The Academic Minute for 2022.12.12-2022.12.16

The Academic Minute from 12.12 – 12.16

Monday, December 12th
Scott Landes – Syracuse University
The COVID-19 Burden Has Been Greater Among People With Intellectual and Developmental Disability
Scott Landes is an associate professor of sociology and O’Hanley Faculty Scholar at Syracuse University. Informed by his interest in medical sociology, aging and the life course, and disability theory, the majority of his research focuses on health and mortality trends across the life course for those with intellectual and developmental disability, and for veterans. Together with Dr. Margaret Turk from Upstate Medical University, he had spent the past 2 years focused on COVID-19 outcomes among people with intellectual and developmental disability.

Tuesday, December 13th
Chris Impey – University of Arizona
Super-Earths and the Search for Life Beyond Earth
Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has over 230 refereed publications on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in NASA and NSF grants. He has won eleven teaching awards and has taught three online classes with over 350,000 enrolled and 6 million minutes of video lectures watched. Chris Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society, and he has won its career Education Prize. He’s also been NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Carnegie Council’s Arizona Professor of the Year, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He has written 90 popular articles on cosmology, astrobiology and education, two textbooks, a novel called Shadow World, and nine popular science books: The Living Cosmos, How It Ends, Talking About Life, How It Began, Dreams of Other Worlds, Humble Before the Void, Beyond: The Future of Space Travel, Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes, and an upcoming book on exoplanets, Worlds Without End.

Wednesday, December 14th
Alex Moran – University of Oxford
In Praise of Mischief
Dr Alex Moran is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, who will shortly be taking up a post as an IRC post-doctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin. His primary research interests are metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and meta-ethics. When not writing philosophy, he also produces essays, poetry, and both longer and shorter fiction.

Thursday, December 15th
Maurice Huguenin – University of New South Wales
Southern Ocean Takes on the Heat of Climate Change
Maurice Huguenin is a doctoral candidate at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. He holds a Master’s degree in Atmospheric and Climate Science and a Bachelor’s degree in Earth Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). In between his Master’s and the start of his PhD, he worked at MeteoSwiss and investigated changes in the atmospheric circulation over Central Europe. In his doctoral research, he uses supercomputer models and observations to investigate the drivers of recent ocean warming from the local to the global and from the annual to the multidecadal scale.

Friday, December 16th
Tuan Nguyen – Kansas State University
Understanding the Issue of Teacher Vacancy
Tuan D. Nguyen is an assistant professor of education at Kansas State University. His main research interests teacher labor markets, education policy, and school improvement. He applies rigorous quantitative methods to examine the effects and unintended consequences of education policies, the barriers to persistence, and the effectiveness of policies designed to combat attrition, particularly for an equitable society.