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: Wednesday, Nov. 4
Time: 3 to 4 p.m.
Location: All seminars will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 837 7926 0487
Passcode: 590550

Dr. Juliet Michelsen Wahleithner, Department of Literacy, Early, Bilingual and Special Education
"What Bugs Me: Working to Improve the Teaching and Learning of Writing"
2018-2019 – Promising New Faculty

Students continually enter college not feeling confident as writers, while teachers throughout the K-12 system continually report feeling unprepared to teach writing. Drawing on findings from multiple research projects, Wahleithner will explore reasons why this is. Additionally, she will discuss her current work, including with the San Joaquin Valley Writing Project, to develop teachers' capacity to teach writing so that they feel better prepared and their students, ultimately, feel more confident as writers.

and

Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Department of English
"How Mexicans Became Brown: The Flipside of U.S. Whiteness Studies"
2018-2019 – Promising New Faculty

Hernandez will discuss her current research project, which situates U.S.-based Mexican racial formation within the context of whiteness studies. This project tracks the "browning" of Mexicans through the latter half of the 19th century as legal and economic processes working in tandem with seemingly-innocuous cultural ephemera that permeated all areas of daily U.S. life.

Upcoming Seminars

Date: Thursday, Nov. 19
Time: 3 to 4 p.m.
Location: All seminars will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 819 3925 2344
Passcode: 889349

Lisa Anderson, Department of Anthropology
"Cs Get Degrees (Comedy, Connection, Caring, and Currency) and Other Lessons I Have Learned From My Students"
2018-2019 – Outstanding Lecturer

For 10 years, I taught in Fresno State's First Year Experience (FYE) program. This program was designed to provide first-generation college students potentially at risk of not graduating, with extra mentoring and support. This program "allowed" me to spend more time talking to and getting to know my students on a deeper level than was typical of other courses. I am certain I learned as much from them as they did from me, and these lessons have made me a better teacher.

and

Dr. Kao-Ly Yang, Department of Linguistics
"Teaching the Invisible and Learning Beyond Language"
2019-2020 – Outstanding Lecturer

Teaching the Hmong language has been an adventure, both exhilarating and challenging as there are very few adequate teaching materials — the Hmong written tradition is still recent. In this presentation, Yang will share her reflection which led her to the creation of teaching materials to support the learning of Hmong while enhancing students' appreciation of their cultural heritage, and building a strong foundation in their language and culture in order for them to be more successful in the academic world. Also, she will talk about teaching practices that impact students' heart and mind, and make them reconnect — academically and critically — with their linguistic and cultural heritage.

Date: Thursday, Dec. 3
Time: 1 to 2 p.m.
Location: All seminars will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 838 3359 3818
Passcode: 478221

Dr. Vadim Keyser, Department of Philosophy
"Perspective and the Pandemic"
2019-2020 – Promising New Faculty

Keyser will present on various perspectival frameworks — from biology, philosophy, art and transdisciplinary approaches. The aim of these frameworks is to "make sense" of the multi-tiered effects of the pandemic.

and

Dr. Zhi Liang, Department of Mechanical Engineering
"Improvement of Cooling Systems on Microelectronic Devices"
2019-2020 – Promising New Faculty

Nanostructured semiconductor components are widely used in microelectronics such as CPUs and LEDs. The huge power density in modern microelectronics is far beyond typical cooling capabilities. This leads to local overheating and catastrophic failure of microelectronics. Hence, efficient cooling of microelectronics is one of the crucial challenges for further progress of the semiconductor industry. Liang will discuss the key problems in the improvement of cooling systems on microelectronic devices in this talk.

Date: Tuesday, Dec. 8
Time: 2 to 3 p.m.
Location: All seminars 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 wellbeing 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.