Alexander Opitz’s research focuses on developing non-invasive brain stimulation technologies for brain disorders. Dr. Opitz has a particular interest in the underlying physics and physiology of transcranial magnetic and electric stimulation. Research in his lab spans from computational modeling of electric fields and their effect on neurons to electrophysiological recordings of brain activity in animals and humans. His lab is further developing closed-loop stimulation technologies to improve the effectiveness of brain stimulation. Dr.

Paragraph: Hyun Soo Park is a computer vision researcher who is passionate about developing an AI system that can decode implicit codes of our non-verbal social signals, e.g., gaze direction, facial expression, and body gestures, that plays a major role in our daily communications. His lab designs a massive sensing infrastructure to measure the subtle social signals in three dimensions, develop a computational model to analyze and forecast the behaviors, and render them in an immersive technology to enable authentic social telepresence.

Talvin Wilks is an acclaimed director, dramaturg and playwright with an almost 30 year professional career. For Wilks, politics and history become the rooted foundation in which to examine, by means of drama, identities continually divided by race, class, gender and sexuality and have informed his original works and collaborations which have reached Broadway, off-Broadway and national stages.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common chronic disease affecting about 420 million people worldwide. To stop the vicious cycle of the disease, Emilyn Alejandro’s team combine integrative approaches and using both animal models and human studies to uncover the role of nutrient-sensor protein mTOR and OGT in the placenta and pancreas, to ultimately predict individuals who are at risk for obesity and diabetes and to find ways to increase insulin secretion to improve clinical interventions for patients with diabetes.

Samira Azarin studies the role of the cell microenvironment in the development and function of healthy and diseased tissues to enable fundamental insights into biological mechanisms, develop model systems for drug discovery, and design biomaterials that direct the behavior of cells and tissues in the body.

Jeff Calder is a mathematician whose research involves using continuum mathematical analysis, including partial differential equations and the calculus of variations, to study discrete problems at the foundations of machine learning and data science. The goals of his research are to further our understanding of existing algorithms, and to develop new, more efficient algorithms founded on strong theoretical principles with provable performance guarantees.

Trinity Hamilton is an environmental and molecular microbiologist. Her research examines microbial photosynthesis and global biogeochemical cycles throughout Earth’s history. Her research combines genomic, functional, and evolutionary studies of complex microbial ecosystems to answer outstanding questions in microbial ecology and evolution in the face of changing environmental conditions, and has been applied to places ranging from Yellowstone hot springs to Minnesota lakes to Greenland glaciers.

Douglas Kearney is an award-winning poet and critic working on / with / through Black aesthetics and performance. His research engages literature, music, and entertainment with foci in interdisciplinary artistic praxes, the grotesque, and the crossroads where antiblack violence meets spectacle. His books include Mess and Mess and, Buck Studies, and Sho. A librettist, Kearney’s most recent operas are Crescent City, Sweet Land, and Comet / Poppea (commissioned by the American Modern Opera Company).

George Annor’s research focuses on components of cereals and grains and how they are affected by breeding, agronomical practices, and nonthermal processing techniques. With faculty in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, he is working to explore the food and functional characteristics of new and novel cereal, protein, and oilseed crops. As an example, he developed a method to rapidly screen large numbers of samples for wheat gluten quality at early stages of wheat variety development.

Luciano Caixeta is an animal health researcher who focuses on improving the health of dairy cows with the ultimate goal to help feed the ever-growing world population. His research focuses on the period around parturition of dairy cows. During this period, cows have a considerable risk of metabolic disorders and infectious diseases. Dr. Caixeta combines basic and applied research to describe the physiological adaptations of dairy cows under metabolic stress. With his research, Dr.