Speaker Bios - Research Weeks - Virginia Commonwealth University

Kevin Allison

Dr. Allison’s research interests broadly focus on the role of culture and context in adolescent development, the role of community assets that support healthy developmental trajectories for urban youth and adults, and the professional development of diverse students and leaders in institutions of higher education. Current work is building on social capital theory which proposes explicit and tangible value in the social connections between members of a group. Where possible, the research is building on participatory research strategies, where researchers bring their expertise in conducting studies, but collaborate with members of the community to ‘co-create’ knowledge.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm

Charlene Crawley

Charlene Crawley, Ph.D., is the director of the Interdisciplinary Science Program and an associate professor in the VCU Department of Chemistry. She is currently an associate professor of chemistry where she has served on about 20 graduate thesis committees, published ten peer-reviewed research articles, given more than 30 technical and professional presentations in her field, and garnered more than $800K in direct or supportive grant funding. She has served as a mentor, educator and advocate during her participation in diversity-focused bridge and outreach activities at VCU including a similar capacity, she also developed and served as the director of the Emerging Scholars Program (ESP) in chemistry at VCU. This program was designed to support the education and retention of diverse student populations taking introductory math and science courses.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm

Gary Cuddeback

Dr. Cuddeback, Ph.D. is an associate dean for research and the interim associate dean for faculty affairs at VCU’s School of Social Work. He has been involved in projects focused on individuals with severe mental illnesses, especially those individuals who are involved with criminal justice system, and has published papers about the physical health needs of justice-involved individuals with severe mental illnesses; the prevalence of individuals with mental illnesses in prison; the role of Medicaid on mental health service use and recidivism after jail release; the characteristics of individuals with mental illnesses who are incarcerated in jails versus prisons; and adaptations of evidence-based practices for justice-involved individuals with severe mental illnesses.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm

Christine Cynn

Chris Cynn is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her interdisciplinary research draws from feminist, queer of color, and cultural studies to explore literary and visual productions of illness, health, memory, and archives. She is the author of Prevention: Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d'Ivoire, as well as a number of articles in journals such as Camera Obscura, Journal of Asian American Studies, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Transformations. She has co-edited a collection of essays on literary and visual representations of HIV/AIDS. In addition, she has worked as a full-time community organizer and is the co-producer of a documentary on a human rights trial in Haiti, and the co-producer and director of a number of short videos.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm

Bathsheba Demuth

Bathsheba Demuth is writer and environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern places and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she trained huskies for several years. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, and ecologies intersect. In addition to her prize-winning book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is currently the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.

Do Whales Judge Us? Interspecies History & Ethics
Monday, May 1, 2023 | 4-5:30 pm

Rayvon Fouché

Rayvon Fouché is the director of NSF's Social and Economic Sciences Division. His work explores the multiple intersections between cultural representation, racial identification, and technological design. Dr. Fouché research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Illinois Informatics Institute, Illinois Program for the Research in Humanities, University of Illinois' Center for Advanced Study, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Dr. Fouché holds a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University.

Public Humanities and Social and Economic Sciences in Research
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 12-1:30 pm

Matthew Gibson

Matthew Gibson is Executive Director of Virginia Humanities, where he created and helped endow Encyclopedia Virginia, a free and reliable multimedia resource that tells the inclusive story of Virginia for students, teachers, and communities who seek to understand how the past informs the present and the future. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 2005. His dissertation focused on the production of White vigilante narratives in popular American fiction from the novels of Thomas Dixon to the 2004 creation of the Minuteman Project along the Southwest border of the United States.

Public Humanities and Social and Economic Sciences in Research
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 12-1:30 pm

Jesse Goldstein

Jesse Goldstein, Ph.D., is associate director of the Humanities Research Center and associate professor in the VCU Department of Sociology. His new book, "Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism" (MIT Press) offers a critical assessment of entrepreneurial approaches to addressing environmental problems with new technologies. A new research project looks at student entrepreneurship in the university setting. He teaches courses on environmental sociology and political economy, and is involved in a range of artistic and activist projects.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm

Sylvester Johnson

Sylvester A. Johnson, the founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities, is a nationally recognized humanities scholar specializing in the study of technology, race, religion, and national security. He is also associate vice provost for public interest technology at Virginia Tech and executive director of the university’s Tech for Humanity initiative. His award-winning scholarship is advancing new approaches to understanding the human condition and social institutions of power in an age of intelligent machines and other forms of technology innovation.

Leading the Ethical Governance of Innovation
Wednesday, April 12, 2023 | 4-6 pm

Gina Longo

Gina Marie Longo, Ph.D., received her doctorate from the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research agenda contributes to knowledge about digital spaces, intersectional identities, citizenship, nationalism and inequality with implications for the sociologies of migration, gender, race and politics. She recently completed her postdoctoral research position on the Access to Justice Project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Law School, which explores the challenges to self-representation that low-income, non-custodial parents experience throughout child support court. Her current project employs mixed methods to investigate how U.S. citizens negotiate immigration officials’ demands that they prove their marriages are authentic.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm

Maike Philipsen

Dr. Philipsen serves the School of Education as professor in the Department of Foundations. She is also Co-PI of an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant geared at increasing faculty diversity at VCU, and a certified coach in the Immunity to Change methodology. Her research interests span the social foundations of education, including issues of social justice and equality in education, specifically the roles of race, gender, and social class in shaping schools and institutions of higher learning. Her publications focus on equal opportunities at both the K-12 and college/university levels, employing primarily a sociological perspective and qualitative methodologies.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm

Costa Samaras

Dr. Constantine (Costa) Samaras serves in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as the Principal Assistant Director for Energy and OSTP Chief Advisor for Energy Policy. In this role, he works with the OSTP Director, Deputy Director for Energy, and senior governmental leaders in coordinating Federal activities on U.S. energy policy, assessing suitability of energy technologies for meeting U.S. climate, resilience, equity, and security objectives, and aligning U.S. energy innovation systems with the scale of the climate challenge.

Symposium on Sustainable Energy and Environment
Thursday, April 27, 2023 | 9 am

Terry Sejnowski

Dr. Sejnowski is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor and director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at The Salk Institute. He is a pioneer of neurobiology, using both experimental and computer modeling techniques to study the connections between brain cells and the way neurons work together in large networks.

ChatGPT and the Talking Dog
Monday, April 10, 2023 | 2-4 pm

Cristina Stanciu

Cristina Stanciu, Ph.D., is director of the Humanities Research Center and associate professor in the VCU Department of English, where she has been a faculty member since 2011. Stanciu is a scholar of multiethnic and Indigenous cultures in the United States, who works at the intersection of several fields in American studies: Native American and Indigenous studies, visual culture, and immigration and citizenship studies. Stanciu is committed to supporting and promoting faculty scholarship and intellectual community in the College of Humanities and Sciences, as well as broadening the rich connections between humanistic research at VCU and the student body and Richmond communities.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Moving Science Forward (Panel Session)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | 2-3:30 pm