The Academic Minute from 03.07 – 03.11
Monday, March 7th
Mark Gibney – University of North Carolina Asheville
The Gap Between the Promise of Human Rights
Mark Gibney is the Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and an Affiliated Scholar at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Lund, Sweden. From 2014-2016 he served as the inaugural Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Faculty of Law, Lund University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute. Gibney is one of the founding members of the Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Consortium and he serves on the Board of Editors of Human Rights Quarterly, the Journal of Human Rights and the International Studies Journal (Iran). Since 1984, Gibney has directed the Political Terror Scale (PTS) (PoliticalTerrorScale.org), which measures levels of physical integrity violations in more than 190 states. His recent book publications include: The Routledge Handbook on Extraterritorial Obligations (2022); International Law: Our Common Future (2020); International Human Rights Law: Returning to Universal Principles (2015, 2d ed.); Litigating Transnational Human Rights Obligations: Alternative Judgments (2014); the Handbook of Human Rights (2014); and Watching Human Rights: The 101 Best Films (2013).
Tuesday, March 8th
Trey Adcock – University of North Carolina Asheville
Support for Indigenous Students Through Land Acknowledgments
Trey Adcock (ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, enrolled Cherokee Nation), PhD, is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Director of American Indian & Indigenous Studies at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He was named one of seven national Public Engagement Fellows in 2018-2019 by the Whiting Foundation for his work documenting a Bureau of Indian Affairs run day school in the TutiYi “Snowbird” Cherokee Community. He obtained his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Sequoyah Dissertation Fellow focusing on technology integration at an American Indian boarding school in Oklahoma. Dr. Adcock’s work has been published in the Journal of American Indian Education, Teaching Tolerance and Readings in Race, Ethnicity and Immigration. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Native Health and sits on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Cherokee Studies.
Wednesday, March 9th
Patrick Bahls – University of North Carolina Asheville
The Dollar-a-Lot Program
Patrick Bahls was born and raised in Helena, Montana. He stayed in the West for college, attending the University of Denver as an undergraduate before moving to the South to pursue his doctoral degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. After a completing a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois, Patrick joined the faculty in the Math Department at UNC Asheville and later took over as Director of the university’s Honors Program. Patrick’s academic interests vary widely, including not only pure mathematics but also composition and rhetoric and urban studies. Among his favorite classes to teach are Calculus II and the university’s senior capstone course, LA 478: Cultivating Global Citizenship.
Thursday, March 10th
Tiece Ruffin – University of North Carolina Asheville
Radical Enactment of Equity for Educational Justice
Tiece Ruffin received her Ph.D. from Ohio University in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Special Education and cognate in Reading Education. Also, she received a B.S.Ed. and M.Ed. from Ohio University in Special Education, with an emphasis in learning disabilities and intellectual disabilities; and Secondary education, with an emphasis in reading education, respectively. Tiece Ruffin has past teaching experiences as a licensed special educator (K-12) and reading educator (K-12) teaching youth with and without disabilities from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in both rural and urban contexts. Additionally, her teaching experience spans various educational settings such as the public school, correctional institution, and home/hospital. Lastly, her school administration experience was as a local education agency representative for a large urban public school district monitoring placement and educational services for students with disabilities who attended private schools.
Friday, March 11th
Leah Greden Mathews – University of North Carolina Asheville
Springsteen-omics: Understanding Economics Through the Songs of the Boss
Erica L. Woodahl, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Director of the Skaggs Institute for Health Innovation at the University of Montana. Erica Woodahl received a B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmaceutics at the University of Washington. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical pharmacokinetics at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Woodahl research focuses on precision medicine and pharmacogenomics to identify sources of interindividual variability in disease treatment and prevention (e.g. genes, environment, and lifestyle). Translation of pharmacogenomics into clinical practice requires genetic research with diverse patient populations to accurately predict drug response and toxicity for all people regardless of geographic location, ethnicity, or age. Towards this end, we focus on precision medicine and pharmacogenomics with rural, American Indian and Alaska Native, and pediatric populations.
