The Academic Minute from 7.15 – 7.19
Monday
Claire Cahen – Occidental College
Selling Student Futures
Claire Cahen (she/ her/ hers) is an urbanist, researcher and educator living and working in Los Angeles. She researches and writes about municipal austerity and public sector union renewalâhow workers are responding to decades of cuts to public services, how they are forming new labor-community alliances in the process, and the relationship between inequality and the privatization of public goods, especially public education. She holds a PhD in Environmental Psychology from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College.
Tuesday
Zachary Silver – Occidental College
Understanding Canine Perception of Human Behaviors
Assistant Professor of Psychology Zachary Silver has a B.A. in psychology and music from Illinois Wesleyan and a pair of masterâs degrees and a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale. As a researcher at the Canine Cognition Center at Yale, he studied how animals learn from and about humans. His research has been featured in both academic and mainstream media.
Wednesday
Natasha Sekhon – Occidental College
Unlocking Ancient Water Signals Locked in the Geologic Record
Dr. Natasha Sekhon has her training as a low-temperature geochemist and paleoclimatologist. She uses the geochemical signals preserved in speleothems (secondary cave deposits) and monitors modern cave systems to reconstruct periods of past climate change through the Quaternary and discern processes dictating modern cave systems. Dr. Sekhonâs research is multidisciplinary as she uses concepts from karst hydrology, speleothem sciences, climate dynamics and statistical modeling to investigate hydroclimate variability on seasonal to millennia time scales. She is interested in processes driving changes in global monsoon systems, El Nino Southern Oscillation, extreme hydroclimate conditions (floods and droughts) and periods of abrupt climate change. Dr. Sekhon earned her bachelorâs degree in Earth System Sciences from the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Sekhon received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, following which she was a postdoctoral scholar at Brown University. She started as an Assistant Professor in Geology at Occidental College in January 2024.
Thursday
Syeda ShahBono Ijaz – Occidental College
How Foreign Aid Changes Political Behavior
Syeda ShahBano Ijaz is a scholar of the political economy of development with a regional focus on South Asia. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship is situated at the cusp of international and comparative politics: she is most interested in the domestic consequences of foreign aid and its impact on the political behavior of aid recipients in the global south. In 2023, she received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Before joining UCSD, she completed an M.A. in Politics from New York University and an M.Sc. in Economics for Development from the University of Oxford as a Commonwealth Scholar. At Occidental College, she teaches courses on international development, globalization, foreign aid, and democratic processes in South Asia.
Friday
Raul Navarro – Occidental College
Organic Chemistry as Molecular Architecture
Raul Navarro was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. He obtained his bachelorâs degree in chemistry at Yale University, then traveled back to California to conduct his graduate studies at Caltech, where his research focused on the total synthesis of propellane alkaloid natural products. After obtaining his PhD, Raul made his way up north to Stanford University, where he investigated the development of chemical genetic tools to study protein function. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Occidental College, where his research group investigates the development of new transition-metal catalyzed reactions to construct bioactive molecules.
