The Academic Minute for 2024.06.10-2024.06.14

The Academic Minute from 6.10 – 6.14

Monday
Bruce Johnson – Centre College
Benefits of Public Goods Do Not Justify Stadium Subsidies

Bruce K. Johnson is the James Graham Brown Professor of Economics at Centre College, where he has taught since 1987. He became interested in sports economics when he developed a baseball salary model as a teaching example for his econometrics class. It led eventually to a chapter in a Brookings Institution volume on the economics of baseball in 1992.

To answer the question of whether sports public goods could justify large stadium subsidies, Johnson teamed up with Centre alumnus and environmental economist John Whitehead to adapt the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) survey technique to sports public goods. Their analyses of a new basketball arena and a minor league baseball stadium in Lexington, Kentucky demonstrated the feasibility of CVM in sports. They teamed up with Peter Groothuis and Michael Mondello, respectively, for the Pittsburgh and Jacksonville studies.

Tuesday
Amit Kumar – University of Texas at Austin
Conceal Less, Reveal More
Amit Kumar is currently an Asst. Professor of Marketing and Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the McCombs faculty, he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Cornell University and his A.B. in Psychology and Economics from Harvard University. Professor Kumar’s research focuses on the scientific study of happiness and has been featured in popular media outlets such as The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Business Insider, CNBC, CNN, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Hidden Brain, The Huffington Post, National Geographic, The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Scientific American, Time Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. His scholarly work has been published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Current Opinion in Psychology, Emotion, The Journal of Consumer Psychology, The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Psychological Science.

Wednesday
Gerald LeTendre – Penn State University
Will We See Robots in Our Child’s Classroom?
Gerald LeTendre is the Harry Lawrence Batschelet II Chair of Educational Administration at The Pennsylvania State University.  He was editor of The American Journal of Education, and served for eight years as head of the Education Policy Studies Department at Penn State. His current research focuses on how disruptive technologies affect teacher work roles and professionalization. This includes looking at attitudes towards robots in the classroom; how online education and disruptive technologies are shaping the professional status of teachers around the world; and how international and cultural differences can be effectively integrated into online teaching environments.

Thursday
Ediz Ozelkan – University of Colorado-Boulder
Music Artists Hurt by TikTok Licensing Snafu
I graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2023 with my PhD in media research and practice. I am currently a lecturer in the media studies department. My dissertation asks if music streaming services helped or hurt economic opportunities for music professionals, using a political economic lens and quantitative methods to measure the impact of technology on opportunity in media. This project is being reworked into a book-length manuscript. I also have an M.A. in American Studies from Columbia University and a B.S. in sociology from SUNY Old Westbury. My research has ranged from cultural sociology; hip hop and music studies; political economy; media and labor economics; and pedagogy.

Friday
Tracy Hookway – Binghamton University
Cell Research Could Help Us Better Understand How Our Hearts Beat
The focus of our lab is to develop predictive engineered in vitro models of human cardiovascular tissues to interrogate the mechanisms that drive morphogenic developmental processes. To achieve this we use multi-scale, three-dimensional cultures of stem cells and their differentiated progeny to recapitulate tissue development, tissue homeostasis, and pathophysiological states. We focus on understanding the bi-directional interactions between cells and their local environment.