The Provost's Awards Lecture Series is intended to honor and showcase the recipients of the Provost's Awards and provide them an opportunity to present, share and discuss their work with the campus. Another goal of this series is to raise the level of academic and intellectual discourse among our colleagues, and to further enrich connections with others across the campus.

Date: Tuesday, Dec. 8
Time: 2 - 3 p.m.
Location: Seminar will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 835 0636 8756
Passcode: 874672

Dr. Katherine Fobear, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
"Intersectional Failures: LGBTQ+ Asylum Seekers in the United States"
2019-2020 – Promising New Faculty

Fobear's talk focuses on recent immigration and asylum policies in the United States and how those policies affect sexual and gender minority asylum seekers coming to the US/Mexico border. Changes to long-established refugee policies, as well as new procedures like the Migrant Protection Protocols (also known as Remain in Mexico), Asylum Transit Ban, and Family Separation have had a critical impact on the well-being and safety of asylum seekers coming to the United States. These changes have been particularly impactful on those fleeing persecution on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and HIV status. Sexual and gender minority migrants experience far greater precarity with many being brutalized and killed when seeking asylum.

and

Dr. Matin Pirouz, Department of Computer Science
"Towards a Complex Network Approach to Brain Modeling and Anomaly Diagnosis"
2019-2020 – Promising New Faculty

Complex networks supplemented with predictive analytic methods have potential to create a revolutionary framework for the study of collective behaviors of different brain disorders and eventually model the human brain. Pirouz's talk will present an integrated network-centric approach to identify brain anomalies (Schizophrenia, Insomnia, Epilepsy, Autism and Alcoholism) using innovative and non-invasive approaches involving signals and imagery, complex network analysis and predictive analytics. Such a novel and original perspective as brain modeling is crucial and made possible with the advent of cloud computing platforms and big data algorithms.