenting classic, rediscovered, and new works to audiences worldwide. His debut solo album of French contest pieces, Première, was hailed as “an absolutely brilliant CD . . . bringing back from oblivion some truly beautiful music, played with precision and lyricism,” and his rediscovery of Jacques Ibert’s Morceau de lecture for bassoon and piano in 2018 made international news.
Thursday, September 1st
Amy Lueck – Santa Clara University
English Professors Study More Than Books
Amy J. Lueck is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University, where her research and teaching focus on histories of rhetorical instruction and practice, women’s rhetorics, feminist historiography, and digital public memory. Her book, A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856-1886 (SIU Press 2020), brings together several of these research threads, interrogating the ostensible high school-college divide and the role it has played in shaping writing instruction in the U.S. Her more recent research attends increasingly to the rhetorics and politics of space, including virtual space, in history and remembrance.
Friday September 2nd
Caitlin Clark – Colorado State University
Chocolate Flavor Through Fermentation
Caitlin is a Ph.D student and chocolate researcher at Colorado State University. Her research in the Food Science program focuses on cacao fermentation and post-harvest processing techniques.
After earning a B.A. in Linguistics and Classical Languages at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2005), Caitlin lived in Madrid, Spain, working at the Spanish Department of Defense and other government agencies. She was drawn to fermented foods during her time in Spain, where she was exposed to traditional, time-honored practices of food preservation.
