What matters to you.
0:00
0:00
NEXT UP:
 
Top

Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

All Speakers

  • Dr. Peter Nien-chu Kiang is Professor of Education and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston where he has taught since 1987. Under his leadership, UMass Boston has developed the most Asian American Studies courses, faculty, and community linkages of any university in New England and has been highlighted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities as a national model in integrating culturally-responsive instruction in the classroom with holistic practices of mentoring, service-learning, and advocacy to address the social and academic needs of students as well as the capacity-building needs of local Asian American communities. The program's alumni include teachers, social workers, health care providers, business entrepreneurs, and leaders of local Asian American community organizations as well as the first Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees to complete Ed.M. and Ed.D degrees at Harvard. Peter's own research, teaching, and advocacy in both P/K-12 and higher education with Asian American immigrant/refugee students and communities have been supported by the National Academy of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Massachusetts Association for Bilingual Education, and others. His recent research commitments have included documenting race-related trauma and post-traumatic stress experienced by Asian American Vietnam veterans and constructing pathways for education and community development with Cambodian and Vietnamese American populations in Massachusetts. Peter currently serves as co-president of the Chinese Historical Society of New England and chair of the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights. He holds a B.A., Ed.M., and Ed.D. from Harvard University and is a former Community Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. In 2007, he received the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award at UMass Boston. [Source: http://www.umb.edu/academics/departments/cehd/programs/curriculum\_instruction/faculty/kiang.html]
  • Paul Parravano has been part of MIT's Office of the President since 1991. His role in the Office of Government and Community Relations involves fostering communication and understanding between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and all levels of government, major constituency groups, and MIT's surrounding community. He serves as a liaison and resource for people within MIT who may have a need to work with external parties and those in the community who have a similar need to interact with the Institute. Prior to his employment at MIT, Paul worked as a staff attorney in a civil rights consulting firm in the Boston area, providing advice and consultation for corporations on the implementation of civil rights regulations. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law. Paul likes to highlight his strong affinity for baseball, barbecue, and water sports. His greatest delight flows from his family, which includes two daughters, Emily and Eleanora, and his wife Martha. Paul and his family are Arlington residents.
  • John S. Rigden is currently an Honory Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his B. S. from Eastern Nazarene College and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Upon completion of his graduate work he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. He has served on the faculties of Eastern Nazarene College, Middlebury College, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In 1987 he joined the American Institute of Physics where he served as Director of Physics Programs. Rigden's scholarly work has been in the areas of molecular physics and the history of science. Rigden's professional activities have been at the national and international levels. He was editor of the *American Journal of Physics *from 1975 to 1985. In 1992 he was the Director of Development of the National Science Standards Project at the National Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he was elected chairman of the History of Physics Forum of the American Physical Society. He has served on numerous committees of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. He served as an NSF consultant to India in 1968 and 1969. He was the United States Representative to the International Science Exhibition in Rangoon Burma in 1970, a Fulbright Fellow to Burma in 1971 and to Uruguay in 1975. Rigden is the author of *Physics and the Sound of Music* (John Wiley), *Rabi: Scientist and Citizen* (Basic Books), and *Hydrogen: The Essential Element *(Harvard). He has edited *Most of the Good Stuff, Memories of Richard Feynman* as well as several collections including the* Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics* and the *Macmillan Encyclopedia of Elementary Particle Physics* where he served as Editor-in-Chief.
  • Melissa Roderick is the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a co-director at CCSR. Professor Roderick is an expert in urban school reform, high school reform, high-stakes testing, minority adolescent development, and school transitions. Her work has focused attention on the transition to high school as a critical point in students school careers and her new work examines the transition to college among Chicago Public School (CPS) students. In prior work, she led a multi-year evaluation of Chicago's initiative to end social promotion and has conducted research on school dropout, grade retention, and the effects of summer programs. Professor Roderick is an expert in mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation. Her new study focuses on understanding the relationship between students' high school careers and preparation, their college selection choices and their post-secondary outcomes through linked quantitative and qualitative research. In this joint project with the Chicago Public Schools, Professor Roderick is assisting CPS in tracking successive cohorts of Chicago students and building new indicators through analysis of high school transcripts and surveys of students and teachers to assess the preparation of CPS graduates for college. Professor Roderick has a Ph.D. from the Committee on Public Policy from Harvard University, a master's degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an A.B. from Bowdoin College.
  • Theodore Friedmann, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, is also director of the Program in Gene Therapy there. The overriding interest of his laboratory is gene therapy. He and his team continue their interest in the assembly and in vivo targeting of viral vectors and non-viral nanoparticle vectors. They apply these gene transfer methods as well as microarray-based transcriptional profiling and proteomic techniques to the study of a neuro-degenerative and developmental CNS disorder, and also use microarray and proteomic methods to characterize the developmental pathways in human embryonic stem cells that produce classes of neurons, especially dopaminergic neurons. Friedmann's laboratory is also using transcriptional and proteomic techniques to examine the mechanisms of action of muscle growth factors and anabolic steroids, both in vitro and in vivo.
  • Stephen Kern taught at Northern Illinois University for 32 years, completing his tenure there as a Distinguished Research Professor. He came to Ohio State in 2002. He has been an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Northwestern, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was appointed a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State in 2004. His area of specialization is modern European cultural and intellectual history, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, the body and sexuality, time and space, love, vision (the gaze), causality, and murder. He has been awarded A.C.L.S., N.E.H., Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Fellowships and received the Ohio Academy of History Distinguished Historian Award for 2007. He is currently researching a book on modernism, modernity, and narrative.
  • Dr Sonu Shamdasani works on the history of psychiatry, psychology and the human sciences, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. He has edited several books and is the author of *Cult Fictions: C.G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology* (1998), *Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science *(2003), *Jung Stripped Bare by his Biographers, Even *(2005), and (with Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen) *Le Dossier Freud: Enquente sur l'Histoire de la Psychanalyse *(2006).
  • Maxwell J. Mehlman is Arthur E. Petersilge Professor of Law and director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He received his JD from Yale Law School in 1975 and a BA from Reed College in 1970. In between college and law school, Professor Mehlman was a Rhodes Scholar, earning his second bachelor’s degree from Oxford University in 1972. After law school, he practiced with the Washington, DC firm of Arnold & Porter, where he specialized in federal regulation of medical technology. He joined the faculty at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 1984. Since 1986, he has been the director of the Law-Medicine Center. The National Institutes of Health recently awarded Professor Mehlman a significant two-year grant to review, and then address, any public policy gaps in guidelines and ethical differences between therapeutic and enhancement genetic research that involves human subjects.