Chair and Associate Professor of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, Washington University in St Louis Flora Cassen was born and grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. She went to college in Brussels and studied law and history at the Free University of Brussels. She moved to New York in 2000 to continue her studies at NYU, earning a PhD in Jewish History in 2008. She has taught European and Jewish history at the University of Vermont, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and now at Washington University in Saint Louis, where she is also the Chair of the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies. Her book Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. It tells the history of the yellow badges or hats that Jews were forced to wear in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Her book offers a reflection on the power of discriminatory signs and explains where Renaissance anti-Judaism came from and what it meant to Italian Jews and Christians. She has published articles in flagship academic journals such as the Journal of Early Modern History, the Jewish Quarterly Review, the Association for Jewish Studies Review, and in collections of essays. Her articles together with the book form a body of work that explores diverse facets of early Modern Jewish life (ranging all the way from anti-Judaism and dress to travel, spying, and food) in Italy and the Spanish Empire. In addition to her academic work, she has been writing columns for broad public audiences on the subject European antisemitism.
Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociology, Flinders University Dr. Fairley Le Moal is a Researcher in Sociology, working in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences of Flinders University, and a member of the Centre Max Weber UMR5283 (France). Fairley has defended her PhD in Sociology and Anthropology in October 2022, graduating from Flinders University and from the University Lumiere Lyon 2. Her thesis focuses on the work of ‘feeding the family’, in France and in Australia, and she adopted an ethnographic approach, visiting families in their homes for observations. She investigate more particularly the practices and experiences of family mealtimes in middle and upper-class households, looking into food socialisations, family relationships, emotion management and power dynamics. Her results shed light on the work of everyday family mealtimes, and the contradictory imperatives family members face – particularly mothers – when it comes to eating together and maintaining health within the family, which end up reproducing gender inequalities at home.
Assistant Professor of Pediatric Cardiology, University of Illinois at Chicago I am a Medical Doctor specializing in Pediatrics, Cardiac Imaging, and Cardiology. I am also very excited to share the importance of science literacy with the American public.
Professor of Computer Science, UMass Lowell I am Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning and Undergraduate Studies at UMass Lowell. I am interested in a collection of themes around what I call “Engaging Computing”: - Engaged computing means computational processes that are engaged with the world—think embedded systems. I’m creating computationally-active, physical-media design environments for an unusual set of users, including children, artists, and other non-engineers. - Engaging computing means the design processes that people use when they are creating, building, and debugging. I’m specifically interested in environments that allow people to perform ultra-rapid prototyping, to exploring their ideas by implementing them immediately, getting feedback from seeing them in action, and then iterating, repeating the process. A negotiational process rather than a planned one. I am also working on building novel tools and approaches for student to gain fluency with data. We’ve built the iSENSE collaborative data visualization platform, and a build of MIT App Inventor with extensions for publishing data to iSENSE. We are also working on CS Pathways, to integrate computer science into middle schools based on kids building apps for social good.
Research scientist, School of Human Nutrition, McGill University Farzaneh is a recent Ph.D. from the School of Human Nutrition at McGill University, affiliated with McGill's Margaret A. Gilliam Institute for Global Food Security. Farzaneh has over a decade of national and international academic research and professional experience in public health nutrition and food security in Uganda, Malawi, Canada, and Iran. Her doctoral research investigated the intersections between food security, women's empowerment, equity, and policy using a gender lens in Uganda. She has also collaborated with Food Secure Canada as a research consultant. Her research has been published and presented at various national and international conferences. Farzaneh's research interests include equitable food systems, community-based approaches, intersectionality and equity-centred analysis, gender, and science communication.
PhD candidate in behavioural ecology, University of Liverpool Fionnuala is a behavioural ecologist specialising in the behaviour of birds. She completed her MSc Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter, where she studied the social networks of flamingos. Currently, she Is working towards her PhD at the University of Liverpool. Her current research focuses on individual differences in behaviour (animal personality), parental care and social interactions in seabirds. Outside of research, she has several years of higher education teaching experience and enjoys creating science communication content.
