The Academic Minute for 2023.12.18-2023.12.22

The Academic Minute from 12.18 – 12.22

Monday
Bryan Acton – Binghamton University
Unveiling Blind Spots in Leadership Evaluations
Dr. Bryan Acton is an Assistant Professor at the Binghamton University School of Management and a Fellow of the Bernard M. & Ruth R. Bass Center for Leadership Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech and was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Durham University Business School (UK). He is primarily interested in studying how leadership emerges within collectives over time. He is also interested in refining the measurement techniques used to evaluate leadership, and leveraging advanced statistical methodologies to enhance our understanding of social systems.  His research on improving measurement has been in collaboration with a much larger team of leadership scholars and supported by grants from the US Army Research Institute.

Tuesday
Christian Miller – Wake Forest University
How Often Do You Lie?
Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was most recently the Director of the Honesty Project (honestyproject.philosophy.wfu.edu/), funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In recent years he was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project (www.moralbeacons.org), funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and the Director of the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 120 academic papers as well as Moral Psychology with Cambridge University Press (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics (Bloomsbury Press).

Wednesday
Claire Nolasco Braaten – Texas A&M University-San Antonio
Dental Radiographs and Unaccompanied Minors
Claire Nolasco Braaten is an associate professor of criminology at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. She obtained her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State University, her Master’s in International and Economic Business Law from Kyushu University in Japan, and both her Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and her J.D. in Law from the University of the Philippines College of Law, where she was a member of the Order of the Purple Feather, the law school’s honor society.

She has published in several peer-reviewed criminal justice journals, including Deviant Behavior, Law & Society, Journal of Refugee Studies, Journal of Criminal Justice, Crime Law and Social Change, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, and Security Journal as well as law reviews such as the American Journal of Criminal Law and Criminal Law Bulletin.

Thursday
Yi Cao – George Mason University
A.I. and Earnings Calls
Yi Cao is an assistant professor of accounting at the George Mason University School of Business. His research interests include corporate voluntary disclosure, product market competition, financial disclosure quality, and textual analysis. Yi has also held academic positions at the School of Management and Economics of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen as an assistant professor of accounting. He holds her Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Maryland, R.H. Smith School of Business. His work has been published in published in Contemporary Accounting Research. His work has also been featured in media outlets such as the Financial Times and Bloomberg.

Friday
Bob Brecha – University of Dayton
Electric Vehicles: Transporting the World Towards the Paris Agreement
Dr. Robert Brecha (Bob) received his PhD in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been a faculty member at the University of Dayton (Ohio, USA) since 1993. Currently he is Professor of Sustainability in the Hanley Sustainability Institute and Director of the Sustainability Program, with a joint appointment in the graduate Renewable and Clean Energy Program.  He has been affiliated with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, and since 2018 with the climate science and policy institute Climate Analytics. For his work he has received support as an international Fulbright Fellow and through a European Union Marie Curie Fellowship.  His recent research focuses on energy needs for sustainable development, working with developing countries on formulating strategies to meet Paris Agreement targets, integration of variable renewable energy into existing systems, and climate change mitigation strategies.