Monday
Jacob Sawyer – Alma College
Examining Myths About Grief and Bereavement
Jacob Sawyer is a counseling psychologist interested in factors related to mental health and well-being. His background and training as a clinician strongly inform his approach to his work as a faculty member. His career at Alma began in 2022.
Tuesday
Jovan Kamcev – University of Michigan
New Water Purification Technology
Jovan Kamcev develops technologies for affordable and sustainable water and energy, with a focus on membranes and sorbent materials for water treatment, energy storage, and energy generation. He earned his PhD in chemical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. After graduating, he was further trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkley. He grew up in New York City.
Wednesday
Susanna Calkins – Rosalind Franklin University
Scaling Inclusive Teaching
Susanna Calkins is the founding director of the Nexus for Faculty Success and an associate professor in the School of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago. Prior to joining RFUMS in fall 2022, Dr Calkins directed faculty initiatives at the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching at Northwestern University for almost 20 years, focusing on inclusive teaching, curricular and pedagogical innovation, assessment of student learning and program evaluation. She has co-authored two academic books (Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: The Reflective Professional (Sage, 2009) and Reflective Teaching (Bloomsbury, 2020, 2024), with a third Reflective Doctoral Education (Bloomsbury Press) in development. She was a co-PI on an NSF-IUSE grant that created the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project, an open-access course which has served over 11000 educators across the United States to date. She earned her PhD and MA in history (British history, women and gender studies) from Purdue and an MS in higher ed administration from Northwestern University.
Thursday
Karmel Choi – Harvard Medical School
Linking Genes to Depression
Karmel Choi is a Clinical Psychologist, Director of the Precision Prevention Program in the Center for Precision Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. Her group uses methods from data science, epidemiology, and statistical genetics to understand the development of depression across the life course and identify actionable strategies for prevention. She serves as the outreach representative for the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium’s Major Depressive Disorder Working Group, which seeks to discover how genetic factors contribute to depression.
Friday
Yunsuh Nike Wee – Oklahoma State University
Origins of Laws About Bodily Damage
Yunsuh (Nike) Wee is a Ph.D. student in experimental psychology working with Dr. Daniel Sznycer. Her research focuses on how the mind computes values and how evaluative systems interface with emotion systems. Her research draws on social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral ecology.
