Associate Professor of Civil Engineering Technology, Environmental Management and Safety, Rochester Institute of Technology Amanda Bao is an Associate Professor and Program Director in Civil Engineering Technology at Rochester Institute of Technology. She got her Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, in 2006. Dr. Bao started teaching at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2010 and she regularly teaches structural engineering courses. Prior to RIT, she worked as a bridge structural engineer at Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. and Michael Baker International, Inc. in Denver, Colorado, and she is a licensed professional engineer in Colorado and New York, USA. Dr. Amanda Bao won the 2021 Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching at RIT. Dr. Bao has been actively involved in engineering education research since 2011, including digital learning, active learning and intensive collaboration with industry. Dr. Bao develops a teaching website: http://baoteachingcet.com/ and opens a YouTube Structural Design Teaching channel to post screencasts to supplement traditional lecture-type classes, and she also created hands-on active learning modules to improve teaching and learning effectiveness. In addition to education research, Dr. Bao conducts research in the areas of bridge resiliency and sustainability, innovative construction materials and evaluation of aging infrastructure. She has extensive research experience in finite element modeling and lab testing of structures and published more than 20 research papers.
Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Oxford Prior to becoming Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography, Ariell was the Course Director of the MSc/MPhil in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance and before that an ESRC-GCRF postdoctoral fellow at the School for Geography and the Environment on an independent project called Managing Development and Infrastructure: Understanding State Engagements with Rural Communities in Mongolia. She completed her DPhil from the School for Geography in February 2016. She holds a BA degree in Anthropology from Hartwick College and an MPA from Cornell University in the United States. Since 2004, Ariell has worked extensively in rural Mongolia with mobile pastoralist communities around land use and rural development issues. She started her research in 2004 studying the guest house and international traveller culture in Ulaanbaatar. From 2006-2007 she held a US Fulbright Fellowship in Mongolia to study international development discourse related to herder livelihoods. Her DPhil work from 2012-2016 consisted of an ethnography focused on the governance of pastoralism and changing forms of work in rural Mongolia. In 2016 she engaged as an expert on a multi-disciplinary team to conduct a qualitative analysis of herder livelihoods and socio-economic changes related to the Oyu Tolgoi mega mine complex in the South Gobi Desert. From this work, Ariell's research focus has become concerned with understanding the impacts of mines and infrastructure investment (particularly Belt and Road Projects) in rural Mongolia, Central and South Asia (mostly Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan) and implications for politics and formations of the state in this region. Ariell's current research aims to understand the relationship between social systems, resource distribution and governance frameworks in regions undergoing economic transformation. She specializes in qualitative, participatory research, using methods such as ethnographic participant observation, interviewing, mapping and immersive field work to document and analyse the conditions that inform human decision-making and organization.
PhD student of the sociology of mass violence, The Ohio State University Anneliese M. Schenk-Day is a PhD student broadly studying the sociology of mass violence. Schenk-Day has worked on projects pertaining to hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community and racial minorities in the United States, and internationally studied the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi, Bosnian genocide at Srebrenica.
Associate professor, University of Liverpool Abigail has a PhD from the University of Cambridge whereI also completed an MPhil and BA. She has worked as a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the Universities of Manchester and Hull and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Abigail has published widely on Spanish and Catalan cinema and television with a focus on memory, national identity, gender and feminism. Her monograph 'Cinema at the Edges: New Readings of Julio Medem, Bigas Luna and Jose Luis Guerin' is published by Berghahn Books. She is currently working on a co-authored monograph, with Prof. Anja Louis, Sheffield Hallam, on Feminism and Femininities in Spanish TV Drama (under contract with Palgrave MacMillan) and co-editing a volume on Gender and TV in Iberia and Latin America (under contract with Bloomsbury). Her current project focuses on mediating feminism in contemporary Spanish popular culture.
Research and Innovation Officer at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab, Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation, Drexel University Alicia Atkinson is the Research and Innovation Officer at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab, based out of the Lindy Institute at Drexel University. As a researcher, advocate, somatic practitioner, and systems thinker, she focus on expanding economic and racial justice in the Philadelphia region and beyond. She brings a deep commitment to centering the community in decision-making to shift systems towards equity and justice. In her prior leadership roles, she’s been responsible for research, policy development, and advocacy work centered on expanding financial security for low-income communities. Most recently, as the Managing Director of Financial Empowerment at United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey (UWGPSNJ), where she was responsible for aligning strategic direction to community needs and opportunities, cultivating partnerships, and integrating philanthropic investment to support families, communities and financial security initiatives in the region. Previously, she was the Managing Director at The Prosperity Agenda, where she led new strategic initiatives and managed place-based projects rooted in the wisdom, experience, and expertise of families enduring economic inequality. She led the research, design, and evaluation of innovations, such as Money Mindset Cards, which honor lived and living experience in financial conversations. Prior to that, she was a Policy Analyst with the Government Affairs team at Prosperity Now, where she promoted effective policies and programs to expand savings, credit building, financial coaching, and integrated service delivery. Alicia holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Legal Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was a Graduate Research Assistant at the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity, working exclusively on the Leveraging Mobility Project. She also co-authored the report “Employment Capital: How Work Builds and Protects Family Wealth and Security,” which highlights the importance of quality work-based policies for low- and moderate-income workers in preserving and growing assets overtime.
