Fram Focus volume 5:9 - April 2020 Special Issue on Disaster & Disruption
RIT has many experts in the domains of disaster, disruption and resilience. Faculty affiliated with the Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking share their thoughts on critical thinking, disaster and disruption. Faculty and staff are invited to email ritframchair@rit.edu with their thoughts.
Jennifer Schneider
Eugene H. Fram Chair, Academic Affairs
Professor; Collaboratory for Resiliency and Recovery; Civil Engineering Technology, Environmental Management and Safety, College of Engineering Technology
After a time in industry, Dr. Schneider has been at RIT for 23 years. She teaches many risk related courses (Exposure Assessment and Analysis, Risk Management, System Design, Disaster Science, etc.). She focuses on research that impacts communities. This domain is crosscutting, gives her the opportunity to broadly interact with students and colleagues, and is never the same.
Christine Keiner
Professor, Science, Technology and Society; College of Liberal Arts
Dr. Keiner is a historian of science and environmental historical who focuses on the political role of scientific expertise.
Rachel McGinnis
Director, Peace and Conflict Studies Program
Assistant Professor, Public Policy and International Relations; RIT Kosovo
Dr. McGinnis teaches conflict analysis and resolution from an environmental security approach at the graduate level military aeronautical school (ERUA), oversees the PCS program in Kosovo that requires similar course for undergrads, and works in refugee or conflict zones each summer (e.g., Lebanon, Turk-Syrian border, Greece, etc.) She also continues to work on and develop a mobile phone app that assists displaced individuals during crisis—primarily due to conflict, but also environmental issues.
Qing Miao
Assistant Professor, Public Policy; College of Liberal Arts
Dr. Miao studies environmental economics and policy with a particular focus on climate change adaptation, natural disaster policy, and risk analysis. Her other research areas include public finance, science and technology policy.
John Oliphant
Associate Professor, Physician Assistant; College of Health Sciences and Technology
Dr. Oliphant enjoys his “double life” as both a university professor and a practicing medical provider. He can apply what he learns in the academic setting to his patients and administrative work in the clinical setting and vice versa. He is also passionate about global/public health and leadership within healthcare systems, both domestically and internationally. His driving goal is to finish his life with no regrets and to leave his little piece of the world better than he found it.
Konstantinos Papangelis
Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Games and Media; Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences
Dr. Papangelis’ research focuses on location-based games and social networks, the physical web, location-based and in-situ crowdsourcing, proximity technologies, extended reality, and multi-sensory entertainment technologies.
Jessica Pardee
Associate Professor, Department of Science, Technology, and Society; College of Liberal Arts
Dr. Pardee challenges her students to consider how different values and priorities shape the mitigation of, experience within, and recovery from emergent disasters of all scales.
Justin Pelletier
Director of the GCI Cyber Range and Training Center, Global Cybersecurity Institute, Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences
Dr. Pelletier teaches Authentications and Security Models and enjoys exploring information security economics, social cybersecurity, and quantum/post-quantum security. He is a combat veteran who has served as an intelligence officer during three overseas deployments and provided homeland response for two domestic emergencies.
David Schwartz
Director and Associate Professor, School of Interactive Games and Media, Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences
Dr. Schwartz has been studying how the convergence of games and media-centric computing, GIS, and disaster planning can save the world.
Brian Tomaszewski
Associate Professor, School of Interactive Games and Media, Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences
Dr. Tomaszewski is a geographic information scientist with research interests in the domains of geographic information science and technology, geographic visualization, spatial thinking, disaster management and forces displacement research with research projects fund by the US National Science Foundation and Germany, Rwanda and Jordan as well as collaborations with the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees. Fun fact: Dr Tomaszewski was the co-creator of the Refugee GIS or “RefuGIS” project that is the world’s first innovation project to empower refugees themselves to use GIS and he also plays the banjo!
Anthony Vodacek
Professor, Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, College of Science
Dr. Vodacek loves remote sensing because he loves how it helps him explore the world.
From Gene Fram
“Biologist Carl Bergstrom on coronavirus, misinformation and why we weren’t prepared” by Christina Farr. Ms. Farr is a technology and health reporter for CNBC.com.
“A Framework for Thinking” by Elon Musk. Musk is co-founder and CEO at Tesla Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX); and The Boring Company. He is also CEO of Neuralink.
“Using the Mind’s ‘Executive Functions’ ” by Frank John Ninivaggi. Dr. Ninivaggi is an associate attending physician at the Yale-New Haven Hospital and an assistant clinical professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University of Medicine.