Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego Dr. Porter is an expert in computer science education research focused on active learning pedagogies and assessing student learning. He is interested in identifying core course concepts which are essential to student success, developing pedagogies which facilitate student engagement with those concepts, and creating assessment instruments to evaluate the effectiveness of those pedagogical practices. He is also interested in improving the diversity of the discipline by using pedagogies which foster a community among the students. His research on Peer Instruction, a student-centric pedagogy which uses targeted conceptual questions (often with clickers) to identify student understanding, has shown it to be widely valued by computer science students in a variety of contexts, that students learn from the Peer Instruction process, and that, relative to lecture, it reduces student failure rates while improving the retention of majors. In addition, his work has shown that student responses collected automatically through the Peer Instruction process can be used to both predict student outcomes and to identify critical course concepts. Porter also works on multi-core, multi-threaded computer architectures with UC San Diego computer science Professor Dean Tullsen, who was his Ph.D. advisor. Porter also collaborated with the late Allan Snavely at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on scheduling in high-performance computing, and continues to work with Snavely’s San Diego startup, EP Analytics. Capsule Bio: Porter joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2014. Prior to UC San Diego, he was an assistant professor at Skidmore College in upstate New York. He received his undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of San Diego in 2000. From 2000 to 2004, he served as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet and is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. After leaving the Navy, he earned his M.S. in 2007 and Ph.D. in 2007 in computer science from UC San Diego. As co-principal investigator on an NSF award, he has studied the impact of Peer Instruction in computer science classes. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture in 2011, Best Paper Award at the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Technical Symposium in 2013, and Chair's Award for his paper at the International Computing Education Research Conference in 2014.
Research Associate, Public Health, University of Sheffield Dr Fenton is a Research Associate in Public Health at the University of Sheffield and in Geography at the University of Manchester. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester. Her PhD used biographical and life history methods to explore different generations of British women's relationships to alcohol across the lifecourse. Since finishing her PhD, she has worked on projects on youth, generation and the life-course, including the ESRC funded Girlhood and Later Life project and the UKRI funded Austerity and Altered Life-Courses project at the University of Manchester, and the Wellcome funded Youth Drinking in Decline project at the University of Sheffield. She is especially interested in how young people’s transitions into adulthood act as a litmus test for the state of societies – the nature and extent of (in)equality, social (in)justice, the quality of life they offer - and how this changes over time.
Secretariat at the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on World Heritage, Indigenous Knowledge Experienced archaeologist and cultural heritage professional based in New South Wales.
Professor, Biological Sciences, Brock University Dr. Vasseur is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Brock University where she is also a member of the Women and Gender Studies program and the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (note however inactive since on sabbatical July 1st, 2018 until June 30, 2019). Since 2014, she holds the UNESCO Chair on Community Sustainability: From Local to Global at Brock (renewed 2018). Her research program is highly interdisciplinary and links issues such as community-based ecosystem management, climate change adaptation and resilience and sustainable agriculture. She works in China, where she is a visiting scholar at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. Her work in Ecuador focuses on the community sustainability and ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change of rural native communities in the Andean region of the Chimborazo. Her community-research work with the City of greater Sudbury led her to receive in 2011 the Latornell Pioneers Award from Conservation Ontario. She has produced over hundred publications and more than 200 presentations as a researcher. Since June 2018, she is the President of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, where she was previously Chair of the Sectoral Commission on Social, Human and Natural Sciences. She is the vice-chair for North America on the steering committee of the Commission for Ecosystem Management at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and leads the thematic group on Ecosystem Governance. Dr. Vasseur is also the Past-President (President from 2014 to2018) of the Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology.
Senior Lecturer in Music, The Open University Laura Hamer is a Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in Music. She is currently Director of Student Support for the School of Arts and Humanities. Laura is a Feminist Musicologist specialising in Women in Music. She holds a BA in Music from the University of Oxford and an MA and PhD in Musicology from Cardiff University. She completed a PG Cert in Academic Practice (HE teaching qualification) at Liverpool Hope University in 2013, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a pianist, and holds an LRSM in Advanced Piano Performance. Laura initially worked for The Open University as an Associate Lecturer between 2010 and 2011. She was also a Lecturer in Music at The Open University in 2011. Between 2012 and 2018 she worked for Liverpool Hope University, including four years as Head of Music. She has also taught Music at Cardiff University, Rose Bruford College, and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire of Music. She served on the Central Committee of the National Association for Music in Higher Education (NAMHE, now MusicHe) between January 2014 and December 2016. She was Lead for the EDIMS (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies) Network Parents and Carers Working Group between 2020 and 2022. As a Staff Tutor, Laura oversees tuition and supports students and Associate Lecturers on a range of Music modules throughout the UK (currently A342). Research interests Laura’s primary research interests lie in women in music, encompassing both classical and popular traditions. Her monograph Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919-1939, was published by Routledge in 2018 (paperback edition, 2020). She has also published articles and book chapters on a wide range of women musicians, including composers, songwriters, conductors, and all-woman orchestras, and also on Olivier Messiaen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, reception and criticism studies, and digital musicology. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and co-editor, with Helen Julia Minors, of The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond (forthcoming, Routledge). Please see the Publications tab for a full list of publications. Laura has organised a number of conferences and events. In 2013 she organised the Eighth Biennial International Conference on Music since 1900. In 2015 she organised the Women in Music since 1913 Symposium, and the same year she co-chaired Hopkins at Hope (a celebration of the time spent in Liverpool by the poet, musician, and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins) with Dr Guy Cuthbertson (Liverpool Hope University). In 2019, she co-chaired the International Women and/in Musical Leadership Conference with Prof Helen Julia Minors (York St John University). She is currently PI on the AHRC-funded Women's Musical Leadership Online Network: Women’s Musical Leadership Online Project (WMLOP) | Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (open.ac.uk).
Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University Lyke Thompson has been teaching at Wayne State for about 30 years as a professor in the Department of Political Science and in the former College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs. He has taught program evaluation, urban administration, Detroit Politics, and Michigan Politics. He became the director of Wayne State University's Center for Urban Studies in January 2003. During his administration of the Center he has collaborated with staff and community members to expand its capacity for research and intervention into areas including program evaluation, GIS, survey research, public safety, domestic violence, healthy homes, and climate change. The Center works intensively within Detroit and its metropolitan area both to understand urban processes and institutions as well as to improve the lives of Detroit's most challenged households.
