麻豆传媒

 
, MD, is an Attending Neonatologist in the  at  (CHOP). She is an expert in infant care and can address a broad range of topics. These include breastfeeding, neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS or neonatal withdrawal from medications), prematurity, infant follow-up and their development in and outside the NICU and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). 
Parga-Belinkie’s research focuses on neonatology. Key areas include neonatal intensive care, newborn infant issues, neonates, breastfeeding and overall pediatric wellness.  
As an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) spokesperson, co-host of the AAP’s podcast, , and host of a new video series, , Parga-Belinkie is passionate about connecting with the community and educating patients and families in new and innovative ways.  
 
She is also Director of the  at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) and assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at the .  
 

Current Positions


Assistant Professor, Finance


Hentges Fellow in Finance, Finance




Research Interests


Insurance Economics


Household Finance


Public Policy Analysis


Health Economics




Selected Awards & Honors


Les B. Strickler Innovation in Instruction Award - American Risk and Insurance Association, 2024


National Association of Insurance Commissioners Research Fellowship, 2023 - 2024


Excellence in Reviewing Award - Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2023


Excellence in Reviewing Award - Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2022

Kruggel was named director of the James Madison University Center for Economic Education in July 2022. In 2024, the center was honored with the Albert Beekhuis Award for outstanding performance and excellence by the national Council for Economic Education.

Kruggel was associate director of the program from 2018-2022, when he also served as a master teacher for the national Council for Economic Education.

Kruggel served on the National Advisory Committee for the Council for Economic Education in fall 2023 and on the Executive Committee for the National Association of Economic Educators (NAEE) in fall 2022.鈥疘n 2023 he was honored with the NAEE Rising Star Award.

He has a master's degree in economics from the University of Delaware and a bachelor's degree in secondary education and teaching from Purdue University.

Jeffrey Kuo, MD, MMM, is chair of patient flow and EMS, and serves as system medical director of emergency management and security at Ochsner Health in New Orleans. He plays a critical role in Ochsner’s patient transfers and disaster preparedness for hurricanes and other natural disasters.
A board-certified emergency medicine physician, his expertise extends to emergency medicine and emergency response for major events. Dr. Kuo is the on-field airway management physician for the New Orleans Saints, and he coordinates medical operations for major events, including the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Super Bowl LIX.
 

Upadhyay’s research focuses on understanding the cognitive processes that inform reading. Discourse processing—or text and narrative comprehension—involves more than simply understanding the individual words on a page. Our mental representations for what we read build from the smallest units of language to the broadest higher-order representations, and include word and sentence level comprehension, memory, attention and social and pragmatic information. 
Upadhyay earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and English at Kent State University, a master's degree in psychology at Binghamton University and a doctorate in cognitive psychology at Binghamton University.
Upadhyay teaches: 

PSYC 380: Cognitive Psychology – an upper-level core psychology major course on the scientific study of the mind and mental processing (e.g., attention, memory, language). 
PSYC 497: Capstone Seminar: Psychology of Language – an entryway to the science of psycholinguistics, the psychological study of how people use and comprehend language.
PSYC 400: Attention & Mindfulness – an upper-level psychology major course on understanding how attention, distraction, and the recovery of human intention works in our day to day lives. 

Dr. Robert Sawyer, PhD, is a board-certified neuropsychologist, serving a dual role at Ochsner Health. As medical director of provider experience in the Ochsner Office of Wellbeing, Dr. Sawyer leads efforts aimed at bolstering the resilience and effectiveness of medical teams amid the pressures of contemporary medicine. He can speak on topics such as workforce wellness and preventing physician burnout.
In addition, Dr. Sawyer serves as medical director of neuroscience value with the Ochsner Neuroscience Institute. He is particularly dedicated to redefining the economic aspects of dementia care, helping health care systems understand the underlying financial needs for establishing and maintaining dementia care programs. He is a co-investigator in a National Institute on Aging/National Institutes of Health study of dementia care management led by the University of California San Francisco. He also chairs the Alzheimer’s Association's recently created workgroup focused on the business case for care navigation. 
Dr. Sawyer earned a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Memphis in Tennessee. He completed an internship in neuropsychology with Memphis VA Medical Center in Tennessee, and a fellowship in neuropsychology with VA Maryland Health Care System in Baltimore.

Fushcia-Ann Hoover, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary researcher specializing in social-ecological urban systems. She employs a range of approaches and perspectives from the fields of planning, engineering, social and environmental sciences. Her research centers environmental justice, green infrastructure planning, and relationships between people, place and the environment.
Hoover joined the department in 2021 as an assistant professor of environmental planning, where her projects explore green infrastructure planning, urban water quality, and environmental decision-making. Prior to joining the department, Hoover held postdocs at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), and the Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati, OH. She is also the founder of EcoGreenQueen LLC, a company dedicated to teaching and expanding the knowledge and use of environmental justice frameworks and methods across research and practice.
Hoover earned her master’s and doctorate from the Interdisciplinary Ecological Sciences and Engineering program in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University, and holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of St. Thomas, MN. Dr. Hoover is a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe-Salata Climate Justice Fellow, and a faculty affiliate with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability’s Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research site at Arizona State University.

Don Chen is Professor at the Department of Engineering Technology and Construction Management in the William States Lee College of Engineering at UNC Charlotte. His expertise covers performance improvement of pavements and applications of Building Information Modeling in design and construction. As Principal Investigator, Dr. Chen has secured over $1.7M in external funding and published more than 25 journal and conference papers with six of them in prestigious American Society of Civil Engineers journals. Dr. Chen has served as a journal editorial board member and Lead Proceedings Editor for international conferences.

Michelle E. Zuñiga, AICP (she/her/ella) holds a PhD in Urban and Environmental Planning and Policy from the University of California, Irvine. Since 2012, Michelle has focused her research on Latinx communities particularly, low-income, immigrant communities and how they experience and respond to environmental injustice and threats of displacement. Michelle explores their perspectives and experiences in the context of planning processes and urban policy. In parallel, Michelle also researches the implementation and challenges of environmental justice land use policy that call for drastic changes to how planning is conducted and how residents are engaged.
Michelle uses qualitative tools, community engaged methods, and interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the multifaceted dimensions and complexities related to neighborhood change and environmental justice. Before turning to a full-time academic career, Michelle also worked as an environmental justice organizer in Denver, where she worked alongside residents advocating for mitigation and more engagement in transportation and environmental planning processes.

Aldo Russo, MD, is a board certified and fellowship trained gastroenterologist at Ochsner Medical Center - Baton Rouge in Louisiana. He also serves as medical director for the Ochsner Baton Rouge region. His expertise includes the prevention of colorectal cancer, treatment of viral hepatitis, management of inflammatory bowel disease and treating gastrointestinal emergencies.
Dr. Russo earned a medical degree from Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Urena in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He completed an internship and residency at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, and a fellowship in gastroenterology at Louisiana State University Health Science Center in New Orleans. He is board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology. He is a frequent participant in health forums and other events for Spanish-speaking audiences.

Yutang (Tina) Chen, Ph.D. is an accomplished civil engineer specializing in construction safety and data analytics. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Technology and Construction Management. Before joining UNC Charlotte, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University, exploring the use of UAVs and BIM in enhancing construction safety. She also researched at the University of Toronto, benchmarking safety practices within the Ontario construction industry. Chen’s research interests include automation, robotics, virtual reality, and BIM, with a focus on how these technologies can improve safety measures and project management. Additionally, she has investigated the importance of organizational and individual resilience in construction safety. Her contributions to the field have been recognized with various awards and honors, including the ASCE Construction Research Council Best Paper Award and a postdoc conference travel grant from Purdue University. Beyond her academic achievements, Chen actively contributes to the field through her role as a reviewer for respected journals like the Journal of Safety Research and the Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering. She is also an associate member of both the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering.

Originally from New Hampshire, Stephanie Pilkington is a civil engineer by training, receiving her Ph.D. and M.S. from Colorado State University and B.S. from Virginia Tech, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has previously worked for the U.S. Air Force as an Environmental Restoration Program Manager (civilian). Her core research interests relate to meteorological natural hazards and how they affect communities. Her expertise is in community resilience to natural hazards and modeling hazard impact and recovery on a systems level. She has created multiple models using machine learning and artificial neural networks. Pilkington has also participated in damage surveys and is an avid storm chaser.

 
, MD, is the Psychiatrist-in-Chief and Chair of the  (DCAPBS) at  (CHOP). She specializes in treating children from underserved urban communities and works with the entire family or support system to improve the lives of children and adolescents.
Her extensive expertise includes pediatric mood and anxiety disorders, ethnically diverse children, health services research, psychiatric aspects of chronic medical illness, psychopharmacology, medical and psychiatric conditions, adolescent medicine, neuroimmunology and mood disorders, eating disorders, psychosomatic disorders, and suicide prevention.
Benton is dedicated to eliminating disparities among minority and underserved populations and developing leadership for a diverse child psychiatry workforce with a mission to prepare the next generation of diverse physician leaders. She also creates partnerships between communities and academic centers.
Benton is also the Site Director for CHOP’s  and the . Her research focuses primarily on pediatric mood and anxiety disorders, sickle cell disease and psychiatric conditions, HIV and psychiatric conditions, neuroimmunology and mood disorders, health services research, eating disorders, and ethnically diverse children.
She serves as President of the  (AACAP) and is a Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the .
She has received numerous honors throughout her career. Recent awards include the Humanitarian Award from the , the Shelley Leaphart-Williams Community Outreach Award from the , the McGavin Award (Agnes Purcell) for Prevention, the Blanche F. Ittleson Award for Research in Child Psychiatry from the , the Council on Concerns of Women Physicians (CCWP) Service Award from the  (NMA), the David M. Ellis, M.D., Lifetime Achievement Award and the Philadelphia Business Journal .

 
 

Andy Bobyarchick teaches applied geophysics at UNC Charlotte. His long-term research interests include the tectonics and regional geology of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, particularly within the eastern crystalline core of the chain.
For several years, he has taught an intense, hands-on summer institute for in-service K-12 schoolteachers. This field- and lab-based course is oriented on content and experience. He is also actively involved in developing online physical geology courses for non-science majors or teachers through UNC Charlotte and through the UNC general administration.
Bobyarchick received a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from SUNY Albany. A former research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, he is a member of the Geological Society of America, Carolina Geological Society, American Geophysical Union, Association of Environmental and Environmental Geologists and Sigma Xi.

Violeta J. Rodriguez’s research is focused on understanding the mechanisms that contribute to, maintain and/or exacerbate health disparities among minoritized youth and their families.  By focusing on both youth and their parents, she explores how the intricate association between parenting and health inequities can either mitigate or exacerbate these disparities, particularly in understudied and underserved populations (e.g., Global South countries, racially and ethnically minoritized people, immigrant families, Spanish-speaking caregivers and youth, LGBTQIA+ families, families disproportionately affected by chronic illness). 
She is committed to improving assessment methods used to evaluate health outcomes and predictors (e.g., parenting) in parents and youth, ensuring their validity across different cultural (cross-cultural and multicultural), research, and clinical contexts. Through the development of culturally sensitive and contextually appropriate assessment tools, she aims to improve the accuracy of how we assess various factors (e.g., parenting) in research and interventions. She is interested in the translation of evidence-based health promotion strategies and interventions into underserved settings to promote health equity using community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles, and informed by implementation science frameworks (e.g., MOST, CFIR).
Education
PhD, Clinical Psychology, University of Georgia
MS, Psychology, University of Georgia
MSEd, Research, Measurement and Evaluation, University of Miami
BA, Psychology, Florida International University
Website

 

As director of research strategy for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Cornelius Smith analyzes data and develops strategies to support the college’s researchers across the math and physical sciences, humanities, and social and behavioral sciences. She previously held several leadership roles in external relations, alumni engagement, and research strategy and administration with Millikin University, Marietta College, the Center for Intelligent Process Automation, and the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust.
Her book  (University of Kansas Press, 2022) examines the motivation, messaging, and connections between military and public service for female veterans—including Elaine Luria, Chrissy Houlahan, Elissa Slotkin, Tammy Duckworth, Joni Ernst, Martha McSally, and Tulsi Gabbard. She contributes interdisciplinary research to collections examining depictions of female presidents in American popular culture, the office of the First Lady of the United States, internationalization strategies, and central and eastern European politics. 
Cornelius Smith earned her PhD in History from Purdue University, MA in political science from Eastern Illinois University, and BA in philosophy and political science from Millikin University.

Matthew Giglia, MD, is a colon and rectal surgeon at Ochsner MD Anderson Cancer Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His expertise includes surgical management of colon and rectal cancer, robotic colon and rectal surgery, surgical management of inflammatory bowel disease, treatment of anorectal disease like fistulas, hemorrhoids and fissures, and surgical management of diverticular disease. His media interviews include tips on preventing colorectal cancer and the risk of erectile dysfunction with colorectal surgeries.

Dr. Giglia earned a medical degree from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center New Orleans. He completed a residency in general surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a fellowship in colon and rectal surgery at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. Dr. Giglia is a member of the American College of Surgeons, the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons and the Louisiana State Medical Society. He is double board certified in colon and rectal surgery, as well as general surgery.
 

Simon A. Rogers is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. He uses experimental and computational tools to understand and model advanced colloidal, polymeric, and self-assembled materials. Rogers investigates the fundamental physics behind time-dependent phenomena exhibited by soft matter under deformation for biomedical, energy, and environment applications.
Education 
B.Sc. (Honors) Physics, Victoria University of Wellington
Ph.D. Physics, MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnologies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Website

 
 

Casey Davenport, Ph.D., is an associate professor of meteorology with research expertise in severe weather, particularly focusing on thunderstorms capable of producing tornadoes.
She is particularly passionate about severe weather, which motivates her primary research interest in the dynamics of severe storms. She participated in VORTEX2, a large multi-agency field project that set out to learn more about how tornadoes and tornadic thunderstorms work. The project also inspired her current research trajectory focusing on the impact of temporally- and spatially-varying environments on storm evolution. Davenport is also interested in better understanding how changes to environments influence internal processes and storm behavior, using both observations and idealized modeling. Her proximity to the Appalachian Mountains further inspires her to investigate the interaction of thunderstorms and complex terrain.

Martha Cary (Missy) Eppes, Ph.D. is a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she has worked since 2003. She holds BS and MS degrees in Geology, with theses focused on soils and geomorphology, and a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from the University of New Mexico – where she researched the influence of soil development and weathering on the response of landscapes to tectonic perturbations and faulting.
Her current research interests include mechanical weathering processes, soil geomorphology and Quaternary geology of post-glacial landscapes, and soil geomorphology of the piedmont of the eastern United States. Since 2009, she has been the recipient of $1.49 million in external grants from sources including NSF and NASA; $975,339 were awarded as Lead-PI and $515,296 as Co-PI. She has served as first author of impactful articles in prestigious Nature Communications, Geology, Geophysical Research Letters, Reviews of Geophysics, and GSA Bulletin.
Her most recent body of published work has focused on mechanical weathering processes and the insight that fracture mechanics concepts can provide to the understanding of natural rock fracture. Eppes and Keanini (2017) recognized and quantified for the first time a previously unrecognized role of climate in subcritical rock fracture in the context of Earth surface processes; Eppes et al., 2020 verified that study’s theoretical models with field data. For this work, Eppes was recipient of the 2020 Geological Society of America (GSA) Kirk Bryan Award for Research Excellence – GSA’s highest honor in her discipline.  Eppes became an elected Fellow of GSA in 2018 and leader of the Quaternary Geology & Geomorphology Division of GSA from 2018-2021, culminating in Division Chair. She has been research advisor to 3 PhD students, 20 MS students and ~106 undergraduate students (2004-present) – and published 16 papers with student co-authors since 2010.
In 2022, Eppes was the head co-leader of an international, interdisciplinary conference (PRF2022 Progressive Failure of Brittle Rocks) bringing together the fields of surface processes and rock mechanics.   In 2022-2023 she served in highly prestigious positions as a Fulbright Research Scholar and a University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study Fellow. For “groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research linking rock fracture mechanics and surface processes, and building new bridges between communities," Eppes was chosen to receive the 2022 AGU Earth and Planetary Surface Processes Group’s Marguerite T. Williams Award.