The Academic Minute from 2.20 – 2.24
Monday
Pankhuri Malhotra – University of Oklahoma
Finding Brand Alliances Among Seemingly Unlikely Partners
Dr. Pankhuri is a computational social scientist with an interest in graph-based methods for improving and scaling marketing research. Her current research applies combined methods from marketing, network and data science for mining user perception of brands using publicly available social media datasets. She is also working with influencer datasets on Twitter and Instagram to understand social activism and build network-based recommender systems. Recently she has started working on exploring the role of DEI initiatives in the influencer economy space.
Tuesday
Barbara Combs – Kennesaw State University
Anti-Black Racism Is Not Better Than it Used to Be. It Just Takes Different Forms.
Barbara Harris Combs, J.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University. Combs is a humanist and interdisciplinary scholar who received her Ph.D. in Sociology with a concentration in race and urban studies from Georgia State University in 2010. She also holds a Juris Doctorate degree from The Ohio State University and an MA in English from Xavier University (Ohio). She brings this interdisciplinary background to her study of society. Dr. Combs is the author of From Selma to Montgomery: The Long March to Freedom (Routledge, 2013). Her current book project, Bodies Out of Place Theorizing Anti Blackness is U.S. Society (University of Georgia Press) was released in 2022. A third book project, Black Places and Spaces of Political Empowerment, with co-authors Todd C. Shaw and Kirk Foster is under contract with Oxford University Press. She loves people and books, and she is committed to racial/social equity.
Wednesday
Nir Eisikovits – UMass Boston
A.I. and Everyday Life
Nir Eisikovits is professor of philosophy and founding director of the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston. Professor Eisikovits’ research focuses on the moral and political dilemmas arising after war, the culture of war and the ethics of technology.
Thursday
Beth Livingston – University of Iowa
Move On From Leaning In
Beth A. Livingston is the Ralph L. Sheets Associate Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and the faculty director of the Dore-Tippie Women’s Leadership program. Sher earned her MBA from the University of Kentucky and Ph.D. from the University of Florida. She studies human resources, gender and diversity, and the management of work and family in the interest of family well-being. Her research has been highlighted in the New York Times, NPR, and the Harvard Business Review, and she has been published in multiple top academic journals. Livingston has also done executive education, speaking engagements, and consulting for companies and non-profits such as Accenture, Deere & Co., Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, Allsteel, and Hollaback!
Tina Opie is an Associate Professor in the Management Division at Babson College. After a career as a banker and management consultant, she earned her Ph.D. from New York University’s Stern School of Business and also earned her MBA from the Darden School of Business. Her research focuses primarily on how organizations can create workplaces that successfully leverage individual difference and convey respect for individual contributions. She also studies whether discrimination against overweight people can be reduced by abandoning a focus on appearance and adopting a focus on health.
Friday
Keith Diaz – Columbia University
How to Counteract the Health Harms of Sitting
Keith Diaz is a certified exercise physiologist and an Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. His research focuses on elucidating the role of prolonged sedentary behavior in the development of chronic disease, with a specific focus of developing feasible, sustainable, and cost-effective guidelines for reducing prolonged sitting.
