The Academic Minute

Academic freedoms may be under attack, but professors have legal protections as well.Kent Kauffman, professor of business law at Purdue University Fort Wayne, discusses this.Faculty Bio:Academic freedoms may be under attack, but professors have legal protections as well. I’m Dr. Lynn Pasquerella, president of The American Association of Colleges & Universities, and today on The Academic Minute: Kent Kauffman, professor of business law at Purdue University Fort Wayne, discusses this.Transcript:Academic freedom has an almost kaleidoscope effect. It looks differently to various groups: university administrators; faculty; students; and certainly politicians. For faculty, academic freedom is an essential prerogative, allowing them to decide what to study and research, and what and how to teach – even when those choices are controversial. Over a half-century ago, the United States Supreme Court, in one case, declared academic freedom vital to a democracy, and in another case said academic freedom required safeguarding because of its “transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” The sources of academic freedom include tradition (to the extent academic freedom’s history is valued), binding employment policies that detail its contours to faculty, and, for public university faculty, the First Amendment, for which teaching is considered a “matter of public concern” and worthy of constitutional protection. Regrettably, some states are restricting academic freedom in various ways, including prohibiting the kinds of courses or content that can be taught, allowing students to secretly record their instructors in class, and giving students the right to file complaints against their instructors for what those students would consider offensive teaching statements. But faculty have for decades been protected by a legal doctrine, the Germaneness Standard, which evaluates whether controversial content is pedagogically related, not if it makes students uncomfortable. In a noteworthy case, an adjunct instructor of interpersonal communication sued his college after he was fired because a few students got offended by a social deconstructivism, word association exercise he conducted in class. In ruling for the instructor, a federal court of appeals concluded the exercise was germane to the subject and, thus, protected by the First Amendment, because teaching is a matter of public concern.Read More:[Bloosmbury] - Navigating Choppy Waters This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

What can ivermectin teach us about health misinformation?Dannell Boatman, assistant professor of cancer prevention and control at West Virginia University, takes a look.Faculty Bio:Dannell Boatman, EdD, MS, is an Assistant Professor and health communication researcher in the Department of Cancer Prevention and Control at the West Virginia University (WVU) School of Medicine. She conducts her research through the Communicating for Health in Appalachia by Translating Science (CHATS) Lab and is the founding Director of the CHATS Core at the WVU Cancer Institute. Raised in Appalachia, her early work in community and rural public health inspired a research program focused on improving how scientific evidence is communicated and used to support health decisions.Her research combines communication and behavioral sciences to understand how people navigate cancer information and to develop evidence-based strategies that improve communication across clinical, community, and digital settings. Her work spans community-engaged research, rural and Appalachian health, and cancer misinformation, with a focus on translating scientific evidence into practical communication strategies.Through the CHATS Core, Dr. Boatman partners with researchers, healthcare organizations, and communities to move evidence into practice through knowledge translation, dissemination science, audience-centered communication, and creative strategies that increase the impact of research.Her work has been recognized by the Academy of Communication in Healthcare as a Putnam Scholar and by the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute as a Research Scholar. She serves on the American Cancer Society National Lung Cancer Roundtable Stigma and Nihilism Task Group, the World Health Organization’s Health Information Integrity Alliance, and the editorial board of PEC Innovation.Transcript:Why do some medical claims gain traction despite a lack of scientific evidence?When a recent observational study suggested that ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, might help treat cancer, the claim spread rapidly online. Although ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective for treating cancer, many people shared the study as proof that it worked, even as scientists raised serious concerns about the study’s findings.It may seem like the story began there. My research shows it was actually just the latest chapter.To understand how these claims gain momentum, I use social listening to monitor online cancer misinformation. By tracking conversations across social media and other digital spaces, I examine how health claims emerge, spread, and resurface over time.My research has followed multiple periods of heightened online attention surrounding ivermectin and cancer. One came in January 2025, when a high-profile podcast promoted antiparasitic drugs as alternative cancer treatments. I watched public interest surge in real time. While this spike in attention was new, the conversation was not. My research found that claims linking antiparasitic drugs like ivermectin to cancer had been circulating for years, driven by powerful personal stories, influential voices, and active online communities. By the time the observational study was published recently, many people had already encountered multiple versions of the same narrative, shaping how they made sense of its findings.What I discovered about ivermectin reflects a broader pattern. New scientific findings do not enter a vacuum. They become part of conversations that have often been unfolding for years. Those ongoing discussions shape how people interpret new findings, even while scientists are still evaluating the evidence.By revealing how health misinformation develops and spreads, this work can guide earlier and more effective responses, helping people make better-informed decisions about their health.Read More:[The Conversation] - Ivermectin isn’t a cancer miracle drug, but influencers claim otherwise – here’s how to avoid sprinting past scientific evidence This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Deleting cookies isn’t enough to stop online tracking.Phu Phung, associate professor of computer science at the University of Dayton, explains why.Faculty Bio:Dr. Phu Phung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dayton. He is the founder and director of the Intelligent Systems Security Lab, where his team developed MyWebGuard, a system for detecting and mitigating web-based privacy threats, including browser fingerprinting. He is also the University’s founding Point of Contact for the Cyber Defense program, designated an NSA National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense in 2022. His research addresses security across web, mobile, cyber-physical, and IoT systems, with recent work spanning AI and Machine Learning applications in cybersecurity. Dr. Phung has recently been promoted to Full Professor, effective August 2026.Transcript:Most people think clearing cookies protects their privacy online. It’s a reasonable assumption, but that’s only part of the story.Websites can also track people using a technique called digital fingerprinting.Instead of placing a file on your device, fingerprinting quietly collects small details about your browser and hardware, such as screen size, language settings, installed fonts, and other technical traits. Taken together, those details form a profile distinctive enough to identify you across the web.Here’s what makes this kind of tracking so hard to stop: you can delete a cookie, but you cannot delete your screen resolution. You cannot erase the fact that your browser and device reveal certain traits every time you go online.My research examines why so many privacy tools still miss this problem, and what better defenses might look like.In our lab, we developed a system called MyWebGuard that tracks where web code originates and how it uses your data. We found this approach can catch privacy risks that some traditional blocking tools miss.That distinction matters. Most current protections still rely on an all-or-nothing model — they either block a source entirely or allow it completely.But today’s websites are more complicated than that.A single webpage can carry useful features, harmless scripts, and invasive tracking code all at once. Blocking everything breaks the page. Allowing everything surrenders your privacy.That is why my work explores a more precise approach.Instead of shutting everything down, we can monitor sensitive browser actions in real time and restrict only the specific behaviors that enable hidden tracking without disrupting everything else.The lesson is simple. If we want better online privacy, we need smarter protections — not just broader ones. In the modern web, fine-grained control may be our most effective defense. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Knowing when to retire and leave the workforce can be easier said than done.Lee Ann Rawlins Williams, clinical assistant professor at the University of North Dakota, looks into why retirement is changing.Faculty Bio:Lee Ann Rawlins Williams, PhD, CRC, CFLE, HS-BCP, is a Clinical Assistant Professor and Program Director of the Undergraduate Rehabilitation and Human Services Program in the Department of Education, Health and Behavior Studies at the University of North Dakota. Her academic and professional work focuses on rehabilitation, mental health, accessibility, aging, and disaster preparedness within educational, community, and human service systems.Her recent scholarship and professional contributions have expanded nationally and internationally in the areas of disaster preparedness, recovery systems, educator well-being, accessibility, and aging populations. Her work examines the emotional, educational, and systemic impact of disasters on educators, older adults, and individuals with disabilities, with a particular emphasis on inclusive preparedness, continuity of care, mental health integration, and accessible support systems across educational, health, and rehabilitation settings.She has held leadership roles at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels within rehabilitation and human services organizations. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, contributed to interdisciplinary scholarship, and co-authored two books focused on case and caseload management. Her current work also explores later-life counseling, aging and workforce identity, and resilience across changing life transitions.Outside of her professional work, she enjoys traveling, attending sporting events, spending time with family, and making memories with her rescue dog, Foxy Roxy.Transcript:Retirement is often described as a milestone, a moment when a person leaves work and enters a new stage of life. Yet for many older adults today, the question is no longer simply whether to retire, but how to know when the time is right.Workforce participation among adults age 65 and older has increased in recent decades. Longer life expectancy, rising healthcare costs, and concerns about retirement security have changed how many people approach later life. As a result, the once-clear markers of retirement have become less certain for many Americans.But financial considerations tell only part of the story. Work provides more than a paycheck. For many adults, it offers structure, routine, purpose, and identity. In an increasingly disconnected world, work may be one of the few places where people feel socially anchored, connected to others through relationships, shared experiences, and a sense of contribution. For many people, professional roles become closely tied to how they contribute to their families, communities, and society. Deciding when it is time to step away therefore involves emotional and psychological considerations alongside economic ones.Research on retirement transitions suggests that leaving work is rarely a purely financial decision. Retirement may offer greater freedom, flexibility, and opportunities to pursue other interests. At the same time, work often serves as a source of identity, routine, social connection, and purpose. The challenge for many older adults is not simply deciding whether they can afford to retire but determining when stepping away from work feels right.The challenge is that retirement no longer follows a clear script. Older adults are often encouraged to remain active, productive, and engaged while also being expected to recognize when it is time to leave the workforce.Perhaps the most important retirement question today is not whether people should keep working. It is how people determine when the time is right, and what comes next.Read More:[The Conversation] - Older Americans are often compelled to keep working – and then criticized for not stepping aside This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

How can we reduce traffic jams during the morning commute? Mayank K. Vadaliya, doctoral candidate in information technology at the University of the Cumberlands, explores how prediction models could help.Faculty Bio:Mayank Vadaliya is a doctoral candidate in Information Technology at the University of the Cumberlands, where his research focuses on machine learning applied to transportation systems. He holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Cleveland State University and is a Full Member of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. His work on reinforcement learning for adaptive traffic signal control investigates how learning agents can reduce delay and emissions across urban intersection networks.Transcript:Every morning, millions of us sit in traffic that seems to appear out of nowhere. One minute the freeway is moving; the next, it’s a parking lot. What if we could see that jam forming before it actually happens?That’s the question behind my research. I build systems that predict traffic congestion in real time — several minutes before it builds — so drivers and traffic operators have time to react.Most prediction tools lean on a single model. Some are good at the patterns that repeat, like the daily rush hour. Others are better at sudden, irregular changes — a crash, or bad weather. But no single method handles both well.My approach combines three kinds of machine learning. First finds patterns across the road network. Second tracks how traffic changes over time. And last improves the final forecast. Together, they cover each other’s blind spots.I tested this on METR-LA, a public dataset from hundreds of real sensors on Los Angeles freeways. Against standalone models, the hybrid system cut prediction error by more than thirty percent.Why does that matter? A forecast that arrives a few minutes earlier gives the system time to act — to reroute drivers, to retime signals, to warn commuters before they hit the bottleneck. Congestion costs Americancities tens of billions of dollars a year and adds needless carbon to the air.Better prediction won’t make traffic disappear. But learning to see the jam before it forms is the first real step toward clearing it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Other countries are transitioning to electric vehicles faster than the United States.Gregory Keoleian, professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan, details some reasons to make the switch.Faculty Bio:Dr. Greg Keoleian is the Peter M. Wege Professor of Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan and serves as co-Director of the Center for Sustainable Systems, which he cofounded in 1991. His research focuses on systems analysis including life cycle assessment, life cycle costing, and optimization to accelerate climate and sustainability solutions across energy, mobility, buildings, infrastructure, water and wastewater, IT, food systems, and consumer products. He combines systems analysis, sustainability science, and stakeholder engagement to solve critical sustainability challenges and advances solutions by aligning technology, markets, policy, and behavior drivers. He has collaborated with business and industry, national labs, government agencies, and NGOs on hundreds of applied research projects and publications.Dr. Keoleian has appointments as Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) and as Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In 2022, he recently was appointed to co-direct MI Hydrogen at UM, a cross campus enterprise to create hydrogen solutions that accelerate clean energy transitions. He earned his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1987. In 2007, he launched and leads the Engineering Sustainable Systems dual degree program to train a new breed of engineers in sustainable systems. Dr. Keoleian was named to the Reuters Hot List of the world’s top climate scientists in 2021 and was awarded the Society Prize by the International Society for Industrial Ecology in 2025.Transcript:Transportation is the second highest household expenditure and automobiles account for 1/6th of total U.S. carbon pollution. So, vehicle choice has a big impact on your budget and the environment.Total cost of ownership includes vehicle purchase and financing, fuel costs, maintenance and repair, insurance, and taxes. Although upfront costs are higher for electric vehicles, operation and maintenance costs are much lower than gasoline counterparts. Electric sedans and small SUVs have the lowest total ownership costs in most US cities. Battery costs, which account for about 30 percent of total vehicle costs, are decreasing so larger SUVs and pickup trucks will soon reach cost parity particularly given high gasoline prices. 70% of vehicle purchases are used vehicles and used EVs have the least ownership costs so this is an excellent time to buy one.Let’s shift gears and talk about climate pollution. Many have experienced the smoke from wildfires this summer driven by drier and hotter conditions in the Canadian boreal forests. Costs from weather and climate disasters including droughts, wildfires, flooding and health effects are increasing in the US; they reached $183 billion in 2024. EVs are a key solution. More vehicle electrification, moving from hybrids to plug-in hybrids to all battery electric vehicles means greater benefits. On average, battery electric vehicles have 70% lower lifetime greenhouse gas emissions compared to internal combustion engine vehicles. New England states, due to their cleaner grids, have even lower lifetime emissions.In China, over 60% of vehicle sales are electric and Norway is above 90% compared to 7% now in the US. EVs are the future, they are quieter, cleaner, and drive better. It’s time for the US to break away from a fossil fuel-based economy and not only strengthen our economic competitiveness but care for the planet and our grandchildren’s future.Read More:[Michigan] - Vehicle Lifecycle Emissions Calculator[Michigan News] - EVs reduce climate pollution, but by how much? New U-M research has the answer[Michigan News] - Electric vs. gasoline vehicles: Is EV ownership competitive in your area?[Michigan News] - Used EVs currently offer car buyers lowest lifetime cost of ownershipMichigan Center for Sustainable Systems - Electric Vehicles FactsheetVehicle emissions calculator· Vehicle choice and emissions reduction study· Total cost of ownership study – new vehicles· Total cost of ownership study – used vehicles· Sustainability Factsheets· Electric vehicles factsheet This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Relationships between humans and AI chatbots are a fascinating area of study.Jaime Banks, professor at the school of information studies at Syracuse University, delves into these relationships to see what we can learn.Faculty Bio:Jaime Banks is Professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. After earning a Ph.D. in Public Communication and Technology from Colorado State University, she has been previously faculty in Ontario, West Virginia, and Texas. Her work is animated by questions about the relationships between humans and social technologies (mostly social AI, social robots, and videogame characters), examined through mixed methodologies. She serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human-Machine Communication, Journal of Media Psychology, Communication Research Reports, and Technology, Mind, & Behavior. Her work has been funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, and the National Science Foundation. In any spare time, she is caretaker of three rescue mutts and enjoys open-world videogames (for the Horde!).Dr. Banks teaches undergraduate courses on research methods and human-centered design approaches. At the graduate level, she teaches a course on theories of human-AI interaction. Students interested in taking independent study credits for research experience should reach out via email.Dr. Banks’ research into human-machine relationships focuses on communicative and cognitive processes as well as the effects of those interactions. In particular, she is interested in how people perceive mind or mental capacities in machines, how people form moral judgments about machine behavior, and how people understand how complex technologies work. Her current work focuses on the dynamics and effects of AI companions, mental shortcuts that might promote fear of or interest in social robots, and how language and media representations shape how people think about these technologies.Transcript:Millions of humans are in relationships with AI companions—they chat, argue, and otherwise share mundane and intimate experiences. AI companions have been critiqued because of very unfortunate events, those problems are the exception not the rule. Most people are not delusional—they know their partner is a machine. The relationship is real, but one partner is artificial. And sometimes that artificiality can drive what makes the relationship meaningful: Glitches become personalities and being digital frees the pair from constraints of physical bodies.I’ve found there are at least two distinct patterns for machine companionship. The first is a connection marked by feelings of genuine care and being understood. The second is a blend of meaningful exchanges and personal growth. In both, people emphasize their feelings are real. This realness becomes even more apparent when we examine how people experience the end of AI relationships. Sometimes apps are shuttered or a model is retired, and there are real impacts on the humans connected to them. For some, it’s merely a deletion of data. For others, there is real loss akin to human death and their grief is real.We’ve long dismissed these connections as parasocial or unreal because one participant is a machine. But that logic confuses the nature of the partner with the reality of the connection itself. The machine is real. The coordination between human and machine is real. The meaning people make of the relationship is real. It’s only in acknowledging that reality that we can ask important questions—about how these connections operate, how those operations can produce both positive and negative outcomes, and what they might teach us about what it means to be a human. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Immune cells play a key role in regulating eye pressure linked to glaucoma.Katy Liu, associate professor of ophthalmology at Duke University School of Medicine, explores this connection.Faculty Bio:Dr. Katy Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the Duke University Eye Center. She is a board certified, glaucoma fellowship-trained clinician-scientist with a PhD in Cell & Molecular Physiology, and her primary focus is to make basic science discoveries that can be translated from the bench to glaucoma patients.Transcript:Glaucoma is a disease where the pressure in the eye is too high, and it is a leading cause of permanent vision loss. The issue in glaucoma is that the drain of the eye is dysfunctional and does not drain fluid normally from the eye. This leads to a build-up of pressure in the eye and results in vision loss. Most of our existing treatments for glaucoma do not target the drain of the eye where the issue lies. In our research, we examined at the drain of the eye and found immune cells in these drainage tissues. We found that they play a critical role in maintaining eye pressure. Previous studies found that macrophages – the clean-up crew of the body – are found in the drainage tissues of the eye. Using modern immunology techniques, we were able to show that a specialized type of macrophage, called resident macrophages, live in the drainage tissues of the eye. These resident macrophages are important in housekeeping tasks in other tissues, so we asked whether they’re important in maintaining the normal drainage of fluid from the eye. We removed resident macrophages from drainage tissues in mice, and we found that this altered normal eye pressure. When we removed resident macrophages, eye pressure went up. Next, we asked how resident macrophages regulate eye pressure. We discovered that when we removed resident macrophages, the was a build-up of extracellular or scaffolding material in the drain of the eye, which increases resistance and pressure within the eye. Our study was the first to show that resident macrophages are important in maintaining normal eye pressure.Glaucoma is a disease of aging, and there are changes to the immune system that occur with aging as well. Our next steps are to look for resident macrophages in human eyes and to determine how they act in eyes with glaucoma. Our goal in the future is to target these specialized immune cells with drug therapies to lower eye pressure and prevent vision loss in patients with glaucoma.Read More:[DukeHealth] - Immune Cells Play Key Role in Regulating Eye Pressure Linked to Glaucoma[Immunity] - Resident tissue macrophages maintain intraocular pressure homeostasis This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On University of Miami Week: Water insecurity is already affecting more people than previously thought.Justin Stoler, professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development, explores the quiet water crisis.Faculty Bio:Dr. Justin Stoler’s research explores urban health disparities using social, environmental, and spatial epidemiological methods. He is also affiliated with the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy. Dr. Stoler enjoys field work and has worked in several countries—including a decade of experience in Accra, Ghana—exploring links between neighborhood structure, geodemographics, the environment, communicable diseases, and water insecurity. Dr. Stoler directs the Social & Health Inequities Research & Education (SHIRE) Lab, which provides research and professional development opportunities to students at all levels. His courses blend geospatial frameworks with contemporary population, environmental, and global health issues.Transcript:When most Americans think of water insecurity, they imagine crises in developing nations and assume that safe tap water is a given in the world’s wealthiest country. Our research tells a different story. As a global water security researcher, my work focuses on measuring how communities interact with water. Scientists traditionally measured water security by looking at groundwater availability, reservoir levels, or piped water volumes. However, those metrics miss the human experience entirely. Years ago, I was part of a team that created the HWISE scale, a psychometric tool that measures how people experience water insecurity through physical burdens, such as being unable to wash your hands, and psychological distress, such as worrying about not having enough water. The HWISE scale improved our understanding of how water insecurity impacts households globally. Now, I co-lead a team that created a new scale to measure household water insecurity in the United States. What we’re uncovering is a quiet crisis driven by environmental shocks to water systems, such as floods, fires, and freezes; new contaminants such as PFAS and microplastics; and declining public trust. Our data suggest that roughly one in five US households may experience at least low-level water insecurity. We need to face several realities. First, national wealth does not guarantee water security; the struggle for water in America is more common than we realize and hurts national productivity. Second, the days of bountiful, cheap, clean water are behind us. But, third and most importantly, we have solutions, such as technology that improves water access and reliability, and payment models that make water more affordable. Our new metrics will help track progress in securing safe water for all Americans. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On University of Miami Week: To maximize the impact of research on youth anxiety, asking the right questions matter.Jill Ehrenreich-May, professor of psychology and pediatrics, dives into this.Faculty Bio:Dr. Jill Ehrenreich-May is a Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Psychology at the University of Miami. Dr. Ehrenreich-May’s research is concerned with the development and evaluation of transdiagnostic programs for youth presenting with or at risk for anxiety, depression and related concerns. She directs a community-research clinic at the University of Miami, the Child and Adolescent Mood and Anxiety Treatment Program, which serves as a hub for training and dissemination of evidence-based practices in youth psychotherapy and allows for the study of mechanisms and outcomes associated with transdiagnostic treatments for youth.Transcript:Back-to-school season is stressful. Parents, teachers, and especially students, commonly experience heightened emotions ahead of the new school year. Trained as a clinical psychologist, one of my areas of expertise is youth anxiety and stress. When training future clinical psychologists, I want my students to understand the experience of anxiety and deliver the right tools to cope.For more than two decades, I have led research on the Unified Protocols for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children and Adolescents, a compelling collection of treatment strategies addressing a range of emotional needs in kids. Put simply, this work aims to frame existing evidence-based treatments typically developed in research settings in a manner that makes them feasible and scalable in any environment. However, much of that work originated in my research clinic. To truly understand how to make youth psychotherapy scalable, you need to move your research outside such a highly controlled setting.Few evidence-based interventions built for clinical delivery pivot to outside settings, like schools, and even fewer incorporate school community perspectives during adaptation. My latest research attempts to fill these gaps in the literature. I iteratively adapted the Unified Protocol for Adolescents in lower-resource high schools to deliver hands-on, effective cognitive behavioral treatment strategies to students in a natural, familial setting. The resulting program was designed with input from the community, including teachers, students, families, administrators, and more, on how to best adapt the intervention. Results were strong. We found that anxiety-related life interference, irritability and behavioral problems were reduced and students had better classroom behavior. The program’s success demonstrates that as practitioners and researchers, we need to tailor interventions to best fit the unique needs of youth and the world they live in.Read More:[Miami] - College of Arts & Sciences This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On University of Miami Week: Can AI bridge the mental health equity gap for Hispanic youth?Willy Prado, distinguished university professor of nursing and health studies, public health sciences, and psychology, explores the possibilities.Faculty Bio:Guillermo (Willy) Prado is professor of Nursing and Health Studies, Public Health Sciences, and Psychology at the University of Miami. He is a pioneer in health disparities and behavioral interventions for the prevention of substance use, sexual risk behaviors, obesity and mental health in Hispanic families.He has received approximately $20 million of continuous NIH and CDC funding since his doctoral studies (including approx. $1 million dollars/year of active funding) as PI and over $100 million as Co-I, mentor, or collaborator. His research has led to over 190 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. His h-index is 48 and the average number of citations per year in recent years is over 800, speaking to the impact of his work on the field.Prado’s scholarship on family-based preventive interventions and Hispanic adolescents is internationally recognized. At the time that Prado and his colleagues began developing family-based preventive interventions for Hispanics, there were no such interventions for this population. For significantly advancing knowledge in the behavioral interventions, health disparities, and adolescent health literature, he has received numerous awards and honors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Science Network; the Community, Culture, and Prevention Science Award from the Society for Prevention Research; and election to the prestigious National Academy of Medicine. His research has been featured in multiple media outlets including the Miami Herald, NBC, Univision, and CNN en Español. He has also been invited to serve as a witness to the U.S. House Select Committee on Economic Disparities and Fairness in Growth to speak about prevention science and health disparities.In addition to research and scholarship, Prado has a strong commitment to teaching and mentoring. In addition to his well-funded research program and his administrative responsibilities since arriving at University of Miami in 2007, Prado has taught courses in prevention science, research methods, professional development, and biostatistics. In recognition of his teaching, Prado received the inaugural faculty teaching award in the Department of Public Health Sciences awarded by the Public Health Student Association.Prado is also dedicated to mentoring and training the next generation of prevention and health disparities scientists, particularly those who identify as underrepresented minorities (URM). In fact, more than 90 percent of his doctoral mentees in the past 10 years have been URMs. All his doctoral mentees have pursued careers in research, academia, and industry. His post-doctoral fellows have all successfully pursued faculty positions upon completion of their post-doctoral training and all his post-doctoral fellows have received NIH K awards and/or R01s within 18 months of completing their fellowship with him. Prado has been the recipient of mentoring awards including the award for mentoring early career preventionists from the Society for Prevention Research and the Presidential Award of the Florida Education Fund for his commitment to training underrepresented minorities.Prado served as interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, and previously as vice provost for Faculty Affairs and dean of the Graduate School. He previously served as the founding director of the Division of Prevention Science and Community Health, director of the Epidemiology Division, and director of the PhD program in Epidemiology in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Miller School of Medicine. He is former associate editor of Prevention Science and the immediate past president of the Society for Prevention Research, an organization of more than 800 prevention scientist, practitioners, and policy makers. Currently, he is on the executive committee of the Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine of Florida; and on the board of directors of Research!America, a non-profit medical and health research advocacy alliance, whose board of directors consists of former secretaries of Health and Human Services, former NIH directors, the president of the National Academy of Medicine, the president & Chief Executive Officer of the American Association of Colleagues of Nursing, and other health leaders and policy makers.Transcript:Hispanic adolescents face significant systemic barriers to mental health care, ranging from limited access to insurance to cultural stigma surrounding treatment. Yet, even as these challenges persist, effective solutions are within reach. When families are equipped with the right tools and support, parents are uniquely equipped to play a powerful role in promoting their adolescent’s mental health and well-being. For more than two decades, with vital funding, our team developed and rigorously tested Familias Unidas, a culturally grounded, family-based intervention designed to empower parents and strengthen parent-adolescent relationships. By helping families improve communication, build trust, enhance parental involvement, and develop effective monitoring skills, Familias Unidas empowers families to create healthier, more supportive home environments. Through multiple clinical trials, we proved that strengthening family functioning significantly reduces risk behaviors and improves adolescent mental health outcomes. But research only transforms lives when it reaches the communities who need it most. While we’ve successfully implemented Familias Unidas in communities locally, nationally and internationally, expanding access remains a critical priority. That’s where AI offers an unprecedented opportunity. With ongoing funding and support, we’re pioneering AI-powered digital therapists that can guide family sessions, facilitate more constructive conversations and provide personalized guidance that strengthens family relationships in real time. This work showcases the transformative power of research funding: taking interventions proven through decades of scientific research, combining them with innovative technology, and making evidence-based family mental health support accessible to families wherever they are. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On University of Miami Week: What is the long-term effect of AI on human behavior? Nina Huang, professor and chair of business technology, discusses how to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.Faculty Bio:Nina Huang is the Department Chair of Business Technology and Dennis & Smith Family Endowed Chair Professor at the Miami Herbert Business School, University of Miami, Florida. Nina’s expertise centers on understanding how digital technology can enhance user experiences and improve business outcomes. Her research program covers a range of digital contexts, including live streaming, online dating, online learning, online healthcare, mobile applications, and digital commerce.Transcript:Artificial intelligence and digital technologies have permeated most aspects of our lives, but what impacts will it have on the human experience long-term? My research investigates how the cutting-edge technology will influence everything from human decision-making to economic and business outcomes. I seek to uncover the unknown by examining how AI and digital technologies affect the human experience across a variety of contexts, from online shopping and gaming, to software development and business strategy. With any transformation, there will be positive and negative outcomes. In the case of AI, the consequences can have polarizing effects. On the one hand, AI stands to create tremendous opportunities. For instance, in a recent study I found that incorporating AI streaming assistants into livestream sales improved the online shopper experience. The technology mitigated common tensions in livestream selling, increased sales by 3%, and reduced product return rates by more than 12%. The technology can spark unintended consequences as well. My research has also investigated the AI investments that businesses make following media exposure of labor issues. In these instances, when businesses invest in AI to address exposed problems, they often automate, rather than augment, human tasks, which puts jobs at risk. The range of effects underscore the importance of developing a comprehensive understanding of AI technology itself and its impact on user experience and business outcomes.The academic community is uniquely positioned to be a force of good in this AI-led transformation. It is our responsibility to investigate and rigorously vet the evidence that can help users, organizations, and stakeholders understand the opportunities and challenges that accompany advancements. Let’s think about AI not simply as a technological innovation, but as a force that is transforming human behavior and institutions.Read More:[News @ the U] - AI assistant for online shopping[News @ the U] - Labor feeling the squeeze from AI’s advance This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On University of Miami Week: Let’s rethink how discovery happens.Alberto Caban-Martinez, Vice Provost for Research and Scholarship, examines how collaboration can help.Faculty Bio:Alberto J. Caban-Martinez is vice provost for research and scholarship at the University of Miami. He is also a tenured professor of public health sciences at the university’s Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. As vice provost, he provides strategic leadership and oversight for the University’s research enterprise, advancing institutional priorities that promote research integrity, innovation, and global impact across its 12 schools and colleges. He directs initiatives that strengthen compliance and research governance, fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, and works with faculty, staff, trainees, and leadership to enhance research infrastructure and a culture of scientific excellence.Transcript:The men and women in the fire service go above and beyond to protect our communities. They give unconditionally in high stress and dangerous environments. Unfortunately, repeated exposure in those environments can increase health risks. For instance, fire investigators, a specialized group who analyze the root-cause of fires, report higher rates of bladder cancer. My research leads a national longitudinal cohort evaluating health outcomes in an effort to inform health and safety best practices for this group.My team of multidisciplinary experts studies ways to reduce risk for fire service members by investigating evidence-based practices. Our ability to connect experts across disciplines, thoughts, and experiences positions us to solve this challenge.We see this approach front and center in the University of Miami Laboratory for INtegrative Knowledge. Known as U-LINK, this university initiative fosters collaborative research teams to tackle complex problems. The U-LINK approach catalyzes, nurtures, and develops interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research and science. We’ve seen remarkable success. To date, the program has elevated critical research, such as sustainable coastal protections, improved hurricane cone visualizations, and music therapy initiatives, into federally-funded, world-class efforts with global impacts.We’re seeing societal issues continue to compound: first responder health and safety, climate change, extreme weather, energy demands, and more. Only when we’re willing to rethink the traditional research framework and not only embrace, but bolster collaboration, will we find solutions to our most vexing issues.[Miami] - U-LINK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Mindfulness may help to lower anxiety for some, but not all.  How do we know who is who? Resh Gupta, postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis, looks into the research. Resh Gupta is a postdoctoral research associate with the Mindfulness Science & Practice Cluster and the Cognitive Control & Psychopathology Laboratory at […] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Understanding how your body senses muscle movement is essential for balance. Katherine Wilkinson, professor of biology at San Jose State University, examines how it works. Katherine Wilkinson is a Professor of biology at San José State University in San Jose, California. Wilkinson’s specialty is studying and understanding proprioception–how our brains understand our physical presence in […] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Can you trust your gut to heal your brain?Sonia Villapol, associate professor and neuroscientist at the Center for Neuroregeneration and the Department of Neurosurgery at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, delves into the microbiome.Faculty Bio:Dr. Sonia Villapol is an Associate Professor and neuroscientist at the Center for Neuroregeneration and the Department of Neurosurgery, Houston Methodist Research Institute (Houston, TX). She received her B.Sc. in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from the University of Santiago de Compostela (2003) and completed an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2007). She pursued postdoctoral research at the CNRS–Université Pierre et Marie Curie (VI) and INSERM in Paris, and later at the National Institutes of Health/Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine and the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, MD. In 2014 she joined Georgetown University as a Research Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, moving to HMRI in 2018.Dr. Villapol’s work, funded by the NIH, Department of Defense, and private foundations, investigates mechanisms of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration across AD and TBI models, the brain–gut axis, and the development of neurorestorative drug-delivery systems. She has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.Transcript:Brain injuries and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease remain some of the greatest challenges in modern medicine. My research is centered on understanding how inflammation, the immune system, and the gut microbiome interact to shape brain health after injury and during disease progression. When the brain experiences trauma, such as a traumatic brain injury, the damage extends far beyond the initial event. The injury triggers a cascade of biological responses that includes immune activation, metabolic dysfunction, and communication among multiple organs, particularly the brain, liver, and gut. This interconnected network, often described as the gut-brain axis, plays a critical role in regulating inflammation, recovery, and long-term neurological outcomes. In our laboratory, we investigate how signals derived from the microbiome influence the brain’s immune environment and how these interactions can amplify or prolong neuroinflammation after injury. We are especially interested in understanding how these processes may contribute to neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, where chronic inflammation is believed to accelerate disease progression. To address these questions, our work combines a wide range of approaches, including animal models, clinical research, microbiome sequencing, integration of personalized data using AI, advanced imaging, and nanomedicine. One major focus is the development of targeted nanomedicine therapies that deliver treatments directly to specific brain cells involved in inflammation and tissue damage. At the same time, we are exploring whether modulating the microbiome through diet, probiotics, or related strategies can help restore balance to the gut-brain axis and promote recovery after injury. By integrating microbiology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering, we aim to uncover new mechanisms and identify innovative therapeutic opportunities. Ultimately, our goal is to translate this knowledge into more effective treatments that protect the brain, reduce long-term damage, and improve patient outcomes. The future of brain health may depend not only on treating the brain itself, but on understanding the entire biological system that supports it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

How do we get better outcomes at lower cost for preschool children?Angeline S. Lillard, Commonwealth professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, explores one option.Faculty Bio:Angeline S. Lillard is the Commonwealth Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia where she directs the Early Development Laboratory and the Montessori Science Program; her research focuses on children’s play and Montessori education. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science, and Chief Editor of Frontiers in Developmental Psychology. She received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 1991, and the American Psychological Association’s Boyd McCandless Award for her early career contributions to Developmental Science. Her book, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (Oxford University Press) received the Cognitive Development Society Book Award, is translated into several languages, and is currently in its 3rd edition. She has been keynote speaker at dozens of Psychology and Montessori conferences worldwide. Her research has been funded by the Institutes of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and many private foundations.Transcript:Preschool has been around for over a century, but we can't seem to settle on the best models to use--entirely free play, or dive into academics. New research shows the Montessori method yields better outcomes at lower cost. The study followed for 3 years 588 children who had entered a random lottery for a seat at one of 24 public Montessori schools across the country. About a third won a spot, and the rest were waitlisted. The children were no different on outcomes at baseline when they started pre-K, nor were they different at the end of PK3 or PK4. But at ages 5-6, several differences emerged, and the effects were large. First, children who attended Montessori were better readers; specifically, a child who would have scored at the 50th percentile in reading at a traditional school would have scored at the 71st percentile had they attended Montessori. Children who got into Montessori also had better executive function, short-term memory and social understanding at the end of kindergarten. And the cost savings were $13,127 per child as compared to traditional PK3 through kindergarten programs--a savings that would really add up across all the 3- to 6-year-olds in a district. This is not the first study to show better outcomes from Montessori--other randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and two meta-analyses done in 2023 all come to the same conclusion.Why isn't there more of this model? One reason may be that there are many poor exemplars. Real Montessori has 3-year age groupings, and teachers give children structured lessons on how to use hundreds of hands-on materials Dr. Maria Montessori and her collaborators developed to convey learning, and then children freely explore those materials with their peers, without grades, and without teachers dictating their schedules. Bridging play and work, the public Montessori preschool model yields better outcomes, at lower cost.Read More:[PNAS] - A national randomized controlled trial of the impact of public Montessori preschool at the end of kindergarten This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Can AI make spacecraft propulsion more efficient?Marcos Fernandez-Tous, associate professor of space propulsion and hypersonic aerodynamics at the University of North Dakota, discusses this topic.Faculty Bio:I currently coordinate the Space Studies Propulsion Lab within the Department of Space Sciences and offer courses on space propulsion, air-breathing engines, and hypersonic aerodynamics. My teaching emphasizes project-based learning and follows the Innovation-Based Learning methodology.I hold a Ph.D. in Space Sciences from the University of North Dakota, where my dissertation focused on developing a novel synchronization protocol for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Additionally, I earned an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering with a specialization in Air Traffic Management from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, completing a thesis on GPS-based approach procedures for Palma de Mallorca Airport.My research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to integrating artificial intelligence technologies to advance space propulsion development. Beyond academia, I actively contribute to the community of Grand Forks, where I have resided since 2018.Transcript:Every year, hundreds of rockets are launched into space, with numbers rising as missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond become the new reality. But these ambitions depend on propulsion—the technology that moves spacecraft forward. Breakthroughs in this technology are essential to make interplanetary travel faster and more efficient, and artificial intelligence is emerging as a key enabler for that.One branch of AI, reinforcement learning, teaches machines through trial and error, improving performance by interpreting outcomes and adjusting strategies. This capability is particularly valuable for complex systems that exceed human intuition, such as propulsion systems design. Reinforcement Learning can optimize flight paths to minimize fuel use and travel time, or it can assist engineers by analyzing countless variables—materials, geometry, and heat transfer—to identify configurations that maximize efficiency.Nuclear propulsion is among the most promising concepts for deep-space missions. Fission-based systems have been tested before, while fusion remains a frontier. Nuclear thermal propulsion, which transfers heat from atomic reactions to hydrogen propellant, could dramatically reduce travel time compared to conventional propulsion. Reinforcement Learning supports this technology by optimizing reactor designs, such as those explored since NERVA program at NASA in the 60s and 70s.Beyond design, Reinforcement Learning can manage real-time operations, including fuel consumption for adaptable missions. This flexibility is critical for spacecraft that must respond to changing priorities, such as military or multi-role satellites. The ability of Reinforcement Learning to learn and adapt makes it a powerful tool for addressing uncertainty in mission planning.As propulsion technologies evolve, AI—and derivative tools such as reinforcement learning—will play a central role in enabling faster, safer, and more sustainable space exploration, opening pathways to destinations across and beyond our solar system.Read More:[The Conversation] - AI is making spacecraft propulsion more efficient – and could even lead to nuclear‑powered rockets This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Despite efforts to avoid it, vessel collisions are still hindering conservation efforts for whales.Dana Cusano, research assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Syracuse University, explores what changes can occur.Faculty Bio:Dana Cusano is a bioacoustician and behavioral ecologist whose research focuses primarily on the acoustic behavior of marine mammals. Her interests include the use of vocal signaling in animals and the link between vocalizations and behavior. Specifically, she is interested in the social interactions between individuals and how arousal may be reflected in acoustic signals. Past research has also centered on investigating the movement of animals in response to anthropogenic disturbance with the use of animal movement models.Currently, Dana’s research involves studying the acoustic and movement behavior of sei whales, North Atlantic right whales, and humpback whales with the use of biologging tags.Transcript:Many whale species feed in Massachusetts Bay and Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, but two face an especially urgent threat: the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, with only about 384 left, and the endangered sei whale, a species we know very little about. Both can be found close to shore and in heavily populated areas. They also often feed on the same prey near the surface where they are difficult to see, putting them at high risk for vessel collisions, or ship strikes, one of the most serious threats large whales face.Decades of conservation efforts have worked to reduce maximum speeds during specific times of year, and even to shift shipping lanes to avoid critical habitats. Despite this, ship strikes remain one of the leading causes of death and injury to right whales — and the number of sei whales struck in the North Atlantic appears to be increasing and is likely underestimated.A better understanding of what conditions increase that risk, and how to prevent collisions, is critical. My research uses suction-cup tags attached to whales in Massachusetts Bay and the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary to understand how they move near the surface and underwater while they feed in this important spring-time foraging habitat. These data are combined with information on prey to build models that can identify and predict foraging hot spots — areas where feeding whales are likely to aggregate.Using remote-sensing technology, we can identify these hot spots from space even before whales are detected in the area. That information is then pushed as alerts to vessels using the global Automatic Identification System network and to vessel operators in the app WhaleAlert — so mariners can respond before it’s too late. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Would secession work in America?Ryan Griffiths, professor in the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University, looks into why or why not.Faculty Bio:Ryan Griffiths focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty, state systems, and international order. He teaches a variety of courses in international relations. His two recent books include: (1) The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work (Oxford University Press, 2025); and (2) Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia University Press, 2025, with Charles Butcher). Previously, he taught at both the University of Sydney in Australia and at John Hopkins University. He earned a Ph.D. in international relations and comparative politics at Columbia University in 2010.Transcript:There is a growing interest in secession between Red and Blue America. A 2023 Axios poll found that 20% of Americans support a national divorce, and a 2025 Times/Siena poll found that 64% of Americans think the country is too politically divided to solve the nation’s problems.The key factor driving this interest in secession is polarization. Whether it is the Red-State secessionists, the California Independence Party, or the Texas Nationalists, they all point to unstoppable polarization and political dysfunction as the reason secession is necessary. Secession occurs when part of a sovereign state breaks away to form its own recognized sovereign state. In my research, I argue that while polarization is a serious problem in America, secession is not the solution. Roughly half of secessionist movements turn violent, and most of them fail to gain independence. When they do secede peacefully, it is when specific conditions hold: there is a distinct and regionally concentrated nation, with clear internal borders, and a special administrative status that justifies why that nation can secede when others cannot. None of these conditions hold in America.The attempt to divide America into two or more countries would almost certainly produce great violence. The so-called red and blue populations are intermixed. Trying to unmix that population and would create a cascade of hyper-polarization and ideological conflict. I argue that rather than turning to secession as a solution to America’s problems, the better choice is to target the roots of polarization and seek common ground.Read More:[Oxford University Press] - The Disunited States[Columbia University Press] - Before Colonization Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

How space are designed can lead to longer wait times for some.Lawrence Chua, associate professor of Architectural History at Syracuse University, explores why.Faculty Bio:Lawrence Chua is a historian of the modern built environment with an emphasis on the trans-regional histories of Asian architecture and urban cultures. He is the author of Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, published in the University of Hawai’i Press’ Spatial Habitus series in 2021. His current research project, “Untimely Interventions,” investigates the ways modern architecture structured colonial and nationalist perceptions of time and sovereignty in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos from 1893 to 1958. The study frames modern built-forms as “chronopolitical infrastructure”—material sites where the historical consciousness and territorial logic of empire were actively constructed. Through archival and field-based research, it examines temples, museums, monuments, and exposition pavilions as mediated structures through which colonial powers and indigenous regimes shaped national imaginaries. Dr. Chua is also writing a history of “mid-century modern” architecture from the perspective of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung and editing a collection of translations of primary source documents from the early history of the architectural profession across Asia. Dr. Chua’s scholarship has also appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, October, the Journal of Urban History, Fabrications, the Journal of Architecture, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and Southeast of Now. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. He is co-editor of the ArchAsia book series for Hong Kong University Press. He also serves as co-chair of the Race and Architectural History Affiliate Group of the Society of Architectural Historians.Dr. Chua was most recently a scholar in residence at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He has been a Marie S. Curie Junior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität and a research fellow at the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the International Institute of Asian Studies at Universiteit Leiden. At Syracuse University, he teaches courses in the histories of global modern architecture, Chinese architecture, Buddhist architecture, postcolonial utopias, and monuments, memory, and melancholia. As a Faculty Fellow in the Special Collections Research Center 2024-2025, he developed a course on the spatial histories of LGBTQ+ communities in Syracuse. Dr. Chua has taught courses in the history and theory of architecture and urbanism as well as studio courses at Hamilton College, New York University, and Chulalongkorn University. He received his PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University in 2012. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, he is a founding board member with the artists Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer, of Denniston Hill, a not-for-profit arts center.Transcript:What if power isn’t just exercised through space—borders, buildings, highways—but through time itself?Take an airport terminal. Its long corridors are designed around an ideal walking speed. Security checkpoints create waiting as an architectural condition—ropes, scanners, holding areas. Departure gates synchronize passengers to global time zones, while detention rooms and passport control stretch time into hours or days for others. And from above, the control tower coordinates it all.This is chronopolitical infrastructure: architecture that organizes who moves quickly, who waits, and whose time is valued. The same building can accelerate executives through priority lanes while slowing migrants, service workers, or asylum seekers through layered delays.During the twentieth century, architects and planners increasingly designed buildings around political timelines—speed, efficiency, productivity, and development. Those assumptions hardened into concrete, circulation paths, and zoning codes.Seeing architecture as chronopolitical infrastructure reminds us that time is not abstract, it’s designed. And if time has been designed to serve power, it can also be redesigned to support care, repair, and more just futures.Read More:[Taylor & Francis] - Perfecting Siam: Sovereignty, Sacred Space, and Territory at Wat Rachathiwat[University of California Press] - A Tale of Two Crematoria: Funeral Architecture and the Politics of Representation in Mid-Twentieth-Century Bangkok This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Are you talking to a real person? How do you know?Jason Davis, research professor and co-director of the Newhouse Synthetic Media Lab at Syracuse University, examines these questions.Faculty Bio:Dr. Jason Davis is a research professor in the office of Research and Creative Activity at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and co-director of both the Newhouse Synthetic Media Lab and the Emerging Insight Lab. At Syracuse University, Dr. Davis research focuses on the development of AI tools for the detection of synthetic media and disinformation well as STEM focused communication and professional development.Prior to joining Syracuse University, Dr. Davis was director of Business Development and Operations at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he developed research partnerships in the area of upstream and downstream biologics manufacturing and served as Academic co-chair for the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) workforce development committee. Prior to RPI, he served as global training and development leader at General Electric’s Global Research Center, and as a principal scientist leading research efforts in water purification technologies, CO2 capture, nano-particle drug delivery and DNA and RNA stabilization technology. Prior to his role at GE, Davis was a Senior Research Scientist at Curia Global where his research focused on drug discovery in the areas of oncology, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes.Davis’s current research focuses on the detection of misinformation and disinformation using AI/ML tools and the development of detection systems for synthetic media including text, images, audio and video as well as explainability frameworks for AI and Human-in-the-Loop decision making.Dr. Davis holds more than 10 patents in the areas of diabetes, water purification technology, anti-fouling coatings, and RNA sample stabilization technology.Davis earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from McGill University, and a B.Sc. in Biochemistry (with honors) from Laurentian University.Transcript:Over the past year my collaborator Dr. Gina Luttrell and I have been asking a deceptively simple question: Can humans still tell if a person even exists? To answer this question, we first wanted to find out if people could tell when a short profile was written by a machine rather than a human. To find out, we assembled one hundred profiles, half authored by real journalism students and subject matter experts, and half generated by four different large language models. We asked people to read the profiles and label them as “human” or “synthetic.” The result was striking. Participants were correct only 54% of the time, just a shade above the 50% level that equates to random guessing.At the same time, we built an AI detector trained on a separate set of 3,000 profiles. When we ran that detector over the same hundred profiles, it correctly identified 46 of the 50 synthetic profiles and 42 of the 50 human profiles, for an overall accuracy of 88%. What do these numbers tell us? First, as large language models become more fluent, human heuristics, or the gut reactions we take for granted, for spotting deception erode quickly. Second, with the arrival of generative AI, the need to determine if something is real or synthetic represents a new layer of complexity for humans to navigate. Our research suggests breaking this task into three distinct components can help: The first is Detection: Is the content human-generated or synthetic? Second is Attribution: Is it coming from who it says it’s coming from? Finally, Characterization: What is the intent? Is it malicious deception, genuine content, or something in between?By developing robust, trained AI analytics with clear, human readable evidence, we can assist humans with the first two tasks and help preserve digital trust and transparency. This lets us return to the deeply human task of deciding if the content is good or bad and what to do about it.As AI creates new challenges in digital trust and transparency, it also illuminates a broader reality: that perhaps the safest path forward is collaboration, not competition, between humans and machines. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Taxpayers will be footing the bill for reduced SNAP benefits for older adults.Colleen Heflin, professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University, explains why.Faculty Bio:Colleen Heflin is a professor of public administration and international affairs. She is also a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research and a research affiliate in the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health. She has served as associate dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and chair of the Public Administration and International Affairs Department.As a research and policy scholar for over twenty-five years, Heflin is regarded as a national expert on food insecurity, poverty and social policy. Heflin’s research has helped document the causes and consequences of food insecurity, identify the barriers and consequences of participation in nutrition programs, and understand the changing role of the public safety net in the lives of low-income Americans.Heflin has published over 80 research articles, and her work has appeared in leading journals such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Problems, Health Affairs, Medical Care, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Her research is regularly funded by the National Institutes for Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. From 2012-2017, Heflin was supported by a five-year award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service as Family Self-Sufficiency and Stability Research Scholar to explore how multiple program participation affects vulnerable families’ well-being.Heflin has experience engaging with federal policymakers, providing expert testimony before Congress, providing technical assistance to states working to improve access to food and nutrition assistance programs, and working with county agencies to redesign their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) application process. She founded the University of Missouri Federal Statistical Research Data Center and Missouri Population, Education and Health Center. She received the W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association in 2014.Transcript:Nationally, one in five of all SNAP recipients are over age 60. Until now, older adults were not subject to work requirements like their younger counterparts. But provisions in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill limit SNAP benefits for adults ages 60 to 64 without a dependent or disability to three months within a 36-month period unless they can show that they are spending 80-hours per month in work, training, or volunteer activities. Work requirements for programs like SNAP and Medicaid do not lead to increased work but instead result in fewer people receiving benefits. Nonetheless, an even more onerous version of work requirements were expanded for other groups as well, including adults 55-59, those with children who reach age 14, veterans, the homeless, and foster care youth.Reducing older adults’ access to SNAP is particularly shortsighted given the strength of the evidence regarding SNAP’s effectiveness at reducing food insecurity, which already affects 1 in 10 adults over age 60 nationally. Since food insecurity is associated with poor health, the ability to consistently afford nutritious food is considered important enough that the Veterans Health Administration, among others, now regularly screen for food insecurity. Because SNAP participation is associated with $1,400 in health care savings per year, reducing access will increase health care costs in the long run. And the increased health care costs will largely be shouldered by taxpayers since the federal government covers medical costs after age 65 through Medicare and many SNAP participants qualify for Medicaid. It is already too difficult for older adults to obtain SNAP benefits. Currently, just over one in two adults age 60 and older who qualify for SNAP participate. Increasing work requirements is a step in the wrong direction and will decrease SNAP participation, increase food insecurity, and make it harder to cope with diabetes and hypertension, increasing the public costs of Medicaid and Medicare.Read More:[Russell Sage Foundation] - Food for Thought: Understanding Older Adult Food Insecurity This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

One aggressive form of cancer can be set off by an accident in our cells. How do we fight this?Nancy Huang, professor at the Institute of Biosciences and Technology at Texas A&M University, examines.Faculty Bio:Yun (Nancy) Huang, PhD, is a professor at Texas A&M University Institute of Biosciences and Technology and Associate Director of the Center for Epigenetic and Disease Prevention (CEDP) in the Department of Translational Medical Sciences at the Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine. A principal investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health, the CPRIT, the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association, Dr. Huang’s research focuses on investigating transcriptional regulatory mechanisms that support normal development and on how epigenetic defects contribute to pathological conditions, including aging and cancer. Her work involves advanced understanding of TET enzymes and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, pioneering tools to study the “sixth DNA base” and its role in gene regulation and disease. As a highly recognized scientist with over 120 publications and numerous awards, Dr. Huang leads innovative studies at Texas A&M’s Institute of Biosciences and Technology, supported by multiple major research grants. She received her medical degree from Zhejiang University School of Medicine and her doctorate in biochemistry from Georgia State University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and La Jolla Institute.Transcript:Sometimes, a single glitch in our DNA can rewrite a cell’s destiny. In one rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer—called translocation renal cell carcinoma, or translocation kidney cancer—two genes that should never touch break apart and fuse together. That tiny accident sets off a biological chain reaction that turns normal kidney cells into unstoppable cancer factories.This disease mostly affects children and young adults, and one of its key culprits is a gene known as Transcription Factor E3, or TFE3. When TFE3 fuses with another gene, it creates a hybrid called a TFE3 oncofusion—a molecular impostor that rewires how genes are switched on and off. For years, researchers suspected these fusions somehow “supercharged” the cell’s control systems, but the underlying mechanism remained unclear.Now, scientists led by Dr. Lei Guo, Dr. Yubin Zhou, and Dr. Yun Huang, reports that many TFE3 fusion partners can bind to ribonucleic acid (RNA)—the messenger molecule that carries instructions from DNA.This RNA-binding ability lets the hybrid protein form microscopic droplet-like structures, known as biomolecular condensates, inside the cell nucleus. Within these droplets, TFE3 oncofusions pull together key gene-activation engines such as RNA polymerase II and paraspeckle component 1 (PSPC1), creating powerful “gene hubs” that drive cancer growth.Even more remarkably, the team designed a nanobody-based chemogenetic tool that can dissolve these droplets on demand. When they triggered it, the condensates broke apart—and tumor growth slowed sharply in both cultured cells and mice.By revealing how cancer cells weaponize these tiny droplets, the discovery opens a bold new way to disarm fusion-driven cancers—not by blocking genes, but by melting their molecular engines.Read More:[Nature] - RNA-mediated condensation of TFE3 oncofusions facilitates transcriptional hub formation to promote translocation renal cell carcinoma[Vital Record from TAMU] - Disrupting cancer’s secret hubs: A new way to halt tumor growth[EurekAlert!] - Disrupting cancer’s secret hubs: A new way to halt tumor growth This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

We are always looking for new ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease early.Amaryllis Tsiknia, neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, may have found a clue.Faculty Bio:Amaryllis is a 4th-year neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. She completed her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley with a degree in Cognitive Science, and then acquired her Master’s degree in Neuroimaging and Informatics. Her current research uses neuroimaging techniques to uncover how metabolic and vascular factors increase our risk for dementia with a special focus on type 2 diabetes mellitus.Transcript:Alzheimer’s disease is often discussed in terms of amyloid plaques and memory loss. But changes in how the brain manages blood flow and oxygen may also provide important early clues about risk.In our research, we studied older adults with and without cognitive impairment and looked at whether measures of cerebrovascular function were linked to known markers of Alzheimer’s risk.We used two noninvasive tools while participants rested quietly. One measured how fast blood moves through the major arteries in the brain. The other measured blood oxygen levels in the brain tissue near the surface of the cortex. We then used mathematical models to summarize how well the brain adjusts blood flow and oxygen levels in response to normal changes in blood pressure and carbon dioxide.What we found was notable. People with healthier vascular patterns, meaning blood vessels that behaved more like those seen in cognitively healthy aging, tended to have lower amyloid burden and larger hippocampal volume. The hippocampus is a brain region that is essential for memory, and smaller hippocampal volume is associated with greater Alzheimer’s risk.We also found that people with mild cognitive impairment or dementia showed poorer vascular indicators than cognitively normal adults.These findings suggest that cerebrovascular function is closely related to brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s risk and may be part of the disease continuum.Just as importantly, these measures are relatively low-cost and noninvasive compared with some other brain imaging approaches, and they do not require injections, radiation, or active participation during testing.This study does not prove cause and effect, but it supports ongoing work to test whether these vascular signals can help identify higher-risk individuals earlier and track brain health over time.Read More:[Keck School of Medicine at USC] - Novel markers of brain blood flow and oxygenation may offer early clues to Alzheimer’s risk This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Collaboration in mathematics has a long history.Kim Plofker, associate professor of mathematics at Union College, examines this.Faculty Bio:Kim Plofker is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She received her doctorate from the Department of the History of Mathematics at Brown University in 1995. Her research focuses on the history of mathematics and astronomy in India and its connections with Islamic and early modern European science. Kim Plofker’s books include Mathematics in India (Princeton, 2009); (with Anuj Misra and Clemency Montelle) The Sanskrit Astronomical Table Text Brahmatulyasarini (Brill, 2021); and (with Clemency Montelle and Glen Van Brummelen) From Samarqand to Jaipur: Evolving al-Kashi’s Approximation to the Sine of One Degree (Springer, 2025).Transcript:When you took math tests in school, the teacher told you to keep your eyes on your own paper. But the history of mathematical sciences in the real world is full of professional scientists glancing at their neighbors’ work, and often expanding it through ingenious discoveries of their own. In the days before modern physics and the automated clocks, calendars and computers arising from it, timekeeping methods and models of the universe were major scientific enterprises, and often quite controversial. Mathematicians from many different schools and cultures competed to develop theoretical models and computational techniques that were the most efficient, the most empirically accurate, or just the most impressively clever. And when they encountered a foreign visitor doing some interesting math in a different language, they called in a translator and got to work exchanging ideas. My current research focuses on a group of scholars in early 18th-century India, including Hindu and Muslim court astronomers writing in Sanskrit and Persian respectively, as well as European Jesuit missionaries bringing printed books in Latin. This was barely a century after the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition, so scientific hypotheses about the earth orbiting the sun instead of vice versa, and planets moving in elliptical orbits, were still somewhat debatable issues even in European astronomy. The Indian court astronomers were intrigued by these ideas although maybe not totally convinced, while the European visitors in turn were fascinated by some of the ingenious mathematical methods of their hosts. My colleagues and I are reading the manuscripts they created to find out more about how they put their ideas together.Read More:[Springer Nature] - From Samarqand to Jaipur Evolving al-Kāshī’s Approximation to the Sine of One Degree This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

What do green clay tennis courts have to do with climate change?Jonathan Lambert, visiting assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Climate Science at New York University, says it’s more than you might think.Faculty Bio:Jonathan Lambert is a geochemist and paleoclimatologist in the interdisciplinary-focused Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. His research themes are twofold - past climate change and modern climate solutions. In his paleoclimate research, he uses fossil plankton to reconstruct ocean conditions in the Pacific over the past 1.5 Million years. In his climate solutions work, he evaluates carbon dioxide removal strategies such as enhanced rock weathering, and develops new teaching and outreach approaches for emerging climate solutions. He teaches interdisciplinary seminars on ancient earth extremes, local climate change, and climate solutions. Dr. Lambert believes that engaging students of all backgrounds and interests in climate change education, outreach, and research is a bridge to better environmental understanding and contributes to lowering climate anxiety through the power of practical knowledge.Transcript:If you have seen one of the thousands of green clay tennis courts in America, you have witnessed a climate change mitigation technique called enhanced rock weathering. This is a natural process in which rocks like basalt undergo chemical weathering which converts atmospheric carbon dioxide into stable bicarbonate ions that do not contribute to global warming. Crushing these rocks and spreading them over large areas expedites weathering, and dozens of startups are applying this technique on farmland. Research is expanding on other suitable areas for enhanced weathering, and for our study we quantified its climate impact on green clay tennis courts – the American counterpart of the red clay courts common in Europe. As opposed to the crushed brick of red clay, all green clay courts are built using weatherable metabasalt. We used a database of 17,000 green clay courts and built a model to calculate the gross carbon sequestration at each court given the rocks’ grain size, chemical composition, and local air temperature. We also calculated carbon emissions associated with mining and transportation of material to each court during construction and maintenance. In total, we found that all courts in the US sequester a net total of approximately 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year – equivalent to the emissions of 4,200 passenger cars. Additionally, compared to the more common concrete courts, green clay courts emit at least 1.6 times less carbon dioxide from construction. Green clay courts therefore have high climate mitigation potential, and one simple opportunity to increase their carbon sequestration is to shift the proportion of newly built courts to favor clay over concrete. Additional climate benefits can be found by using smaller grain size materials for new clay courts, and by rigorously tracking and iterating on court maintenance practices.Read More:[NYU] - Green Clay Courts Serve Up Environmental Solutions by Absorbing Carbon DioxidePavia Lab at UWCarbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering on American green clay tennis courts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Revisiting the history of the National Alliance of Black Feminists provides a new lens through which to view intersectionality.Victoria Fields, doctoral candidate and instructor of record in Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explores this.Faculty Bio:Victoria T. Fields is an award-winning educator and scholar. She is currently a doctoral candidate and instructor of record in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Victoria is also a graduate assistant for instructional design at the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Higher Education, where she crafts content for Gardner Institute academies and co-leads faculty workshops on topics such as engaged pedagogy, moral imagination, and civic engagement in the classroom. Victoria’s research focuses on the rhetoric of Black women, archival rhetorics, and social movements. In 2025, Victoria was the recipient of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Her work has been published in Volume 11 of the Eastern Michigan University McNair Scholars Journal and Bloomsbury Press, along with co-authorship in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the Sociology of Sport Journal, and Political Communication.Transcript:As Black women were excluded from leadership in both the Black Freedom Movement and mainstream white feminism, they turned to one another to form independent organizations and advance critiques of racism, sexism, and capitalism—grounding their intersectional oppression within their lived experiences.One of the organizations that arose was the National Alliance of Black Feminists, or NABF, a nonprofit organization, active between 1976-1981 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. NABF was committed to achieving full equality for Black women in America. NABF was led by founder and executive director Brenda Eichelberger, who was a guidance counselor in the Chicago Public Schools.NABF used media to promote and generate critical awareness of Black women’s intersectional oppression. Their efforts are seen in public appearances on the Phil Donahue Show, published essays in the Chicago Defender, women’s news for a Change…and Essence Magazine. In addition, NABF led, organized, and facilitated consciousness-raising sessions, conferences, and assertiveness training for Black women. These rhetorical strategies functioned as key sites of NABF’s engagement in political education and organizing, yet the NABF has been understudied and undervalued within dominant historical and feminist scholarship.Revisiting the NABF allows us to uncover the depth and complexity of their rhetorical strategies and contributions to what we now recognize as “intersectionality.” NABF’s work rested on the premise that Black feminism is infused with humanism, linking their identity as Black women to humanity, one that has historically been subject to surveillance, regulation, and violence. They recreated the Bill of Rights through a Black feminist lens—insisting that dignity, agency, and liberation are inseparable.While the NABF was short-lived, the Alliance reframed ephemerality not as failure but as an intentional and responsive space for Black feminist organizing. The NABF’s legacy offers a living template of constructive engagement guiding our collective journey toward liberation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Wichita State University Week: What can we learn about the core of the Sun?Nick Solomey, professor at the Farimount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, looks for answers.Faculty Bio:Nickolas Solomey’s research is in the area of experimental particle and astroparticle physics, in the past he worked extensively on quark flavor physics by rare decays of hadrons, CP violation with Kaons, the study of nuclear states of matter and hadronic interaction physics. He was the co-spokesman of the Fermilab E907 experiment. He is also author of the book The Elusive Neutrino, and continues as editor of the Conference series on Hyperon, Charm and Beauty Hadrons, and has over 200 referred articles in physics research. His current experiments include neutrino experiments of NOvA and DUNE at Fermilab, and he is the PI of a new NASA project Neutrino Solar Orbiting Laboratory that aims to do unique neutrino science with a neutrino space-craft. Since 2018 he has been NASA Innovation Advanced Concept Fellow.Transcript:In 2016, I brought what many considered a “crazy” idea to NASA. It relates to neutrinos, which are mysterious subatomic particles that can go through matter as if it’s not there. Neutrinos should be massless, but we’ve proven they have mass. Most neutrino detectors are massive and experiments must be conducted underground. I suggested studying solar neutrinos, and noted that a small detector would be powerful enough to allow us to learn more about the solar neutrinos produced inside the Sun’s core.At the time, NASA was preparing to launch a spacecraft that would travel close to the Sun. Named the Parker Solar Probe, it entered space in 2018 and is still making close passes by the Sun.Solar neutrinos fly directly to and through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, and the number of these particles increases dramatically closer to the Sun—about 1,000 times higher at seven solar radii than at Earth. A detector placed there becomes effectively 1,000 times more powerful. Building a 250-killigram detector would result in, by far, the largest terrestrial solar neutrino experiment ever.The detector would allow us to study the nuclear fusion core of the Sun in unprecedented detail, and to investigate neutrino properties in new ways, including measuring how solar neutrinos change with distance.We’re now preparing to launch a .1 kg test detector into low-Earth polar orbit, with funding to operate it for one year. Ultimately, we hope to propose a small spacecraft carrying an approximately 250 kg detector close to the Sun. Operating for 5 to 10 years, such a mission would dramatically improve our understanding of the Sun’s fusion core—the source of the energy that sustains life on Earth.Read More:In-Space Neutrino Detection This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Wichita State University Week: Reducing lift-off weight can be crucial for spaceflight.Waruna Seneviratne, director of the Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems (ATLAS) at the National Institute for Aviation Research, explores one way to do so.Faculty Bio:Waruna Seneviratne is the Director of the Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems (ATLAS) at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), Wichita State University. With over 25 years at NIAR, he leads a diverse research portfolio in advanced manufacturing, inspection, durability, damage tolerance, certification, and aging of composite aircraft structures—supported by agencies including the FAA, DoD, DHS, NASA, and major aerospace manufacturers.In 2019, he founded the NIAR ATLAS Manufacturing Innovation Center to create a makerspace-style environment for accelerating advanced manufacturing research and prototyping. He also leads the Manufacturing for Affordable Sustainable Composites (MASC) initiative, sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab, which focuses on integrating in-process inspection technologies into manufacturing. His team’s automated fiber placement (AFP) inspection system received the 2023 JEC Composites Innovation Award for Digital, AI & Data. In 2024, his work on thermoplastic injection overmolded aircraft window plugs—adapting automotive technologies for high-rate aerospace production—earned both the Best Technical Paper Award at SAMPE and the CAMX Innovation Award.Waruna serves on the Technical Oversight Committee for NASA’s Advanced Composites Consortium (HiCAM) and the Executive Steering Committee for the Office of Naval Research’s Composites Manufacturing Technology Center through The Composites Consortium. He is a recipient of NASA’s Group Achievement Award (2022) for his contributions to the Advanced Composites Project, and the “Turning Goals into Reality” Honor Award (2002) for his work with the AGATE Alliance.Before joining NIAR, Waruna worked as a stress analyst on the Airbus A380 program, ensuring compliance with FAA and EASA certification standards. He holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Wichita State University and has lived in Wichita for over 30 years.Transcript:Today’s space structures are built to survive one of the most violent environments imaginable—launch. As a result, they are often overdesigned, carrying extra mass, cost, and complexity just to endure those few critical minutes. At the same time, everything we send to space must fit within the space of a payload bay. This constraint forces engineers to fold structures into compact, origami-like forms—packed with joints, motors, and deployment mechanisms that add weight, introduce risk, and create potential points of failure.But what if we didn’t have to build everything on Earth?What if we could build them in space instead?To meet this challenge, a new approach is emerging: Automated Tool-less Manufacturing, or AToM. This system uses two coordinated robotic arms to fabricate high-performance thermoplastic composite structures directly in space. Working together, they place continuous fibers with precision, creating strong, lightweight, three-dimensional parts—without molds, without ovens or autocalves, and without the constraints of traditional manufacturing.Think of it as additive manufacturing—but engineered for structural strength with continuous fiber composites.The impact is transformative. By eliminating tooling and reducing dependence on multiple launches, AToM removes traditional limits on size, weight, and complexity. Structures no longer need to fold or deploy—they can be built exactly as designed, with fewer joints and far less mechanical complexity and weight.And this isn’t theoretical. At the NIAR ATLAS Manufacturing Innovation Center, this technology has already demonstrated the ability to rapidly produce aerospace-quality composite structures on-site.Even more, the thermoplastic materials used are recyclable—opening the door to a circular manufacturing economy in space, where every resource matters.From orbit to the Moon, to Mars and beyond, this technology redefines not just how we build—but where we build.Read More:Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems - ATLASNew Technology Can Create Composite Structures in SpaceIn-Situ Consolidation Thermoplastic Process Development for Toolless Automated Fiber Placement Manufacturing in Space This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Wichita State University Week: Should we change the way we think about using generative AI for learning?JaeHwan Byun, associate professor in the College of Education, explores this question.Faculty Bio:Dr. JaeHwan Byun is an Associate Professor in the School of Education, College of Applied Studies at Wichita State University. He joined WSU in 2015 and currently serves as Program Chair for the Master of Education in Learning and Instructional Design and Director of the Applied AI in Education Research Lab. Dr. Byun’s work focuses on how educators and learners can engage in learning experiences that are engaging, infused with meaning, and experienced as coherent and complete. Building on longstanding work in educational technology, his current scholarship foregrounds generative AI (GenAI) in education, including studies of teacher adoption and needs, design-based approaches to educator preparation, and how GenAI can function as “design material” that reshapes instructional activity and learning paradigms.Transcript:Today, many see GenAI as a quick tool to get answers. A shortcut. This view misses its real potential and leads to widespread concerns about cheating and shallow learning.My research, conducted with my colleague Dr. Mara Alagić, proposes a new paradigm called Generativism. We argue that real learning with GenAI isn’t about the answer it gives you. It’s about the cognitive work you do with that answer.We define this deep learning in a cycle: You prompt. The GenAI generates. And then, the most important part begins: the critique.That critique then becomes a new prompt to ask GenAI. This process iterates, until you and the AI build a refined learning outcome. This is a moment of critical reflection followed by action.The GenAI acts as a partner that challenges your thinking. Your job isn’t to simply accept its answer. Your job is to question it, validate it, and refine it. That reflective, iterative process is the learning in the era of GenAI.This process creates a dynamic learning space. The AI provides a “scaffold” that pushes you just beyond what you already know. In this model, the GenAI isn’t a simple tool. It’s a semi-autonomous partner and collaborator. Therefore, the learner cannot be a passive receiver. They must become the orchestrator of this complex process.The “ah-ha” moment is this: The true goal of GenAI in education is not to deliver information. It is to provoke the critical reflection and deep engagement needed to build real, lasting understanding.For the younger generations who will inevitably live with this technology, this means teaching them how to think critically is more important than ever.Read More:College of Education This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Wichita State University Week: Your tongue matters more than you might think. Heidi VanRavenhorst-Bell, chair and associate professor in the Department of Human Performance Studies, explores why.Faculty Bio:Dr. Heidi VanRavenhorst-Bell has an established interdisciplinary line of research in clinical exercise physiology and orofacial myology. Her work in promoting healthy tongue muscle performance through physical activity has been internationally recognized and showcased on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. Her research also includes R&D and product validation in the health & fitness industry. Dr. Bell has developed a systematic network purposed toward bridging the gap between healthcare and fitness. Her entrepreneurial background has further led to three start-up companies, secured intellectual property and established a platform to mentor students aspiring to be the next leaders in the field. Besides serving as Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Human Performance Studies at Wichita State, Bell is the undergraduate coordinator for Exercise Science, manager of the Human Performance Laboratory, a Faculty Fellow for the Dorothy and Bill Cohen Honors College, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.Transcript:Eight muscles. One tongue. And it might be the hardest-working muscle group you never think about. That is, unless you bite it. The tongue helps us speak, chew, swallow, and even keep the airway open during sleep. But for more than one in three people, tongue and facial movement patterns don’t work as efficiently as they should—what clinicians call orofacial myofunctional disorders, or OMD.Here’s the tricky part: in clinic, tongue performance measures are often recorded with tools that capture only a slice of what the tongue does. One challenge is slippage of the oral device within the mouth. The tongue’s anterior and posterior have different muscle fiber composition and functional roles, so even small shifts can change what’s actually measured. We tested and patented an oral-safe anti-slip patch, and participants reported better stability without meaningful changes in the pressure values, which is clinically important. Another area of consideration during assessments is head posture. Research shows even the simplest change in position may shift lingual measures.Measuring tongue motion and force in real life—not just during brief clinical visits—presents challenges, too. PARROT, a patented research prototype, could address this. Fitting like a palatal mouthpiece, it wirelessly captures spatial positioning of the tongue within the oral cavity, while also mapping how hard and for how long the tongue is pressing against various structures. The scientific goal? Attain objective, repeatable data that can improve screening, guide therapy, and support telepractice.A deeper physiology question involves fascia, which links human body structures from the tip of the tongue down the tips of the toes. Manipulating fascia and other physiological factors through physical activity and targeted stretching are shown to favor tongue strength or endurance.So, the next time you swallow, yawn, talk or even exercise… remember: your tongue is doing a quiet biomechanical ballet.Read More:Department of Public Health Sciences[Science Friday] - When Your Tongue Needs A Tuneup This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Wichita State University Week: Technology can only help if people are willing to use it.Nikki Keene Woods, professor and chair of Public Health Sciences, reveals why some may not trust devices that could help them.Faculty Bio:Dr. Nikki Keene Woods is an applied behavioral scientist and public health professor. She joined WSU in 2012. She has master’s degrees in behavioral science and public health in addition to a PhD in Behavioral Psychology from the University of Kansas. She is a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and the local chapter the Kansas ACHE. Her research centers on maternal/child health, with an emphasis on advancing health outcomes for women and underserved populations through applied interdisciplinary research. She has led or co-led numerous federally and state-funded projects, including a National Institutes of Health grant on wearable devices for fetal heart rate monitoring, a PCORI grant to improve women’s health, and authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Keene Woods’ scholarship integrates community-engaged methods and applied data analytics to improve population health outcomes in Kansas and beyond.Transcript:When we think about new health technology, we often assume that better tools automatically lead to better care. But when it comes to care during pregnancy, that is not always the case. In my research, my team and I studied how women feel about using wearable devices that allow health care providers to remotely monitor a baby’s heart rate. These tools have great potential, especially for women in rural areas or communities with limited access to prenatal services. We surveyed women of reproductive age to understand what would make them willing or hesitant to use a remote fetal heart monitoring device. What we found was both practical and revealing. First, acceptance depended heavily on whether the technology fits into everyday life. Women were not opposed to technology, but they were clear about their expectations. Comfort and size mattered. Most women said the device would need to be small and fit easily into their daily routines. Second, age mattered in unexpected ways. Women in their thirties and forties were more accepting of the technology than younger women. We often assume that being younger automatically means being more comfortable or accepting of health technology, but pregnancy has a way of rewriting those assumptions. During pregnancy, trust, experience, and perceived risk may matter more than comfort with technology. Finally, privacy and accuracy were concerns as some women worried about who would have access to their data, and whether inconsistent readings might increase anxiety instead of providing reassurance. The takeaway is simple but important. If we want technology to improve care during pregnancy and reduce disparities, we have to design it with women. It’s about adding technology thoughtfully, in ways that make care feel more supportive, more human, and improve quality. Listening to women’s experiences and concerns is not a barrier to innovation. It is how innovation succeeds.Read More:Public Health Sciences at Wichita State University This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Making a decision about an activity for a group of friends can be stressful.Sharaya Jones, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, examines why emotions play a huge part in the process.Faculty Bio:Sharaya M. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Costello College of Business. Sharaya received her PhD in Marketing from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, and her bachelor's degree from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on questions about how consumer perceptions shape consumer responses. In one stream of research, she examines how perceptions of congruity influence consumer responses such as donation behavior and new product appeal. In a second stream of research, she uncovers how consumers experience and make decisions for shared consumption, which are both heavily influenced by perceptions of group members’ preferences.Transcript:Picture this: you’re picking a restaurant for date night, snacks for a movie night with friends, or a group activity for a trip. Why does it feel like a struggle to choose something that will work for everyone? Seven experiments with over 2000 people revealed something surprising: these decisions aren’t actually harder than choosing for yourself – they’re more emotional. You feel a heightened sense of responsibility to avoid getting it wrong, and the less you know about others’ preferences, the less confident you feel that you’ll be able to make everyone, including yourself, happy. The anxiety is real and it shapes your choices.It’s why people gravitate toward “most popular” labels and choose variety packs: those options are a safer bet when satisfying everyone – including yourself. Here’s what’s exciting for brands right now: With AI and social media, we now have real-time signals about who a decision is for. Someone asking an AI “what book should I choose for my book club?” or commenting on a TikTok, asking their tagged friend “should we go to this?” are signals that smart brands can act on. Brands can create bundles or promote “crowd pleasers” for group decisions, as opposed to personalized picks for solo shoppers. These strategies not only help consumers but may also lead to higher conversion.For consumers: ask people what they want and if that fails, give them some options to help them reveal their preferences. And if someone else is choosing for a shared experience, don’t shy away from stating your preferences. It will reduce their anxiety and make the whole experience better for everyone.Read More:[George Mason] - Why choosing stuff to share is an ordeal[Sage Journals] - The Decision-Making Process and Impact of Individual Decisions for Joint Consumption This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

An old Medicare rule is keeping older adults in hospitals longer than necessary, so what can be done?Zoey Chen, PhD candidate in health services research at Brown University, looks into this.Faculty Bio:Zihan Chen is a PhD candidate in Health Services Research at Brown University. She studies Medicare policy, with a focus on post-acute and long-term care.Transcript:Imagine this: an older adult falls at home and is hospitalized with a hip fracture. After two days, their doctor says they’re medically stable and ready to leave the hospital—to continue recovery in a nursing home with physical therapy and monitoring.But they can’t leave.Not because of their health—but because of a rule.Medicare requires a minimum three-day hospital stay before it will cover care in a skilled nursing facility. This is known as the “three-day rule,” and it dates back to 1965.More than half a century later, this rule still shapes care for millions of older adults. Many argue that the three-day threshold is arbitrary, rigid, and inefficient. However, we didn’t have strong evidence on how the rule actually affects care.That changed in May 2023, when the rule was reinstated after being waived during the COVID-19 pandemic. This created a rare natural experiment.What we found was surprising. After this rule was reinstated, more patients stayed in hospitals just over three days. And the increase was larger among patients with dementia or hip fracture, who were mostly likely to need post-hospital care in nursing homes. Patients didn’t use nursing homes any less, they were just staying in hospitals longer than medically necessary to qualify.The result? Thousands of extra hospital days, higher costs for hospitals, and no clear savings for Medicare.This highlights a bigger issue: healthcare is full of eligibility rules like this. They might be valuable, but if we don’t evaluate these rules carefully, they can end up creating bottlenecks—delaying care, increasing costs, and potentially harming patients.Read More:[National Library of Medicine] - Changes in Inpatient and Skilled Nursing Facility Care After the Medicare 3-Day Rule Reinstatement This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

How do children learn to talk about themselves and other people?Erin M. Kenney, assistant professor of psychology at Hartwick College, looks into this using preschool-aged children.Faculty Bio:Erin M. Kenney is an assistant professor of psychology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. Dr. Kenney’s interdisciplinary work includes time as an early childhood teacher, administrator, professor, and researcher. Her areas of expertise include developmental psychology, early childhood education, parent-child conversation.Kenney’s dedication to bridging the gap between developmental science and developmentally appropriate practice includes a commitment to research practices that center participants as knowledge producers and values community engagement. She and the members of the Family and Developmental Studies Research Lab study a variety of topics including parent-child conversation, neurodiversity, and personal intelligence.She earned her B.S. from the University of New England and her M.Ed. from the University of Hartford. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of New Hampshire.Transcript:We live in a world in which people are constantly judging other people. My research seeks to understand how kids learn to talk about others by investigating parent-and-child conversations. I am interested in the influence that a parent’s own personal intelligence has on a child’s development of personal intelligence, often described as the capacity to reason about personalities, both one’s own and those with whom we come into contact.Parent/child conversation research has existed for decades, but the act of including personal intelligence is brand new. It is all about understanding how children truly understand or interact with people, situations and other things that are different or similar to themselves. Our work is aimed at better understanding how kids develop the ability to describe other people using personality trait terms. They’re asked to have a conversation with their parent describing recent positive and negative interactions with a peer or friend. How do they build that skill set to make those determinations of what a good or bad friend is? The reason I went with three and four-year-olds is I used to be a preschool teacher. I understand that three- and four-year-old kids are very concerned with who’s doing the right thing, who’s doing the wrong thing. They’re also very much learning how to describe themselves and how to talk about other people--and my big question is: What are the mechanisms that underlie that? It appears that parents have a huge role in terms of how children learn to talk about the world around them and our interviews reveal that most parents seem to be trying to do the best they can. Through this research, we can gain insights that may be able to help society understand how to better shape future generations to be less divisive and better able to label and understand personality related behavior.Read More:Psychology | Hartwick College This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

We are redefining our view of human intelligence.Aron Barbey, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, looks at how our brain organizes information to do so.Faculty Bio:Aron Barbey is also the director of the University of Notre Dame Human Neuroimaging Center and the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory.Barbey’s research investigates how intelligence emerges from the network organization and dynamics of the human connectome, applying methods from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology and computer science. His work aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the neural foundations of intelligence and to enable scientific innovation in cognitive enhancement, neurorehabilitation and biologically inspired artificial intelligence.Over the course of his career, Barbey’s research group has won more than $26 million in research funding, with support from organizations including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, the White House BRAIN Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and private industry sponsors such as Abbott Nutrition, Google Brain and PepsiCo.Transcript:General intelligence is our ability to solve problems across many areas of life, helping us go beyond what we’ve experienced, make sense of the unfamiliar, and adapt to new challenges. What’s remarkable is not just this capacity, but its source: a finite, fragile system, the human brain, a three-pound organ powered by less energy than a lightbulb. The question is how the brain’s finite architecture makes such flexible intelligence possible.The answer may lie in how knowledge is organized in the brain. Rather than stored in one location, information is distributed across regions. The brain coordinates activity across these regions to construct mental models of the world. These models are built from reusable components of knowledge — information about people, objects, actions and events. Because these components can be combined in different ways across contexts, the brain can generate a variety of thoughts from a finite set of building blocks.But if knowledge is distributed and its components can be recombined in many ways, what determines which combinations are possible? The answer may lie in the network of connections linking brain regions. Like a city’s map, this network defines the possible routes of communication between different parts of the brain.Some regions communicate easily through direct connections, while others are more difficult to link. The brain’s flexibility arises from its physical wiring.This redefines how we understand human intelligence. The brain does not simply process thoughts, it gives them their structure. By shaping which ideas can be linked, how easily they can be reached, and how efficiently they can be recombined, it makes general intelligence possible in a finite system. Intelligence, therefore, is the ability to move through a landscape of ideas whose terrain determines what can be even thought at all.Read More:[Notre Dame News] - Key to human intelligence lies in how brain networks work togetherDecision Neuroscience Lab This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Putting a figure on a person’s bilingual experience can be daunting. Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, assistant professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, looks into one way to do so.Faculty Bio:I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. In my research, I combine insights from monolingual and multilingual individuals, who process language through speech or sign, to inform an inclusive and comprehensive neurobiology of language. My research combines data from neuroimaging, computational and behavioral methods with theoretical insights from linguistics, psychology and neuroscience.I obtained my PhD from New York University, where I worked at the Neuroscience of Language lab under Liina Pylkkänen’s supervision and completed my post-doctoral training at Harvard University, working in the Cognitive Neuropsychology lab under Alfonso Caramazza’s supervision. In 2019, I was recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30 scientist, and in 2025, I received the Early Career Award from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.Transcript:For decades, bilingualism researchers have faced a deceptively simple question: how do we actually measure how bilingual someone is?We often collect rich language histories, but when it comes time to analyze the data, there’s no standard way to turn all that information into a single, interpretable number. As a result, different studies define “language dominance” and “degree of bilingualism” in very different ways, making it hard to compare results across labs and populations.In my research with my collaborator Jessica Chen, we set out to develop a simple, theoretically grounded way to quantify two things: how dominant someone is in one language versus another, and where they fall on the continuum from monolingual to highly multilingual.We built our approach around two variables that decades of work show are fundamental: self-rated proficiency and age of acquisition. Age of acquisition matters because the brain’s capacity for language learning changes over development, and later exposure typically limits ultimate attainment. Proficiency matters because it reflects how well the language is actually represented and used.We combined these factors into a formula that produces a continuous dominance score, ranging from perfectly balanced bilinguals to strongly dominant speakers of one language. We also introduced a multilingualism score that places individuals on a spectrum from monolingual to polyglot, while giving diminishing weight to each additional language, reflecting the fact that the jump from one to two languages is larger than from four to five.We validated these measures in large datasets, including both healthy adults and bilingual individuals with aphasia, and showed that our simple formulas closely match much more complex statistical methods.Our goal is to offer the field a transparent, biologically informed, and easily reproducible way to characterize language experience—so that when we talk about bilingualism, we’re finally speaking the same quantitative language.Read More:[NYU] - Neuroscientists Devise Formulas to Measure Multilingualism This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Union College Week: What happens to our love lives when the rest of life gets messy? Mariah Purol, assistant professor of psychology, examines this.Faculty Bio:Mariah received her PhD in Social & Personality Psychology from Michigan State University in 2024. She is currently a faculty member in the Psychology department of Union College. Her work examines how both individuals’ and their partners’ characteristics influence their relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, and well-being. To that end, she’s interested in how we create happy, satisfying lives as individuals (studying traits like gratitude and optimism), and as relationship members (studying constructs like interpersonal perceptions and personality in romantic relationships/friendships).Transcript:We have lots of ideas about how life events, especially negative ones, might impact our romantic relationships. For example, what happens to a couple when one of them gets diagnosed with a chronic health condition? Has a parent pass away? Loses a child? Does relationship quality degrade in the face of these stressors, or do couples draw closer?In a recent project, I examined the relationship trajectories of over 10,000 couples in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Switzerland. I did this by combining data from three longitudinal datasets, each of which had information about couples’ relationship quality—like their satisfaction, their levels of support, or their closeness— and the life events that they experienced together. With this data, I examined how changes in relationship quality may be associated with the occurrence of these life events. Overall, it was extremely rare for negative life events to predict negative relationship outcomes (like decreased satisfaction). In a handful of cases, experiencing negative life events was associated with positive relationship outcomes. For example, individuals who experienced a potentially stressful life transition, like beginning a new job or experiencing a new negative health event, also reported feeling more support and responsiveness from their partner over time. However, these effects were rare, and, when significant, the size of the effects were very small. It was much more common for the occurrence of these life events to be unassociated with changes in relationship quality. While this may seem surprising, these results emphasize a point relationships theorists have been making for decades: the presence of a negative event alone is not enough to make or break a romantic relationship. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Union College Week: What can we do to improve education for Black students in majority white communities? Stephen Schmidt, Kenneth B. Sharpe Professor of Economics, examines possible solutions.Faculty Bio:Stephen Schmidt has been professor of economics at Union College since 1994, after completing his Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University. He was appointed the Kenneth B. Sharpe Professor of Economics in September 2019. His research interests include the economics of education, especially education finance, and the normative evaluation of economic outcomes and policies. He has published articles in American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings), Journal of Public Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Higher Education, Theoria, Restoration Ecology, Journal of Economic Education, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, Southern Economic Journal, International Journal of Industrial Organization, and others. He teaches courses in econometrics, game theory, intermediate microeconomics, the economics of race, and normative economics, as well as the College’s first-year inquiry seminar.Transcript:There is a racial divide in the United States economy, which means that people of different racial and ethnic identities don’t have the same economic prospects in life. One source of this divide is differences in education. Students of color, especially African-Americans, often don’t get the same level of education funding that other students get. One explanation for this pattern is stigmatization theory. It says that when members of a majority stigmatize a minority, they spend less on public services, since the stigmatized group cannot be excluded from the benefits of those services. My research examines the way school districts set spending levels to see if the patterns that stigmatization theory predicts are found in the data. In particular, I look to see whether the racial composition of a district’s student body affects spending levels differently when the adult voters in the district are dominantly White. There is good news, which is that in districts where the adult voters are less than about 90% White, education funding is higher when the student body contains more African-American or Hispanic students - presumably to address disadvantages children in those communities face. But, in districts with more than about 90% White voters, this effect is found only for Hispanic students, not for African-American students. Why are only African-American students, not Hispanic students, treated differently when districts have highly White voters? Stigmatization can explain this pattern. If White voters stigmatize African-American children - but not Hispanic children – and they can only act on this stigmatization when they are dominant in education politics, then we would see the pattern that we actually see in the data. What should we do? We can redraw district lines in ways that increase the diversity of voters, not just students, where that is possible. When it isn’t possible, state governments could provide funding that local voters are reluctant to provide.Racial Stratification and Local Education Funding This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Union College Week: How do we unravel the secrets of volcanoes?Holli Frey, professor of geosciences, examines tiny crystals to gather clues.Faculty Bio:Holli Frey is a professor of Geosciences from Union College (NY). She studies volcanoes, trying to understand the plumbing systems beneath them, looking for clues as to how and why they erupt. She is particularly interested in mineral chemistry and chronology and uses a variety of analytical tools to address fundamental questions about magma evolution. She has active field-based projects in the Caribbean (St. Vincent and Dominica) and Central Oregon (Tumalo Tuff) and previously did work in the western Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt and plutons in coastal Maine. She enjoys mentoring students, who are frequently co-authors on her publications. Her most recent work is on the eruptions of St. Vincent and she is a project partner of Dr. Jenni Barclay (University of Bristol) on a funded, collaborative grant, “Ex-X: Expecting the Unexpected (Understanding Dangerous Volcanic Transitions)”. This summer, Dr. Frey will take several students to Dominica, continuing to explore the eruptive history of the island. Dr. Frey received her B.A. in geology from Franklin and Marshall College and her PhD in geosciences from University of Michigan, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Transcript:In early 2021, the volcano La Soufrière in St. Vincent in the Caribbean rumbled to life after more than 40 years. Thick lava slowly oozed out at the summit, not a real threat to the 16,000 people living in its shadow.Then, in April, everything changed. The shaking beneath the volcano shifted, prompting an evacuation. In less than 24 hours, powerful explosions began, sending ash high into the atmosphere. For two weeks, more than 30 explosions rocked the island, transforming the landscape and destroying more than 1000 homes.So, what happened inside the volcano during that sudden transition?To find out, we turned to the crystals locked inside the rocks that erupted in the first 48 hours. It was the smallest crystals – called microlites – that were key to understanding the volcano’s behavior. The microlites are like time capsules; they preserve clues about where magma has been and what it experienced on its journey to the surface. As these tiny crystals formed, they caused the magma to become more gas rich, increasing the pressure past a tipping point which caused the explosions.What we found in the microlite chemistry tells a story of magma moving through two very different environments on its way to the surface.The first crystals formed deep underground, more than fifteen kilometers beneath the volcano, where magma sat under intense pressure and water-rich conditions. Those crystals were carried upward, survivors from deep in the volcanic plumbing system.The next series of microlites didn’t come from depth however. They crystallized as the magma was moving more quickly to the surface, after the initial throat clearing first blasts that destroyed the lava dome.By reading the record preserved in the tiny crystals, we can better understand how quiet dome-building eruptions suddenly become explosive and hopefully improve how we anticipate hazards at active volcanoes.Read More:[Lyell Collection] - Petrology of the explosive deposits from the April 2021 eruption of La Soufrière volcano, St Vincent: a time-series analysis of microlites[Union] - Frey Awarded NSF RAPID Grant[U.S. National Science Foundation] - Award Abstract # 2132566 RAPID: The effusive to explosive transition of La Soufrière, St. Vincent: Insights from petrology and hygrometryDangerousVolcanoes.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Union College Week: Why are democracies suspending the rights of their people? Guillermina Seri, professor of political science, explores this.Faculty Bio:Guillermina Seri is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Union College, NY, where she teaches courses in political theory and Latin American Politics. Seri is the author of the books Seguridad: Crime, Police Power, and Democracy in Argentina (Continuum, 2012) and Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance. The Crisis of Democratic Rights (University of Michigan Press, 2026), and co-editor of the volume Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies (Palgrave, 2018).Transcript:We often assume democracies are safe havens for human rights, but my research tracks a troubling trend: Across a number of democracies, state abuses and police violence are starting to mirror the abuses linked to emergency measures that suspend rights in authoritarian regimes.Drawing on media and archival research, I’ve found that while emergency powers used to be the tool of dictators in the 1970s, by the mid-2000s, democratic governments were actually using them more often than nondemocracies. These records challenge established beliefs in political science that democracies “almost never” suspend rights.Why is this happening? One trend associated with the rise of emergency regimes is the subordination of politics to protecting markets. We’ve entered an era where protecting the market has become the state's highest priority—its Reason of State—often bypassing legal safeguards. This global experiment began under the military dictatorship of 1970s Chile, then extended through and from the Global North. Today, it thrives in the “chainsaw” economics of Javier Milei's Argentina by subjecting everyone and everything to a market rationale, even when it may undermine rights protections.However, my research also highlights the democratic extraordinary moments when citizens reclaim voice and rights. These are the moments that open possibilities to strengthen democracy and take care of both people and the planet.Read More:[University of Michigan Press] - Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

On Union College Week: Learning goes on, even during war.Kristin Bidoshi, professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, discusses this through language teaching in Ukraine.Faculty Bio:Kristin Bidoshi is a professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the director of Russian and East European Studies program at Union College, a small liberal arts college in Schenectady, NY. She conducts fieldwork in Eastern Europe and publishes on topics including the use of oral tradition in the works of Anton Chekov, Nikolai Gogol and Liudimila Petrushevskaia. She also publishes in applied linguistics, specifically in Russian language pedagogy, and has recently presented workshops on building, evaluating and using custom AI tools in the language classroom. Kristin also directs a Teaching English Practicum in which Union College students teach English as a Second Language (ESL) classes online to Ukrainian children or in-person ESL classes to refugees and immigrants in the NY Capital District.Transcript:What does it mean to teach language during war? The answer seems obvious. Language instruction can resume remotely, focusing on basic communicative skills. But this captures only part of the problem. War-time language teaching is never pedagogically neutral. Instruction unfolds within asymmetries of vulnerability and responsibility as classrooms become places where global politics and ethical judgment emerge.My research, grounded in applied linguistics, examines foreign language education during war. Drawing on Michael Byram’s theory of intercultural citizenship, qualitative data from student teachers’ reflections and classroom observations of their remote English classes with Ukrainian children, this research examines how wartime English instruction moves beyond its expected focus on grammar and communication to become an ethical and civic practice, reshaping everyday instructional approaches, classroom roles and even student teachers’ understandings of language teaching, power and civic responsibility.A student’s apology for missing class because “the power was out,” is a stark reminder of how the war shapes daily life. When a student mentions life “before the war,” grammar becomes less important as the teacher decides how to preserve instructional routine and acknowledge hardship. In these moments, skill instruction gives way to responding with care to lives shaped by conflict.In times of war, education is fragile. This research reminds us that language pedagogy, theorized through intercultural citizenship, can sustain human connection when war seeks to undo it.Read More:[Space of Knowledge] - English speaking club with American students This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Cannabis may affect your memory after use, but to what extent?Carrie Cuttler, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cannabis Research Center at Washington State University, investigates this.Faculty Bio:Dr. Carrie Cuttler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cannabis Research Center at Washington State University. She directs the Health and Cognition (THC) Lab, where her research examines both the beneficial and detrimental effects of cannabis and cannabinoids. Her recent work focuses on the therapeutic potential of cannabigerol (CBG) and the effects of chronic cannabis use and acute cannabis intoxication on cognition (e.g., memory, creativity, executive functioning), mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD), physical health (e.g., pain, sleep), and stress. Dr. Cuttler has published several books and more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles.Transcript:One of the most well-documented effects of acute cannabis intoxication is impairment in memory. However, memory is not a single process—it is a complex system composed of multiple subsystems that rely on different neural mechanisms. Despite this complexity, most previous research on cannabis has focused on a narrow set of memory tests, particularly verbal memory tests and working memory tests.Far fewer studies have examined how cannabis affects other types of memory that are more relevant to everyday functioning. These include temporal order memory, prospective memory, source memory, false memory, and autobiographical memory.To address this gap, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in which 120 participants with substantial experience using cannabis, vaporized either placebo, a moderate dose, or a high dose of cannabis. We observed significant detriments across several domains, including verbal memory, visuospatial memory, working memory, prospective memory, source memory, false memory, and temporal order memory. To our knowledge, this is the first study to detect significant detrimental effects of acute cannabis intoxication on prospective memory and temporal order memory.We did not observe significant effects on short-term memory or autobiographical memory. However, this is the first study to examine autobiographical memory following acute cannabis intoxication. Future research using more complex autobiographical memory tasks that capture real-world experiences is needed to corroborate this finding.It is important to note that participants were mostly young adults frequently using cannabis recreationally. Effects would likely be stronger in less experienced cannabis users and findings may not generalize to older adults or medical users.Read More:[Sage Journals] - Mapping the acute effects of cannabis on multiple memory domains: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Anyone can make a Jackson Pollock painting, right?Jonas Mureika, chair and professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University, examines what physics has to say on the matter.Faculty Bio:Jonas Mureika serves as chair and professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University. Mureika spent much of his academic training at the University of Toronto, where he earned his B.S. in astronomy and physics and Ph.D. specializing in theoretical cosmology. He also holds an M.S. from the University of Waterloo where he studied particle physics.His research is focused on modified theories of gravitation, from implications for early universe cosmology, to micro black hole formation in high energy particle collisions. One such proposal that Mureika has helped advance is the idea that at high energies, the effective dimensionality of space decreases. A novel implication of this theory is that the universe was effectively one-dimensional in the moments following the Big Bang.Mureika is currently interested in the observational signatures of quantum gravity that might arise in future experiments, including LIGO gravitational wave detections, and imaging of supermassive black holes through the Event Horizon Telescope. He has also spent years analyzing Jackson Pollock’s art through fractal and lacunarity analysis.Transcript:20th-century abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock is most well-known for his pour paintings. Though highly regarded in the art world and a household name, many people have wondered: “Is his technique random?” “Can’t a child do that?”There are many fascinating aspects of Pollock’s work, but one of the most striking is the fractal patterns consistent throughout. Fractals exist everywhere in the natural world: in coastlines, lightning, and plants, to name a few, and can be mathematically analyzed to understand the physics that made them and how the structure will evolve over time.A group of physicists, psychologists, and I studied the paintings of adults and children ages 4-6 to distinguish whether artistic style is defined by age and how to differentiate paintings made by the two groups, allowing us to understand not just Pollock, but how to distinguish between any artists’ work at a mathematical level.We used fractal and lacunarity analysis – the measurement of clusters and gaps between them – techniques used in astrophysics, geophysics, biology, and beyond, to examine the artwork. We found that age and biomechanics create distinct artistic signatures, with factors such as balance, height, and vision producing statistically different patterns. Children produce smaller fractal dimensions – less clustering of fine structure, and larger lacunarity – more gaps between clusters, while adults demonstrate the opposite.As part of the study, we analyzed Pollock’s “Number 14,” finding that the lacunarity and fractal measurement resembled those in the children’s paintings more closely.For decades, people have questioned Pollock’s legitimacy, yet his paintings are more complex than they appear when examined mathematically. Pollock’s work teaches us many things, but what is particularly fascinating is how his paintings show us that age, balance, and how you move through space all leave traces that physics can interpret.Read More:[Frontiers] - A question of Jackson Pollock’s balance: using lacunarity and fractal analysis to distinguish poured paintings by adults and children This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

What role does friendship play in political and resistance movements?Kim Miller, professor of art history, and coordinator of the Peace and Social Justice Studies Program at Wheaton College, examines this.Faculty Bio:Kim Miller is Professor of Art History, and Coordinator of the Peace and Social Justice Studies Program at Wheaton College. Formerly, she directed Wheaton’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program (2006 – 2020), served as co-director of the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities, and held the Jane Oxford Keiter Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Kim is also a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, where she works to develop strategies to expand access to education for underserved populations. She serves as a professional mentor for South Africa’s “Future Professors” program, a nation-wide effort which aims to support young faculty and graduate students of color with their research and scholarship as they advance through the faculty ranks. Kim’s research focuses on the ways in which women artists and activists in South Africa use artmaking as a form of activism and empowerment, particularly in the context of that country’s anti-apartheid movement. Her forthcoming book, How did they Dare? Women’s Activism and the Work of Memory in South African Commemorative Art, examines how memorial practices and commemorative sites are associated with women’s political struggle in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. Kim is co-editor, with Prof Brenda Schmahmann, of the book, Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents: Public Art in South Africa, 1999 – 2015.Transcript:In 1955, two South African women brazenly defied apartheid laws when they slipped past the feared security police, boarded a plane for the first time in their lives, and crossed the world to speak the truth about what was happening to their country. Lilian Ngoyi and Dora Tamana were formidable activists, skilled organizers, and close friends — chosen as delegates of the Federation of South African Women to represent the anti-apartheid cause abroad. Their illegal journey took them to Switzerland, England, Germany, Romania, China, and Russia, where they stood before crowds and described the cruelties of apartheid with clarity and courage. When they returned home, they worked with other women activists to organize the 1956 Women’s March. The largest public demonstration in the history of the anti-apartheid movement. My research asks a question history has largely ignored: what role did friendship play in sustaining that movement? What role does friendship continue to play as a sustaining force in political and social movements? My work considers friendship as a “knowing practice” in the way that Audre Lorde imagined it, to understand the development of political subjectivity in the lives of female anti-apartheid activists. How might a close examination of women’s lives demonstrate how relationships between women strengthened the resistance movement and rejected the patriarchal and separatist ideology of apartheid?Through letters, diaries, newspapers, and photographs, I’ve been recovering what I call hidden histories — the intimate bonds between women that made political resistance possible. These were not incidental relationships. Ngoyi and Tamana’s friendship survived imprisonment, torture, solitary confinement, and house arrest. They held each other up when the state tried to break them down.African feminist scholars are now building a rich body of work that theorizes these bonds — understanding friendship and intimacy not as private matters, but as political ones. My work joins that conversation, centering the women who dared to resist, together.Read More:LinkedIn This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Healthy aging is critical for the present and the future.Jean Wactawski-Wende, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the University at Buffalo, discovers more.Faculty Bio:Jean Wactawski-Wende, PhD, is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and dean of the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions. She is an epidemiologist who focuses her research on understanding factors that influence women’s health.With more than 25 years of research experience, she is the principal investigator of UB’s Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Center and also leads the WHI Northeast Regional Center, comprising 9 other institutions. Initiated in 1993, the WHI is an National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded, multi-centered study that involves both randomized clinical trials and an observational longitudinal study examining the major factors influencing morbidity and mortality in older women.In addition to the WHI, she has been principal investigator on dozens of research studies funded by the NIH and other federal agencies. Her interests include research on risk factors and prevention of cancer, osteoporosis and periodontal disease in postmenopausal women. Her current research focuses on the oral microbiome and health outcomes. She has also conducted several studies on reproductive health issues in younger women. As part of this work, she has led several large-scale prevention clinical trials in women.Transcript:Thanks to the generosity of thousands of women across the country, researchers like me continue to learn more each day about the major causes of death and disease in postmenopausal women.Many of these women have completed yearly surveys as part of the Women’s Health Initiative, a long-term national study that began in the early 1990s and has yielded important insights into the risk factors for cancer, heart disease and osteoporosis, among other conditions, in a rapidly growing U.S. demographic. We’re also learning more about the role the microbiome plays in influencing human health and disease.This research is critical. The number of Americans 65 and older is projected to increase by 42%, to 82 million, by 2050, with women accounting for the majority of this group.That’s why it is so vital that we continue to learn about how things like diet and exercise play a role in healthy aging.WHI ancillary studies have allowed my research colleagues and me to report recently in major journals on associations between muscle strength and reduced risk of death in women between the ages of 63 and 99, and the use of menopausal hormone therapy and incidence of a leading cause of corneal blindness. We’ve also investigated how two types of gut bacteria may be associated with a diet high in red meat, eggs and full fat dairy products, which can lead to the hardening of arteries.Through WHI, we will continue to make further discoveries, while giving young researchers opportunities to advance their careers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Is there a size limit on planets?Jean-Baptiste Ruffio, research scientist in astronomy at the University of California, San Diego, checks in to find out.Faculty Bio:Jean-Baptiste Ruffio is a research scientist studying extra-solar planets in the Astronomy & Astrophysics department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He has been developing statistical and instrumentation techniques to push the frontiers of planet detection and characterization with the largest telescopes in the world, both on the ground and in space.Transcript:How big can a planet be before it’s no longer called a planet? We used the James Webb Space Telescope to answer this question. In our own solar system, Jupiter is the largest planet. But astronomers have found much larger planets around other stars. In 2008, astronomers took the first picture of a surprising system called HR 8799. They saw four massive “maybe” planets orbiting the same star, each being 5-9 times the mass of Jupiter. We have tried to understand if they are planets or brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs form like stars but they don’t get big enough to trigger the fusion of hydrogen. On the other hand, we believe planets generally from in a disk of dust and gas around young stars. Grains of dust collide and get bigger to form planetary cores. When a core gets big enough, it also pulls in large amount of gas to form gas giants like Jupiter. However, classical theories of planet formation struggle to explain the formation of the largest systems like HR 8799. In order to determine if they are truly planets or brown dwarfs, we can measure the composition of their atmospheres. Indeed, if we see a lot of icy and rocky material, that is the telltale sign of a planet. Brown dwarf would instead have a composition similar to the star. We therefore used James Webb to image the four planets around HR 8799. We then spent two years developing new analysis techniques to be able to measure the composition of these planets in unprecedented detail. We found that the planets had much more carbon, oxygen, and sulfur than their star. These observations finally provided the most direct evidence that HR 8799 is truly a planetary system and that planets can be much bigger than we thought.Read More:[UC San Diego Today] - How Big Can a Planet Be? With Very Large Gas Giants, It Can Be Hard to Tell[Nature Astronomy] - Jupiter-like uniform metal enrichment in a system of multiple giant exoplanets[ARXIV] - The compositions of the HR 8799 planets reflect accretion of both solids and metal-enriched gas This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Why do implicit biases still exist in hiring decisions?Samantha Dodson, assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the University of Calgary, answers this.Faculty Bio:Samantha Dodson’s research program focuses on when and why women experiencing roadblocks and adversity are evaluated as deserving of opportunities and support at work.Transcript:Since women began joining the modern workforce after World War II, support professions such as secretaries and paralegals have been predominantly occupied by women. The more powerful professions they support, such as executives and lawyers, are predominantly held by men. These low-power support professions often involve developing efficient processes and paying close attention to detail. In contrast, individuals in high-power organizational roles tend to engage in tasks like identifying and creating values, strategies, and visions. Thus, women are more likely than men to be in roles that require concrete mindsets and less likely to be in roles that require abstract mindsets. Drawing on research linking gender role segregation to gender stereotypes, we theorized that people might believe there are innate attributes that enable women to perform well in process-based roles requiring specificity and attention to detail, whereas men have attributes that help them excel in roles that require seeing the big picture.Six experiments showed that we do, in fact, hold implicit and explicit descriptive stereotypes – or beliefs about what men and women are – such that people tend to believe women are more concrete than men, women are more concrete than abstract, and men are more abstract than concrete. Women tend to hold these beliefs more deeply than men, and these stereotypes arose across dozens of occupations and industries. These beliefs have real-world consequences. In one study, we found that in nearly 550,000 LinkedIn recommendations, connections are more likely to use words such as “detailed and exact” to describe women and “visionary and farsighted” to describe men. Critically, we also found that these beliefs increased the likelihood of women being assigned detailed tasks at work, such as filing paperwork and proofreading, on top of their existing workload, perpetuating gender roles and organizational inequity.Read More:[APA PsyNet] - She sees the trees, he sees the forest: Descriptive gender stereotypes of concreteness and abstractness This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Older adults are starting to use AI at home, too.Ken Brown, Tippie Children Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, says it’s not just for work anymore.Faculty Bio:Ken Brown, Ph.D., is Tippie Children Professor of Management in the Tippie College of Business and department executive officer of the Educational Policy and Leadership Studies Department, College of Education, both at the University of Iowa. He earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Maryland and MA and PhD degrees in Psychology from Michigan State University. Brown is the former associate dean of the undergraduate program in Tippie and served as a Fulbright Specialist at Seoul National University.Transcripts:We know that generative artificial intelligence tools are becoming a bigger part of peoples’ work lives, but are they using those tools at home, too?A recent survey we conducted here at the University of Iowa shows that yes, they are.For many, in fact, AI has become an even bigger part and is now a go-to tech tool at home as well as the office.We surveyed more than 1,000 people in December and found that more people are using generative AI for personal activities and projects than use it for work. We found that of those familiar with generative AI, more than 50% used it for personal activities and projects; only 35% used it at work.Even among full-time employees, more people reported they used it for personal activities than work, and more people feel that generative AI helps them personally than helps them professionally. Of those most frequently using generative AI programs, ChatGPT was the best-known, followed by CoPilot and Gemini.One of the findings that surprised us was that more retired people than we expected use ChatGPT for projects for personal use at home. Nine percent of the more than 264 retired respondents reported they were frequent users of the technology. Only 6 percent of retirees had never used it or heard of it, suggesting a willingness on their part to embrace the new technology.One of the study’s co-authors said that finding tracks with his own family experience, as his retired parents have started using AI as a search engine for such tasks as finding recipes or learning about things they see in the news.While the conversation about AI so far has been focused on the technology’s impact in workplace and educational settings, our survey suggests we should be looking more closely at its impact on retirees, as well. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org