Robert Audi, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected to the 2018 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). He is the seventh living Notre Dame philosophy faculty member to be honored and is to be inducted at an October ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Notre Dame graduate student Mallika Sarma has done fieldwork in the mountains of Nepal and the forests of Congo. She’s traveled to remote villages accessible only by helicopter, speedboat, or days of hiking. She dreams of conducting research in space. All in search of data on how humans adapt to extreme environments.
Throughout the month of March, students in the Moreau First Year Experience course have been visiting the McDonald Center for Student Well-Being to try out a new board game created by Carly Hagins, an MFA student focusing on industrial design. “Quad: A Game of Conversations” works to spark discussion between players about social life at Notre Dame, in the hopes of breaking down the initial misperceptions that often lead to unhealthy drinking habits.
Mark Schurr, professor and acting chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology, is dedicated to research that doesn’t just serve academic ends, but can also do good for the world. At his latest research site — the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie near Joliet, Illinois — he is exploring what life was like for 17th-century Native Americans and working to determine how to best restore the area to a natural environment that allows visitors to enjoy and learn from the land.
For Victoria Braga ’11, a semester in Egypt as an undergraduate gave her a new perspective on the United States — and shaped her future career path. Braga came to Notre Dame with an interest in international relations, but her study abroad experience inspired her to pursue a career as an attorney and a position in the U.S. government. Today, the Arabic and political science major works as a trial attorney in the appellate section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation.
It started two years ago with a handful of Notre Dame undergraduates and a desire to share their love of music. Today, that passion has resulted in two thriving student groups — the Classical Music Club and the Composers’ Consortium — with more than 200 members.
The article, “Identifying high-risk young adults for violence prevention: a validation of psychometric and social scales in Honduras,” details the creation of the new Violence-Involved Persons Risk Assessment tool, an aggregate of seven psychometric and social risk assessment tools previously validated in various American and European contexts.
There are two sides to every story. And for Kraig Beyerlein, there's a side of the story about religious activism that has not been fully told. The associate professor of sociology studies protest movements and has been examining the role of progressive religious activism in the Women's March and along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Four alumni of Notre Dame’s international economics program returned to campus in March to speak to current students about their experience with the major, valuable classes they took, and the skills they developed that are now paying dividends in the real world
Abigail Ocobock, visiting assistant professor of sociology at Notre Dame, offers the first systemic look at the influence of marriage on the LGBQ community in a new paper published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
When King Fok was 6 years old, he suffered from an orthopedic condition that caused him to spend two years on crutches. Uncovered by his health insurance, the condition was Fok’s first glimpse into how socioeconomic status impacts health care. That childhood experience informed his decision to major in Arts and Letters pre-health at the University of Notre Dame. As a future physician, he hopes to make medical care more efficient, inclusive, and accessible to all. A sociology class his freshman year helped him discover a perfect major to pair with pre-health.
Notre Dame research by Dominic Chaloner, Bharat Ranganathan, and Fr. Terrence Ehrman, C.S.C. sought to explore the principles of integral ecology set forth in Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ - "On Care For Our Common Home."
Caitlin Smith-Oyekole, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in English, and Sevda Arslan, a second-year Ph.D. student in anthropology, have been named 2018 Humanities Without Walls (HWW) pre-doctoral workshop fellows. Supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HWW is a consortium of 15 Midwestern humanities institutes fostering cross-institutional collaboration in humanities-based research, teaching, and scholarship.
Anne García-Romero is associate professor of film, television, and theatre and a faculty fellow in the Institute for Latino Studies. She is a professional playwright as well as a scholar focusing on Latina playwriting.
In this Q&A, Paige Ambord discusses her research on how local artists use social media to rebrand South Bend, why she's interested in the process of urban revitalization, and why she hopes to highlight the role of average citizens in urban redevelopment.
As an orthopedic resident at Loyola University Medical Center, Daniel Schmitt ’11 sees a wide variety of patients. Schmitt, who majored in anthropology and biology, relies on his liberal arts education to connect with his diverse patient base and treat them comprehensively at the Level I trauma center — a hospital providing the highest level of surgery to trauma victims.
The College of Arts and Letters is launching a new, interdisciplinary minor in data science. Housed in the Department of Sociology with support from the College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the program will be open to students in any college. “Data science impacts every industry today,” said Sarah Mustillo, professor and chair of sociology. “It is becoming increasingly important for solving problems and making decisions."
Erika Doss, a Notre Dame professor of American studies, has been named to the first-ever Society of Fellows for the Norman Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies. Established to bring leading thinkers to the study of nearly 200 years of American illustration art, the group hopes to more fully develop the language and discourse of an academic discipline devoted to published art.
The presence of a prominent female officeholder has a positive effect on the number of women running for lower offices in her state, according to new research by University of Notre Dame political scientist Jeffrey J. Harden. A state with a female governor or U.S. senator will see an increase in the proportion of women seeking state legislative office by about 2 to 3 percentage points, Harden and two co-authors wrote in an article published this month in the American Journal of Political Science.
When the city of South Bend needed ideas for a new community technology center, it turned to Ann-Marie Conrado’s design research practices class at the University of Notre Dame for help. Part of the collaborative innovation minor in the Department of Art, Art History and Design, the class brings together students from multiple disciplines, from design and engineering to business and anthropology, to solve complex design problems. In this case, the city wanted to create what it called an “inclusive technology resource center” to help residents on the wrong side of the digital divide take advantage of technology for personal and professional growth.