The Academic Minute for 2024.04.15-2024.04.19

The Academic Minute from 4.15 – 4.19

Monday
Ken Gonzales-Day – Scripps College
Queer-ish
Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California and helped to ground anti-immigration and collective acts of violence within the larger discussion of racial formation, policing, and racial justice movements.

Tuesday
Myriam Chancy – Scripps College
Caribbean Women in Literature
Myriam J.A. Chancy, Ph.D. (Iowa) is a Guggenheim Fellow, and Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of the Humanities Chair at Scripps College. Chancy is the author of the award-winning book, What Storm, What Thunder (Harper Collins Canada/Tin House USA 2021), which was named a Best Book of Fall 2021 by Time, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, The Chicago Tribune, Vulture, Good Housekeeping, LitHuband Harper’s Bazaar and was awarded the American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. WS, WT was also shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Caliba Golden Poppy Award, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize & Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

Wednesday
Patrick Ferree – Scripps College
Unexpected Conflict in the Nucleus
Dr. Patrick Ferree is a professor in the W. M. Keck Science Department, which is affiliated with Scripps College and Pitzer College, both located in Claremont, CA. Dr. Ferree received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He did postdoctoral studies at Cornell University. His current research focuses on reproductive development and understanding mechanistically how selfish genetic elements cause disharmony within the genome, using insects as experimental model organisms.

Thursday
Stacey Wood – Scripps College
Our Approach to Fraud Needs to Change
Stacey Wood, Ph.D. is a clinical neuropsychologist and the Molly Mason Jones Professor of Psychology at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. She received a B.A. in Bio-Psychology from Middlebury College, and a Ph.D. in Clinical Neuropsychology from the University of Houston. Wood completed further post-doctoral training at UCLA. She now oversees the Neuropsychology of Decision-Making Lab at Scripps and has published extensively in the areas of aging, decision-making, and susceptibility to financial elder abuse. Wood also works as a consulting neuropsychologist on elder fraud cases related to older adults for Riverside and San Bernardino County for APS, and across the country.

Friday
Sarah Marzen – Scripps College
Testing Interventions to Polarization in Opinion Dynamics Models
Sarah Marzen started in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics but quickly went over to theoretical biophysics and has been researching that ever since. She started as an undergraduate in physics at Caltech, winning the Haren Lee Fisher Memorial Award and Axline Award, and moved to U.C. Berkeley to get her Ph.D. in physics as a National Graduate Research Fellow and U.C. Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellow, joining the Redwood Center in Theoretical Neuroscience to learn more about how neuroscientists view the brain and receiving the Ling-Lie Chua Excellence Award. She then moved to MIT as a Physics of Living Systems Fellow. As a faculty member, she has received awards for her research, including the Mary W. Johnson Faculty Achievement Award and the Scialog Molecular Basis of Cognition Fellowship. She also sits on the Executive Committee for the American Physical Society Division of Biological Sciences and edits their quarterly newsletter, in addition to Guest-Editing various Special Issues and co-organizing several workshops.