Faculty Scholarship Talks

Jenn da Rosa
Weathering Politics: Stakes, Visibility, Structural Contestability and the Path from Climate Science to Policy

Why do some scientific claims spark political fights while others quietly shape policy? This talk draws on two recent projects to explore how climate science moves — or fails to move — from contested belief to concrete state action. The first introduces the stakes–visibility–structural contestability (SVC) framework, a new theoretical framework for explaining how public beliefs about specific scientific claims become politicized. The second turns to the U.S. states between 2010 and 2023, using a fixed effects negative binomial (FE-NB) regression panel to show that billion-dollar weather disasters are a significant predictor of subsequent state climate policy adoption, even after accounting for population, economic conditions, and party control of state government. Read together, the two studies point to a mechanism: catastrophic weather events raise the stakes and visibility of climate risk while narrowing room for competing interpretations, pushing climate science out of contested territory and into the realm of actionable fact. The talk offers both a theoretical account of how scientific claims acquire or shed political charge, and empirical evidence of that process unfolding, disaster by disaster, across the American states.

Nina Markovic
Designing superconductivity on the nanoscale

At temperatures near absolute zero, superconductors conduct electrical current without any resistance. This property is a consequence of an interaction between electrons, which causes the electrons to organize themselves into a collective state. In nanoscale samples, this collective state is fragile and can be manipulated by controlling the physical properties of the samples and their environment. I will show how we developed fabrication and measurement techniques with unprecedented capabilities meant to design, manipulate and investigate collective quantum states of electrons in superconducting nanowires for possible applications in logic, sensing and quantum computing technologies.

Katherine Choe
Making Learning Matter: Creative Strategies for Engagement in the Classroom

This presentation explores creative, evidence-based teaching strategies for making learning more meaningful, engaging, and intellectually challenging to promote student engagement and enhance learning. Based on research on learning, memory, metacognition, and student engagement, it will highlight practical approaches that encourage active participation, deeper thinking, and meaningful connections with course material.