Dr. Chenghui Zhang specializes in criminology, bias crime, racial/ethnic inequalities, and quantitative methods. Her research explores how social structure influences crime and crime reporting behaviors, with a specific focus on how social inequalities affect perceptions of and reactions to bias crimes. Methodologically, Zhang employs survey experiments to obtain first-hand data as an alternative to official statistics and applies advanced statistical methods and machine learning techniques to reveal how social inequalities manifest in crime experiences and crime reporting behaviors.
Eric Crosbie
Dr. Eric Crosbie is a political scientist who examines commercial determinants of health and public health policy. His research focuses on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and examines how commercial industries (tobacco, food and beverage, alcohol, pharmaceutical and fossil fuel) are a key driver of the NCD epidemic and how they influence public health regulations.
Dr. Crosbie’s research is local in analyzing smoke-free environments and sugar-sweetened beverage taxation regulations in the U.S. as well as global in examining tobacco and nutrition packaging and labeling policies and the impact of trade on health. Dr. Crosbie has both local and international experience collaborating with health organizations and health advocates to educate and disseminate academic research findings to policymakers, including publishing research in Spanish to reach wider audiences. Dr. Crosbie also works with undergraduate and graduate students to publish and present research. Overall his research is multi-disciplinary combining elements of public health, political science, international relations, economics, law, and business to examine public health policy both locally and globally.
Richard Scott
My specialty is dental anthropology, with a focus on human tooth crown and root morphology. I have written or edited five books in this area, including The Anthropology of Modern Human Teeth (1997), which came out as a second edition in 2018. Geographically, I have worked in the American Southwest, Alaska, the North Atlantic, Spain, and Hungary.
David Simeral
David has been with the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC) since 2003 as an Associate Research Scientist in Climatology. His professional interests cover a broad spectrum within the fields of climatology, meteorology, and physical geography including expertise in drought, mountain climatology, mountain geography, field-related campaigns collecting weather and climate data, instrumentation, Geographic Information Systems, and communicating scientific information to decision makers, stakeholders, media, and the public.
Barb Brents
I apply research on sexual commerce to understand the politics of sexuality; the intersections of culture and economics; sexual markets and consumption; and the emotional and bodily labor of selling sex. My recent research compares the affects of different legal structures on the experiences of sex workers, and has compared the demand for sexual services in the US and UK.
Christopher Morgan
My research focuses on the hunter-gatherer archaeology of the American West, China, Mongolia, and the southern Andes, with an emphasis on behavioral adaptations to high-altitude, desert, and other marginal environments. I am particularly interested in the ways mobility, storage, and settlement patterns articulate with paleoenvironmental change and the evolution of different types of hunter-gatherer sociocultural organization.
In the America West, I study the archaeology of Numic-speaking peoples across and beyond the Great Basin, the evolution of Archaic lifeways, and the different ways hunter-gatherers in the region exploited mountain environments. In China, I focus on more fundamental evolutionary questions: Lower to Upper Paleolithic transitions, the arrival or evolution of modern humans and human behavior, and the forager to farmer sequence between the Yellow and Wei rivers. In Mongolia, I collaborats with the National Museum of Mongolia on projects that track the origins of pastoral economies and the northeast Asian microblade adaptation. In the southern Andes, I work on collaborative projects with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina that investigate the ways the region’s hunter-gatherers adapted to high altitude settings.
Nicholas Irwin
I am an applied microeconomist by training with an emphasis in environmental economics, urban economics, and real estate. The overarching goal of my research is understanding how individual and household choices affect economic outcomes along two distinct veins. The first explores the decision-making of homeowners and their choice to make housing investments in response to neighborhood spillovers or modify their household resource utilization. The second explores individual responses to information shocks related to environmental hazards or changes in public goods. In this area, my research incorporates novel components of housing market dynamics into traditional hedonic analysis which, if ignored, will lead to a consistent underestimation of the true impact of pollution or changes to amenities. I am also interested in supply-side housing market response to environmental hazards, an oft-ignored topic despite its economic importance.
Mark Tremblay
I study the digital economy.
Levent Atici
I am an anthropologically trained archaeologist with a research focus on the relationships between humans, non-human animals, and the environment. I am particularly interested in the origins of the food we eat, and the evolution of urban food provisioning systems. My research program features fieldwork, laboratory analysis, and an integrative approach to big data and sharing digital data. My background at the intersection of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences allows me to understand and support undergraduate education across the continuum of academic disciplines. As a student of life and infinitely curious Homo sapiens, I often wear multiple hats and strive to integrate multiple perspectives in everything I do.
Leah Madison
Madison has spent 10 years in k-12 education program support, building broader impacts for a variety of scientific topics. She creates partnerships between scientists and community organizations to meet educational needs. Current research aims to increase the amount of co-production being used between stakeholders to improve applied sciences.