The Academic Minute for 2023.05.01-2023.05.05

The Academic Minute from 5.01 – 5.05

Monday
Carolyn Fornoff – Cornell University
Greening Mexican Cinema
Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin American studies at Cornell University. Her work examines how Mexican and Central American cultural production responds to environmental crisis. She is the co-editor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). Her monograph, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, is forthcoming with Vanderbilt University Press.

Tuesday
David Shoemaker – Cornell University
Why Psychopaths Have Bad Senses of Humor
David Shoemaker is a Professor and Interim Chair of the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University. His research focuses on humor and morality, agency and responsibility, and personal identity and ethics. He has published two monographs, over 60 peer-reviewed articles, and eight edited volumes. He is an associate editor of the journal Ethics, and was the co-founder and longstanding co-editor of the ethics blog PEA Soup.

Wednesday
Debanjan Chowdhury – Cornell Univeristy
Strange Metals and the Energy Crisis
Debanjan Chowdhury got his undergraduate education in Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and attended Harvard University for his graduate work in Theoretical Physics. After spending three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, supported by the Gordon & Betty Moore foundation, he started as an Assistant Professor at Cornell University in 2020. Chowdhury uses a variety of theoretical techniques to study and predict the quantum properties of trillions of interacting electrons in interesting materials, ranging from high-temperature superconductors to exotic magnets. His contributions have been recognized by a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and by a Sloan research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.

Thursday
Alex Townsend – Cornell University
Scientifically-Minded Artificial Intelligence
Alex Townsend is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the Mathematics Department. His research is in Applied Mathematics and most recently focuses on developing machines to learn partial differential equations from data. Before Cornell, he was an Applied Math instructor at MIT (2014-2016) and a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (2010-2014). He was awarded a SIAM Computational Science and Engineering best paper prize in 2023, a Simons Fellowship in 2022, an NSF CAREER in 2021, a SIGEST paper award in 2019, the SIAG/LA Early Career Prize in applicable linear algebra in 2018, and the Leslie Fox Prize in 2015.

Friday
Michele Belot – Cornell University
How Do We Get People to Reconsider Their Choices and Behaviors
Michèle Belot is Professor of Economics at Cornell University. Her recent research focuses on behavioral change in areas such as job search, dietary habits and political opinions. She has designed and tested interventions using randomized controlled trials, aimed at encouraging behavioral change.

She is the current President of the European Association of Labour Economists. She has published in journals such as the Review of Economic Studies, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Health Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and The Economic Journal.

She received her PhD in Economics from Tilburg University in 2003 and has held previous academic positions at the University of Essex, the University of Oxford. the University of Edinburgh and the European University Institute.