What might be needed to create an interdisciplinary career guide or toolkit for students who are looking toward a modern work life? This webinar will include alum from the a2ru Emerging Creatives Student Summits discussing both their interdisciplinary paths and experiences and what they would like to have known or had in support of their educational goals as an undergraduate student.
Laura Huisinga
Fresno State University
Laura Huisinga is an artist, designer, and educator. She currently teaches in the Multimedia and Interaction BFA design track at Fresno State. She has a passion for strong UX design and bringing augmented reality into the classroom for all students. Laura has her PhD in Human Computer Interaction and MFA in graphic design from Iowa State University. She previously worked as a front-end-developer and as a designer in Des Moines, Iowa. Dr. Huisinga’s research currently focuses on using augmented reality to aid struggling readers.
Dorsey Kaufmann
University of Arizona
Dorsey Kaufmann is a MFA candidate Illustration and Design at the School of Art at the University of Arizona and works in Dr. Ramírez-Andreotta’s Integrated Environmental Science and Health Risk Laboratory as an Information Designer. Dorsey examines the most effective and purposeful means of data communication, evaluates the ways in which people receive and understand information about environmental quality and the potential exposure to contaminants near hazardous waste sites, and how design incites more informed citizens and behavioral changes. She is interested in the way art can work across disciplines, communicate information in a more experiential and community-integrated way, and build public participation and relationships. Through more experimental forms of data sharing, she hopes build a dialogue around the many factors that impact environmental data-sets and how these factors directly affect people’s body, health, and environment.
David Lydon-Staley
University of Pennsylvania
David Lydon-Staley is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in Human Development and Family Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on substance use and abuse across the lifespan, with a particular focus on adolescent cigarette-smoking. More recently, his work is examining how the practice of curiosity may be captured quantitatively and modeled using network science approaches. His research is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning multiple levels of analysis (brain, behavior, social environment) and multiple timescales (seconds, days, years), thus requiring frameworks and tools from psychology, neuroscience, bioengineering, and network science. Working with collaborators at The Pennsylvania State University and beyond, he is increasingly interested in how artistic and scientific processes may inform one another.
Tess Torregrosa
Northeastern University
Tess Torregrosa is a third year Ph.D. student at Northeastern University where she is co-advised by Dr. Ryan Koppes and Dr. Abigail Koppes. Her project is to study the mechanisms behind heart failure in the autonomic nervous system. She is also very interested in improving science communication and education particularly through the integration of art and design into STEM curriculums. This work can be found in the Koppes’ lab websites: northeastern.edu/lnnr and northeastern.edu/abnel. Prior to Northeastern, she received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with a double major in drama from Tufts University in 2015. She worked with Dr. David Kaplan on engineering a corneal replacement using silk scaffolds.
Grace C. Young
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Grace is an MIT graduate in Mechanical & Ocean Engineering developing technologies to help better understand, explore and manage the ocean. She is currently a Research Engineer at X (formerly Google X), and before that she completed her PhD as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford. She has developed software for CERN and MIT and helped design, build, and test submersible and aerial robots for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Robots she helped develop have deployed in the Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, monitoring marine protected areas, surveying endangered species, and creating 3D maps of ice shelves to better measure climate change. In 2014 she lived underwater for 15 days as an engineer and scientist on Fabien Cousteau’s Mission 31, the youngest female Aquarius aquanaut at the time. An avid sailor and diver, Grace is a four-year varsity letterman on MIT’s sailing team and she sailed across the Atlantic for charity in 2016. A former ballerina, she’s also active in the arts community. Her art exhibition of ultra slow-motion underwater photography was featured on the “Best of Oceans at MIT 2015.” Grace serves as a trustee of The Oceans Project and is chief scientist for the deep-sea submarine Pisces VI. She was named a 2017 National Geographic Emerging Explorer.
