TOWN & GOWN TALKS: 2021-2022
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Swanthea Monroe - May 10, 2022Rev. Dr. Swanthea Monroe is the senior pastor at the People’s Church here in East Lansing and is the first woman to ever fulfill the role. A South-Dakota native, she has been working in ordained ministry for over 20 years. Dr. Monroe has also taught courses on theology, preaching, and contemporary culture as part of the American Academy of Religion.
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Maria Lapinski - April 19, 2022Professor Maria Lapinski (Department of Communication) is Director of the Michigan State University (MSU) Health and Risk Communication Center. A global expert on how to improve health and wellbeing by means of designing persuasive messaging. She has carried out projects in Asia, the Pacific Rim, Central America, and Africa and North America on topics as varied as reducing the transmission of HIV, improving perceptions of risks of shark attacks among divers, promoting conservation practices in Tibet, and lessening the risks of people contracting wild animal diseases.
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David Rayl - April 12, 2022Professor David Rayl, DMA, is a professor of music, director of choral programs and senior associate dean for graduate and research at the MSU College of Music. A passionate and active instructor, he has personally advised over 100 doctoral and master’s students in choral conducting. As a conductor, Dr. Rayl has led performances both across the US and around the world, including the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and the Maggio Musicale in Florence.
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Stephen Schiestel - March 29, 2022Professor Stephen Schiestel, CFA holds the Addy Professorship of Practice in Finance at the MSU Broad School of Business. A passionate educator and financial advisor, he is dedicated to improving personal financial education and financial decision making. A full-time teacher of finance at MSU, Stephen is also an owner of Grand Capital Advisors
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Michael Boivin - March 15, 2022Professor Michael Boivin (Departments of Psychiatry, Neurology and Ophthalmology), has devoted his career to improving the wellbeing of children in Benin, Malawi and Uganda affected by such diseases as HIV, cerebral malaria, and maternal anemia. In recent years, Dr. Boivin has carried out important work in showing how simple interventions can improve the social skills, mental health, language, and cognitive ability of children whose parents have HIV-AIDS or have died from the disease. He is also exploring the neurocognitive effects of cerebral malaria.
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NORMAN GRAHAM - FEBURARY 15, 2022 Dr. Norman A. Graham is professor of International Relations at MSU's James Madison College of Public Affairs. He also serves as the director of the Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University. Prof. Graham's interests include international security and economic relations, international organization, Central and Southeastern Europe, and Central and South Asia. He has taught at Columbia University and led the Yale University Summer Seminar on International Business. He has also served as a Research Associate with the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the Futures Group. The author of many books, Dr. Graham recently published (with Folke Lindahl and Timur Kocaoglu), Making Russia and Turkey Great Again? Putin and Erdogan in Search of Lost Empires and Autocratic Power.
This talk is in collaboration with the 'Great Decision' Program |
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Dr. Artemis Spyrou - February 8, 2022Dr. Artemis Spyrou (National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory) is a nuclear physicist who studies the ‘structure of exotic nuclei and how they react with each other.’ The lab that Dr. Spyrou runs seeks to answer the important question: ‘How are the elements formed in the Universe? ’
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KELLY SALCHOW MACARTHUR - Feburary 1, 2022Dr. Kelly Salchow Macarthur (Department of Art, Art History, and Design). A highly accomplished graphic designer, Kelly is also a retired two-time rowing Olympian who was selected to be ‘Artist-in-Residence’ for the recent Tokyo Olympic Games. She will be talking about her remarkable and varied career.
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Nigel Paneth - JANUARY 25, 2022Dr. Nigel Paneth is Emeritus University Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Pediatrics. He has devoted many years to improving our understanding of the causes and prevention of childhood neurodevelopmental disorders. Most recently, with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Paneth has researched the efficacy of antibody-rich convalescent plasma in treating serious COVID-19 infections.
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Alan Arbogast - January 18, 2022Dr. Alan Arbogast (Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences), recently retired as Chair, is an expert on physical geography, especially of the Midwest and the Great Lakes region.
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Erica Frantz - December 14, 2021Dr. Erica Frantz (Department of Political Science) specializes in the study and teaching of authoritarian politics, democratization, conflict, and development. She is particularly interested in the security and policy implications of autocratic rule. Her numerous books include: Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes (Oxford University Press, 2019, with Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Natasha Lindstaedt); Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018); How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2018, with Barbara Geddes and Joseph Wright); and Development and the State in the 21st Century: Tackling the Challenges Facing the Developing World (Palgrave Publishing, 2015, with Natasha Ezrow and Andrea Kendall-Taylor). Also an accomplished teacher, in 2020 Dr. Frantz won MSU’s College of Social Science Outstanding Teacher Award.
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Susan Sleeper-Smith - Nov. 30, 2021Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Professor Emerita of History at Michigan State University, examines Native American-Euro-American encounters during the colonial and early national histories of North America. She focuses on sites of encounter, particularly borderlands, where diverse people interacted and where identity, initially malleable, changed over time. Dr. Sleeper-Smith is the author of Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Culture Encounter in the Great Lakes, Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World, and Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives.
Dr. Sleeper-Smith’s most recent book is entitled Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and explains how the labor of women transformed the economy along the Ohio River. In addition, committed to improving the teaching of Native American history, Dr. Sleeper-Smith co-edited Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians (UNC Press, 2015). |
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Stan Kaplowitz - November 23, 2021Dr. Stan Kaplowitz, Professor Emeritus of MSU’s Department of Sociology, specializes in social psychology, especially of attitudes and communication. He has taught Political Sociology for many years and has thoroughly studied the group basis of American voting behavior. In addition, Dr. Kaplowitz has published articles on persuasion, attitude change over time, racial attitudes and beliefs, physician-patient communication, and attitudes towards climate change policies, donating tissue to biobanks and a major MSU riot.
Dr. Kaplowitz also applies quantitative methods to predicting risk of lead poisoning from environmental and socio-demographic data. A major part of Dr. Kaplowitz’s current research involves finding ways of increasing energy conserving behavior and increasing public support for energy conservation policy. To this end, he has studied attitudes towards the gasoline tax and carpooling. |
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Social SCience Scholars - Nov. 16, 2021Nicole Jedding, a former Social Science Scholar, is currently studying for an MPhil in Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford and both Kate Frieden and Macken Keefe are current Social Science Scholars. They will be talking about a remarkable and award-winning research project which will shortly be published in a high-profile academic journal. The project, initiated by Nicole in 2018, was designed to test the common assertions (a) that cocaine users were far more often demonized than opioid users and (b) that this has to do with implicit racism. Testing these hypotheses involved coding hundreds of hours of NBC Nightly News segments related to cocaine use in the 1980s and opioid misuse in the 2010s. The results are powerful and important.
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Morteza Mahmoudi - NOV. 9, 2021Dr. Morteza Mahmoudi (Department of Radiology) is the Principal Investigator in the Precision Health Program at MSU. Prior to coming to MSU, he was an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. His research interest is in nanomedicine and regenerative medicine for the development of new nano-based platforms for prevention/treatment of life-threatening conditions such as cardiomyopathy, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. Aside from nanomedicine and regenerative medicine, Dr. Mahmoudi is also very active in social sciences and specifically in drawing the attention of the scientific community in the rising issue of academic bullying. He is among global highly cited researchers in 2018 as reported by Clarivate Analytics.
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Matt Grossmann - October 26, 2021Our presenter today was Dr. Matt Grossmann (Department of Political Science & Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research). Dr. Grossmann is a political scientist whose work focuses on party politics, special interests in politics, and methods in the social sciences. His books include The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation and American Governance (Stanford University Press, 2012), Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014), Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and How Social Science Got Better: Overcoming Bias with More Evidence, Diversity, and Self-Reflection (Oxford University Press, 2021). Dr. Grossmann is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC, host of The Science of Politics Podcast and a regular contributor to FiveThirtyEight’s online political analysis. He has also published op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
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Mónica Ramírez-Montagut - 10/12/21Today we had the privilege to speak with Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut (Director, MSU Broad Museum). Born in Mexico City, Dr. Ramírez-Montagut joined the MSU Broad team in 2020 after having served as director at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Throughout her extensive career, her approach to art is known for being both publicly engaged and socially conscious. Dr. Ramírez-Montagut received her Ph.D. in theory and history of architecture from Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. A trained architect, Dr. Ramírez-Montagut co-curated the 2006 Zaha Hadid retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC and then made the professional shift to working with contemporary artists. In 2020, Dr. Ramírez-Montagut joined the Board of Trustees of the U.S. International Council for Museums (ICOM), the Association of Art Museum Directors (AMMD), and was one of the panelists of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that selected artist Simone Leigh to represent the US in the 2022 Venice Biennale.
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Ben Smith - October 5, 2021Our presenter today was Dr. Benjamin Smith (Department of History, University of Warwick, UK). Professor Smith is a historian of modern Mexican history at Warwick University in the UK who also taught at MSU between 2004 and 2013. Dr. Smith has done most of his research in the archives, villages, churches, and markets of the predominantly indigenous state of Oaxaca. The author of several books on politics and religion in Mexican history, Dr. Smith has just published The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, a myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade. Dr. Smith draws on unprecedented archival research; leaked DEA, Mexican law enforcement, and cartel documents; and dozens of harrowing interviews, to tell the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent.
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Amanda Flaim - SEPTEMBER 21, 2021Our presenter today at 5pm is Dr. Amanda Flaim (James Madison College, Department of Sociology, and Center for Gender in Global Context). Dr. Flaim is a political sociologist who studies human rights policy and development programs in mainland Southeast Asia. She especially researches indigenous and ethnic minority communities in upland Thailand, examining how their vulnerability affects health outcomes, educational attainment, population movements, and land-use/land claims. Dr. Flaim is currently collaborating with fellow MSU/JMC faculty and students, as well as artists, activists, UNESCO, and leading faculty partners in Southeast Asia, to explore the possibilities for less damaging environmental policies along the imperiled Mekong River and its tributaries. This session is held in association with the Great Decisions program of the Foreign Policy Association.
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Kevin Elliott - September 14, 2021Our presenter today was Dr. Kevin Elliott (Lyman Briggs College & Department of Philosophy). Dr. Elliott studies the ethical and social values that play into scientific research, especially in policy-relevant areas of environmental research. He has explored the influences of financial conflicts of interest in research, ethical issues that arise in science communication, and collaborative authorship practices in science teams. Dr. Elliott works with such scientific and policy organizations as the European Food Safety Authority and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Is a Little Pollution Good for You? Incorporating Societal Values in Environmental Research (2011) and A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science (2017).
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Sheril KirshenBaum - SEP. 7, 2021Our T&G presenter today was Sheril Kirshenbaum, a very fine scientist and author who is working to enhance public understanding of science. She currently hosts Serving Up Science at PBS Digital Studios and is executive director of Science Debate, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization striving to get every candidate on record about their views on science policy. At Michigan State University, Sheril hosts ‘Our Table’, a series of round table discussions bringing together farmers and food experts, health professionals and community members to foster dialogue about where our food comes from and how it impacts our health and planet. Sheril co-wrote Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future with Chris Mooney (chosen by the Library Journal as one of the Best Sci-Tech Books of 2009 and named by President Obama's science advisor John Holdren as a top recommended read). She is also the author of The Science of Kissing, which explores the science behind one of humanity’s most cherished activities.
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Gabriella Karin - August 31, 2021Today's talk was especially important and germane. We were honored to host Gabriella Karin. Gabriella is a survivor of the Holocaust who has been invited to speak at the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles and the Museum of Tolerance, as well as at schools, synagogues, youth camps, and many other venues. She is dedicated to increasing understanding of the history of the Holocaust so that it is not repeated. Gabriella is also an accomplished artist whose work is inspired by the Holocaust. Last year, Gabriella published her memoir, the extremely powerful Trauma, Memory, and the Art of Survival: A Holocaust Memoir, which tells her story of survival as a Jewish girl in Bratislava whose family was forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Gabriella has no formal ties with MSU, but she was introduced to us by an alumnus and very kindly spoke to the Social Science Scholars last year. We strongly recommend buying her book and looking at her artwork here.
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