The Academic Minute from 4.7 – 4.11
Monday
Rafaela Fontes – Virginia Tech University
Persistence with Abstinence from Substance Use
Rafaela Fontes is a research scientist in the Addiction Recovery Research Center at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. Her work focuses on decision-making processes in individuals with substance use disorders (SUD), using models of choice to inform more effective treatments. She also investigates factors influencing recovery, aiming to identify diverse pathways that lead to successful outcomes across different substances.
She and her colleagues from the institute drew from the International Quit & Recovery for their recent research on substance use cessation.
Tuesday
Praveen Arany – University at Buffalo
Light Treatments – Myths and Facts
Dr. Arany trained as a dentist, oral pathologist, and biomedical engineer. He served as an Assistant Clinical Investigator at NIDCR/NIH, Bethesda, from 2012 to 2015. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, NY. He has 6 patents, over 150 scientific publications with over 10000 citations, and an h-index of 40. His work has been featured in many mainstream media highlights in over 70 countries. He has received numerous awards recognizing his research contributions, including the Young Investigator National Institutes of Health and Wound Healing Society, Horrace Furomoto American Society for Lasers in Surgery and Medicine, and the Theodore Maiman Award from the Academy of Laser Dentistry. He has been invited to speak in various national and international forums, reviews for over 75 scientific journals, serves on nine journal editorial boards, including associate editor in four, and reviews grants for national and international funding agencies. He is the immediate past president of the World & North American Association for Photobiomodulation Therapy, Chair of the PBM group in SPIE and Optica (OSA), and Chair-elect of Lasers Biophotonics Group, International Association of Dental Research.
Wednesday
Tali Caspi – University of California, Davis
How Cities Shape What Animals Eat
Tali’s work on urban wildlife focuses on emerging patterns and underlying mechanisms of individual variation across the urban landscape to better understand the factors that allow animals to effectively respond to urbanization. She integrates animal behavior, organismal biology, and urban ecology to assess how the built environment shapes the ecology of urban carnivores. Her current research with the Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit explores the nutritional ecology of urban coyotes in San Francisco. As a science communicator, Tali aims to promote human-wildlife coexistence in urban areas.
Thursday
Brandon Vaidyanthan – Catholic University of America
Science is a Quest for Beauty
Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, and scientific institutions, and has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals. He is also Founder of Beauty at Work, a media platform which includes a podcast and YouTube channel.
Friday
Frank McAndrew – Knox College
Why Do Old People Hate New Music?
To the extent that there is a common theme tying my research together, it is that I study human social behavior from an evolutionary perspective. I am especially interested in understanding the psychology of everyday life. Why do we enjoy gossip about celebrities? Why do some people name their children after themselves while others do not? Why are mass shooters almost always young men? My book on Environmental Psychology has been translated into several languages and is recognized as a classic text in the history of that discipline.
I have also become something of a purveyor of psychological science to lay audiences. My blog at Psychology Today Magazine and other op-ed articles have attracted over 25 million readers, and one of my essays even appeared in the playbill of a play on London’s West End.
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