Talvin Wilks is an acclaimed director, dramaturg and playwright with an almost 30 year professional career. For Wilks, politics and history become the rooted foundation in which to examine, by means of drama, identities continually divided by race, class, gender and sexuality and have informed his original works and collaborations which have reached Broadway, off-Broadway and national stages.
Paragraph: Hyun Soo Park is a computer vision researcher who is passionate about developing an AI system that can decode implicit codes of our non-verbal social signals, e.g., gaze direction, facial expression, and body gestures, that plays a major role in our daily communications. His lab designs a massive sensing infrastructure to measure the subtle social signals in three dimensions, develop a computational model to analyze and forecast the behaviors, and render them in an immersive technology to enable authentic social telepresence.
Alexander Opitz’s research focuses on developing non-invasive brain stimulation technologies for brain disorders. Dr. Opitz has a particular interest in the underlying physics and physiology of transcranial magnetic and electric stimulation. Research in his lab spans from computational modeling of electric fields and their effect on neurons to electrophysiological recordings of brain activity in animals and humans. His lab is further developing closed-loop stimulation technologies to improve the effectiveness of brain stimulation. Dr.
Carrie Henning-Smith is a public health researcher who focuses on health equity and the structural drivers of health for rural populations, with an emphasis on mental health and social well-being for older adults and people with historically marginalized identities. In her work, she uses a range of methodologies to examine the role of policy, geography, and community context in shaping health outcomes, including loneliness and social isolation. Dr.
V.V. Ganeshananthan is a fiction writer and essayist who writes about Ilankai / Lankan Tamil communities and the Sri Lankan civil war. Her debut novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of The Washington Post’s Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Columbia Journalism Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, which is about the intersection of literature and the news. She has taught classes on novel writing, plot and revision, and political literature.
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon’s publicly engaged and empirical research has made contributions to the understanding of digital innovation and engagement in journalism. She studies digital media as structuring conditions of journalistic work, including how old and new actors adapt and respond to change in digital innovation, and the cultural forces of change in news organizations and the news industry.
Ya Yang is recognized nationally and internationally as one of the top researchers working in the field of plant functional phylogenomics—a field of molecular evolution that utilizes genome sequences to analyze and reconstruct evolution. In addition to her impressive track record in funding, scholarship, and teaching, Dr. Yang also serves as the curator of plants for the University of Minnesota Herbarium at the Bell Museum of Natural History. Dr.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field studies racism and mortality in the United States in two settings: the early twentieth century and the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of her work puts mortality inequities into new perspective with surprising comparisons; for example, she showed that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, white mortality was still not as high as Black mortality has been every year, long before the pandemic. She also helped lead an award-winning community Covid-19 vaccination program (based in Minneapolis’s Seward neighborhood).
Christian Uwe’s scholarship joins together literature, semiotics, and philosophy to investigate contemporary forms of cultural and political existence. Drawing particularly on sub-Saharan, Caribbean, and French literatures, his research proposes a comparative examination of crises such as contemporary afterlives of the colonial project, environmental degradation, migration, and attendant geopolitical conflicts.
Audrey Dorélien is a population health researcher. She studies the impacts of climate change and infectious disease exposure on maternal and child health. She also studies how human behavior and population dynamics affect the spread and severity of infectious diseases. She describes demographic and health patterns and attempts to identify the causal factors responsible for these patterns. She uses secondary data from household surveys and vital records in novel ways, and often links these datasets with climate, contextual, and infectious disease data.