The Academic Minute from 10.28 – 11.01
Monday, October 28th
Bharath Ramkumar – SUNY Oneonta
Fast Fashion
Bharath Ramkumar is a professor of Human Ecology at SUNY Oneonta. He instructs on quality analysis of apparel products and retail management. His specialties include fashion merchandising, consumer behavior, e-commerce, and structural equation modeling. Dr. Ramkumar’s research has delved into the world of mindful production and consumption practices, technological proliferation in consumption and e-consumer behavior, and entrepreneurship and small business. He is a member of the International Textile and Apparel Association (ITAA) and holds a Ph.D. in consumer, apparel and retail studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a post-graduate diploma in marketing management and a bachelor’s degree in fashion and apparel design from Bangalore University, India.
Tuesday, October 29th
Mike Gunter – Rollins College
Climate Change and Travel
Dr. Mike Gunter is a Cornell Distinguished Faculty member and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow who teaches courses on environmental politics, sustainable development, and international security. He served as a Fulbright Scholar at Univerzita Komenského in the Slovak Republic and has led field studies to the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador as well as traveled with students in Australia, Singapore, and Vietnam. Gunter has over 40 popular and academic publications to his credit, including Building the Next Ark: How NGOs Work to Protect Biodiversity (2004/2006). His current project, Tales of an Ecotourist, makes a case for experiential learning as a route to better understand climate change. Gunter also serves as director of the interdisciplinary International Relations Program as well as an advisor to Rollins’ Washington Semester Program. He was Rollins’ first faculty-in-residence and directed its Living & Learning Communities, whose programs link academic and social aspects on campus.
Wednesday, October 30th
Shady Amin – NYU Abu Dhabi
Chemical Signaling
During his doctoral studies, Shady studied iron acquisition mechanisms in marine bacteria under the supervision of Dr. Carl Carrano. He showed that iron-binding ligands (a.k.a. siderophores) produced by algal-associated
bacteria provided algae with bioavailable iron
through photochemical reactions in exchange
for organic carbon. After his Ph.D., Shady continued his research on microbial interactions at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography under the supervision of Dr. Ginger Armbrust. His research identified a widespread mode of signaling between a group of phytoplankton and associated bacteria, whereby some bacteria produced a hormone that stimulated algal cell division, photosynthesis and carbon fixation. In 2015, Shady joined NYU Abu Dhabi as an Assistant Professor in the Chemistry Program and is now an Assistant Professor in Biology with affiliation in Chemistry.
Thursday, October 31st
Joanne Dickson – Edith Cowan University
Negatives Thoughts and the Ideal Self
Joanne Dickson (Associate Professor of Psychology) joined the Psychology Department in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in 2016. She was awarded her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2003. Since 2003, Joanne has held academic posts at the University of London (Birkbeck College) and the University of Liverpool (Russell Group Research University) before returning to Australia in 2016.
Friday, November 1st
Stephen Howe – Fukuoka University
Yes and No in England and America
Dr. Stephen Howe is an associate professor of English at Fukuoka University, Japan.
His research field is historical linguistics, which is the study of how and why languages change. He is interested in how we communicate “yes” and “no” and in the special words for “yes” and “no,” jearse and dow, in his home region of Eastern England and in New England.
Last year he was a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, a visiting academic at the University of Cape Town, and a Visiting Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney.
He is the author of The Personal Pronouns in the Germanic Languages and co-author of the PhraseBook for Writing Papers and Research in English.
To read more about his research, visit www.yesandno.info.
