Maggie Hennefeld is a feminist comedy theorist and international silent film curator. Her award- winning book, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018) reveals the forgotten history of female performers in early slapstick film comedies. She is an editor of the journal Cultural Critique and co-editor of two volumes, Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated (Duke UP, 2020). She is currently writing a book about the history of women who allegedly died from laughing too hard.

Rachel Hardeman is a Reproductive Health Equity Researcher whose work has significantly shifted the field's ability to name and operationalize structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequities. Furthermore, her research and scholarly activities have made health inequities due to racism more visible and offered empirical evidence as to the ways that public health might intervene on the growing racial inequities in health and health care in our country through health care systems change, medical education and policy.

Olihe Okoro is a community-engaged scholar whose research efforts aim to investigate and address structural inequities that drive health disparities. Dr. Okoro’s work is unique in that it seeks to understand the intersections of social determinants of health with race/ethnicity and sociocultural context, and the implications for health care and health outcomes. Her work continues to inform interventions to improve health outcomes in Black communities. Dr.

Esther Krook-Magnuson is a neuroscientist seeking to improve our understanding of how cells interact within a network, how networks interact with each other, and the physiological roles of neuronal populations. Neuronal networks, diversity, and specificity of function are important to both physiological processes and neurological disorders.

Bonnie Keeler works at the intersection of sustainability science and environmental economics, with particular expertise in water policy. Keeler’s research investigates the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, the social costs of water pollution, and the dynamics of social-ecological systems. Keeler is the co-director of the CREATE Initiative, a community-engaged research project that aims to leverage the resources of the research university in service to the needs and priorities of environmental justice organizations in urban watersheds.

Douglas Kearney is an award-winning poet and critic working on / with / through Black aesthetics and performance. His research engages literature, music, and entertainment with foci in interdisciplinary artistic praxes, the grotesque, and the crossroads where antiblack violence meets spectacle. His books include Mess and Mess and, Buck Studies, and Sho. A librettist, Kearney’s most recent operas are Crescent City, Sweet Land, and Comet / Poppea (commissioned by the American Modern Opera Company).

Trinity Hamilton is an environmental and molecular microbiologist. Her research examines microbial photosynthesis and global biogeochemical cycles throughout Earth’s history. Her research combines genomic, functional, and evolutionary studies of complex microbial ecosystems to answer outstanding questions in microbial ecology and evolution in the face of changing environmental conditions, and has been applied to places ranging from Yellowstone hot springs to Minnesota lakes to Greenland glaciers.

Jeff Calder is a mathematician whose research involves using continuum mathematical analysis, including partial differential equations and the calculus of variations, to study discrete problems at the foundations of machine learning and data science. The goals of his research are to further our understanding of existing algorithms, and to develop new, more efficient algorithms founded on strong theoretical principles with provable performance guarantees.

Samira Azarin studies the role of the cell microenvironment in the development and function of healthy and diseased tissues to enable fundamental insights into biological mechanisms, develop model systems for drug discovery, and design biomaterials that direct the behavior of cells and tissues in the body.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common chronic disease affecting about 420 million people worldwide. To stop the vicious cycle of the disease, Emilyn Alejandro’s team combine integrative approaches and using both animal models and human studies to uncover the role of nutrient-sensor protein mTOR and OGT in the placenta and pancreas, to ultimately predict individuals who are at risk for obesity and diabetes and to find ways to increase insulin secretion to improve clinical interventions for patients with diabetes.