Faculty Scholarship Talks

Veronica Segarra
How to humanize your yeast (and what to do with your first sabbatical ever)

I leveraged the first sabbatical of my career to refocus my research, my teaching, and writing. To pursue a new direction in my research with baker’s yeast, I constructed humanized yeast in which the deleted yeast gene was replaced with the equivalent human gene. In the future, this system will allow us to test human variations in that gene and screen for disease-causing defects. My other efforts during my sabbatical were teaching and writing oriented. To grow as an educator, I experimented with new tools of teaching like molecular modeling and open datasets. To develop my writing skills in new directions I experimented with new formats like essays, book reviews, and collections focusing on what activism looks like in the scientific community. A heartfelt thanks to the colleagues in the Department of Chemistry who graciously rearranged their fall semester teaching schedules so that I could take my first sabbatical ever.

Carolyn Schwarz
Going Without: Patient Care and the Language of Need among Faith-Based Health Care Professionals in the United States

Over last two decades, faith-based organizations have become increasingly involved in health promotion and health care delivery in the United States. One example of this trend is the rise of faith-based medical clinics that provide free and low-cost primary care to people who are uninsured. Based primarily on ethnographic interviews, I consider the ways that health care professionals working at these clinics take up the “language of need” to talk about patient hardship and problems of health care access. In a context where health care continues to be politically fraught and marked by struggle, this kind of language not only defines need in terms of care, moral urgency, and purpose, but is also a way that faith-based health care professionals try to get at the issue of inequality, including health care inequality, without actually naming it.