California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Tom Trice, Assistant Professor, History

A native of rural Louisiana, Tom Trice was the first member of his family to attend college. It was only as he was nearing a completion of a double major in History and English at a small liberal arts college did he decide to pursue a career in Russian history. In the ensuing decade, Trice studied Russian and Polish languages, completed a master's thesis on the right-wing Russian publicist Sergei Sharapov, and joined the reference services staff of the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. Upon leaving government service, Trice undertook doctoral study at the University of Illinois, and later joined the faculty of Glenville State College in central West Virginia, where he taught world, European, Russian, and women's history.

Since embarking on a career in history, Trice has enjoyed the personal and professional benefits that come with studying and working in diverse places, especially Poland, Russia, rural Appalachia, and now California.

Trice's research and teaching interests include imperial and Soviet Russia and modern Europe, with a special focus on life events (birth, marriage, death), social and cultural life in the modern city and gender and sexuality.
 

Lynne Slivovsky, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering

Lynne Slivovksy received her B.S. in Computer and Electrical Engineering and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1992, 1993, and 2001, respectively. She worked with the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) Program from 2001 to 2003. In fall 2003, she started a tenure-track assistant professor position in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She received a Frontiers in Education New Faculty Fellow Award in 2003. In 2006, she was named the Hood Professor of Electrical Engineering. Her research is in the areas of haptics, human computer interaction, computer vision, and engineering education. In her free time, she enjoys mountaineering, kayaking and photography.

 

 

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California State University, Chico

Lynne Bercaw, Associate Professor, Education

Lynne Bercaw is an Associate Professor at CSU, Chico, in the Department of Education. Dr. Bercaw's career in education began in Costa Mesa, CA, teaching elementary school. She moved to Tennessee and earned her doctorate from Vanderbilt University. She received the Otto Bassler Excellence in Research Award from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

In 2000, she joined the faculty at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina (2000-2006). She taught several courses in the Elementary Education Program, including World Literature for Children, the primary course in which she implemented service-learning. Over the years, students' projects included various aspects in children's literature, from identifying and collecting quality books for various local agencies to writing children's books for specific children in need with whom they were partnered. Dr. Bercaw received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Reich College of Education at Appalachian State in 2004.

In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she coordinated the "20/20 Program: Bringing Community Issues into Focus." This program involved approximately 800 elementary education majors who participated in 20 hours of community service in their freshman and sophomore years, followed by 20 hours of service-learning in their junior and senior years. In the first course, they participate in service-learning as students; in the second course, they participate as teachers, implementing service-learning in their elementary placements. Dr. Bercaw is in the final stages of a longitudinal study exploring the influences of the "20/20 Program" on prospective teachers' perception of self, others, and the community.

Dr. Bercaw was part of the North Carolina Campus Compact Research and Scholarship Initiation-a collaboration of six universities-focusing on advancing scholarship of service-learning across the state. She has presented her work in service-learning at both national and international meetings. Several of her students have presented with her, sharing their experiences as students of service-learning.

S. Patrick Doyle, Assistant Professor, Agriculture

Patrick Doyle is an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture and has been at California State University, Chico since 2001. His area of specialization is animal science, in particular animal breeding and genetics. He received his B.S. in animal science at Texas A&M University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in animal sciences at Colorado State University, Ft. Collins.
Patrick's teaching and scholastic interests range from animal science, in particular, meat science; agricultural experimentation (service-learning) and biometrics; to issues facing contemporary agriculture and society coupled with "soft systems" approaches to conflict resolution and facilitation. He has been recognized by the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture for his classroom instruction. He has received an instructional grant from Chico State's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching to redesign the college's undergraduate research course. His scholarly activities beyond his efforts in classroom instruction include nutritional benefits of alternative feeds and forage-based systems, survey work involving USDA's National Animal Identification System, and most recently, residual feed intake in beef cattle.
He has mentored numerous undergraduate students who have gone on to excel in a variety of professional careers and graduate school.
 

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California State University, Fullerton

Katja Guenther, Assistant Professor, Sociology

Katja M. Guenther completed her doctorate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota in April 2006, and joined the Department of Sociology at California State University, Fullerton, as an Assistant Professor in August, 2006. Her doctoral thesis, "The New Trummerfrauen: Rebuilding Women's Welfare in Eastern Germany since German Unification," is a comparative analysis of local women's movements in eastern Germany since the collapse of state socialism there in 1989. This work received the University of Minnesota's Best Dissertation Award in the Social and Behavioral Sciences and Education, and was one of four finalists nationally for the Distinguished Dissertation Award through the Council of Graduate Schools. Her research focuses on the status of women and women's political participation in eastern Germany since 1989. She is also working on concurrent project exploring the politics of European Union (EU) gender policy, especially gender mainstreaming. Dr. Guenther's areas of expertise include gender, social movements, political sociology, qualitative methods, feminist theory and epistemology, and European and EU studies. Her work has been published in Journal of Women's History and Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. She teaches courses on Social Inequality and Women in Contemporary Society at Cal State, Fullerton. As a German-American, Dr. Guenther speaks German fluently, and frequently returns to Europe.

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California State University, Sacramento

Catherine Gabor, Assistant Professor, English

Catherine Gabor is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Sacramento where she teaches composition and rhetoric and coordinates the Teaching Associate (TA) Program in the English Department. She also serves as the Faculty Consultant for General Education Assessment. Given her institution's heavy emphasis on teaching and her scholarly interest in pedagogy, Gabor is a teacher-scholar in every sense of the term. Her teaching interests- from basic writing to graduate seminars- include service learning, writing in electronic environments, and representation in research (Gabor's and her students'). Her publications include chapters on teaching students to do primary research and on pregnancy and academic mentoring, as well an article on the ethics of service learning instruction in Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy. She also has co-developed a nonprofit community literacy organization, Write to Succeed, Inc. Her current focus within that organization is the Writing Partners Program, in which college students and school children write letters to each other, thus fostering mentor-like relationship through literacy. Gabor has moved from piloting the program in her own class to training faculty across the campus to implement the program. One of Gabor's goals is to do an empirical study on the writing skills of the participants and be able to make some statistically verifiable claims about the worth of the program. Gabor is an avid collaborator and seeks opportunities to collaborate with academics throughout the state.

Greg Kim-Ju, Assistant Professor Psychology

Greg Kim-Ju received his BA in Psychology from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota and his Ph.D. in Cultural Psychology from Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He served as community education volunteer for the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, where he was involved with illiteracy, ESL, and youth programs. As a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, he turned his attention to the ways in which young adults (20s and 30s) in South Korea grapple with their ethnic and national identities and how their identities motivated them to become civically engaged in the early 1980s and late 1990s. After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Kin-Ju served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian American Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston (2003) where he put together community profiles that included population, housing, social and economic data on different ethnic and racial groups in Massachusetts. Dr. Kim-Ju joined the Department of Psychology at California State University, Sacramento in the fall of 2003. His research interests include perceptions of race and ethnicity, ethnic identity, and civic engagement. Since 2004, Dr. Kim-Ju has been involved with the 65th Street Corridor Collaborative Project, a high-impact and multi-component community mobilization effort aimed at increasing student academic achievement, fostering student leadership, and improving parent participation in neighborhoods where gang violence, a lack of access to resources and low civic engagement create a need for innovative, culturally competent strategies. His responsibilities include overseeing the Tutoring/Mentoring and Action Research Programs as well as the Assessment & Evaluation Program for all facets of the Project.

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California State University, Stanislaus

Dave Colnic, Assistant Professor, Politics and Public Administration

Dave Colnic is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at California State University, Stanislaus. Dr. Colnic earned a B.A. from the University of California, Irvine and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. His degrees in Political Science greatly inform a multidisciplinary research agenda that focuses on public policy and governance issues, with special emphases on the environmental, public participation and engagement, and the U.S.-Mexico Border region. In the classroom, Dr. Colnic frequently utilizes interactive and innovative pedagogy, such as service learning. He is currently working on several projects to get students into the community to improve local governance and student success. These projects include the creation of a Pathway to Community Leadership curriculum that connects local public and NGO officials with student leaders. The service-learning and political engagement project proposed in this application contributes to his larger program of facilitating student involvemet in real-world governance issues.

Nancy Jean Smith, Professor, Teacher Education

Dr. Nancy Jean Smith was born and raised in Northern Michigan, where she finished a double major in History and Languages, and a Master's in Elementary and Bilingual Education. In Michigan she worked as a Migrant Education Aide and Migrant Teacher for many summers before moving to California in 1984. Since 1984 she has taught various mixed levels of public school in the USA and Chiapas, Mexico, worked at San Joaquin County Office of Education as a Bilingual Program Manager and served as faculty in Teacher Education for the last 12 years. Her passion for language, culture and environmental science are contextualized through transformative education, a socio-political combination of critical theories and pedagogies. Her doctoral work in International and Multicultural Education has offered her continual travel throughout the world, providing her with a global perspective to local and national issues. She coordinated a service learning project in Teotitlan de Valle, Oaxaca for 12 summers. Dr. Smith's current interest has been to move her pedagogical understandings and expertise to the eLearning format. She is an academic practitioner of teaching and learning, and most enjoys projects where service learning and active participation of teachers, elementary students and faculty are mixed together.

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Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

Nina Maria Reich, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies

Dr. Nina Maria Reich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She is an expert in political rhetoric, public sphere and social movement studies, critical rhetoric, and feminist theories. Dr. Reich earned a B.A. and M.A. in Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and completed her doctorate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Reich's scholarship has been published in numerous Communication Studies journals and textbooks including Communication Quarterly and Feminist and Media Studies. Currently, she is working on a manuscript which examines the rhetoric surrounding the femicides in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, Mexico

 

 

Alicia Partnoy, Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures

Alicia Partnoy is a survivor from the secret detention camps where about 30,000 Argentineans 'disappeared.' She is the author of The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival and of the poetry collections Little Low Flying/Volando bajito, and Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la manzana. Partnoy edited You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile, and from 2003 to 2006, she was the co-editor of Chicana/Latina Studies: the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her work has been published in more than twenty anthologies, and in journals in the U.S.A. and abroad. Her poem Communication/Comunicación has been displayed on buses and subways in Washington DC, New York City, and Dallas, and has been selected as one of the 100 favorite food related items of 2006 by the magazine Saveur. A former Vice-Chair of Amnesty International, Partnoy is a professor and the Chair of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Loyola Marymount University. After twenty years of circulation in English, the original manuscript of her tales about being disappeared in Argentina has just been published in her country as La Escuelita-Relatos testimoniales. Partnoy presides over Proyecto VOS-Voices of Survivors, an organization that brings survivors of state sponsored violence to lecture at U.S. universities.

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Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont

Don Stannard-Friel, Professor, Psychology/Sociology

Don Stannard-Friel is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Notre Dame de Namur University. He has also taught at San Francisco State University, U.C. Santa Cruz, USF, Santa Rita county jail, and the Federal Correctional Institution for Women in Dublin. His career in administration has included serving as California Site Director for Notre Dame-AmeriCorps, and, at NDNU, Dean of Faculty and director of Tenderloin U, a community-based learning project.

As a young man, Stannard-Friel lived and worked in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Many years later, when he returned to write a book, he was encouraged by service providers to develop inner-city programs. Since then, working with community partners, he has established a number of activities, including Halloween in the Tenderloin, Tenderloin Immersion, sports clinics, the Tenderloin Youth College Project, Miracle on Eddy Street (a Christmas celebration), and a series of classes taught wholly in the inner city, including Streetwise Sociology, Inner City Studies, and Sports, Service, and Society (to be introduced in Fall 2007).

He is the recipient of a number of awards, including the University's George M. Keller Teaching Excellence Award, the Center for Student Leadership's Inner Fire Award, and the Catharine Julie Cunningham Teaching Project Award for Tenderloin U. He is also a Cosby on Campus: Celebrating Teachers! Honoree.

His writings include Harassment Therapy: A Case Study of Psychiatric Violence, and recently, City Baby and Star: Addiction, Transcendence, and the Tenderloin.

His Ph.D. is from the University of California, Davis. His BA and MA are from San Francisco State University.

 

Gretchen Wehrle, Associate Professor, Pscyhology/Sociology

Gretchen Wehrle has been a faculty member at Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU) since 1999 and currently serves as Chair of the Psychology/Sociology Department. Dr. Wehrle's major areas of interest are community-based learning (CBL), developing reciprocal community partnerships, and faculty development. Dr. Wehrle has taught at least one CBL course each semester since 2000 and recently co-developed a minor in Leadership and Public Service. In 2003, Dr. Wehrle was the first faculty member at NDNU to receive the Inner Fire Award in recognition of her achievements in "sparking students' inner fire toward fulfilling their potential through curricular and co-curricular leadership;" in 2004 she was selected to be NDNU's Wye Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Currently, Dr. Wehrle is co-director of a grant project focusing on faculty development in community-based learning. She also was the project leader for a national Campus Compact Engaged Department grant and a three-year California Campus Compact grant focusing on student civic engagement. For the past six years, Dr. Wehrle has partnered with the Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center to help expand student civic engagement by integrating dialogue into NDNU's curricular and co-curricular and training students to plan and facilitate conversations focusing on social and campus issues. Last year, she was selected to become a member of PCRC's board of directors. Dr. Wehrle has presented her work at Campus Compact's annual Continuums of Service conferences, local community college student leadership conferences, and national conferences focusing on best practices in the teaching of psychology. Recently, she was selected to be a member of California Campus Compact strategic planning committee.

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Occidental College, Los Angeles

Caroline Heldman, Assistant Professor, Politics

Dr. Heldman earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She has published in the top journals in her field, and has co-authored, Rethinking Madame President: Is the US Really Ready for a Woman in the White House. She specializes in the presidency, media, gender, and race in the American context. Prior to teaching at Occidental College, Professor Heldman taught at Whittier College, Fairfield University, and Rutgers University. She holds a bachelors degree in business administration from Washington State University, and has worked as the General Manager for Bio-Energy Systems and a Research Manager for Consumer Health Sciences. Dr. Heldman has also been active in "real world" politics as a congressional staffer, campaign manager, and a campaign consultant. She drove to New Orleans to help with rebuilding efforts the week that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and she has returned to the city twelve times since to assist with rebuilding efforts. Dr. Heldman works in a leadership position with Common Ground, a New Orleans-based grassroots relief organization, and is the cofounder of Critical Response, a group that provides volunteers to engage in high-risk rescue efforts during political crises. She has worked as a book reviewer for the Associated Press, a reporter for KPFK Los Angeles, and a frequent guest on WBAI Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and U.S. News and World Report.

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Pitzer College, Claremont

Kathleen Yep, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies and Sociology

Kathleen Yep is part of the first generation of women in her family to graduate from college and the first professor in her family. Her family's history influences her commitment to working with first-generation college students and to facilitating all students' active engagement in society. After completing her doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, she received the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship for two years. Since fall 2004, She has worked as an assistant professor of Asian American Studies and Sociology at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. Ethnic Studies is a distinct field of inquiry that not only emerged out of political engagement but also emphasizes linking theory and practice through service-learning. Yep draws from this tradition of political engagement in order to integrate what C. Wright Mills calls the "sociological imagination" into her research and teaching.

Kathleen Yep started teaching fall 2004, and has taught a total of 14 classes ranging from Social Movements to Sociology of Education. Over the last five semesters, her students have contributed to and learned from working over 2,225 hours in various communities. Drawing from Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, Stanley Aronowitz, Christine Sleeter, and Henry Giroux, her teaching integrates critical pedagogy and education for critical consciousness. Students have responded positively to this dialogical pedagogy as her average rating for all of her classes is 4.8 out of 5 with 5 as the highest rating and 1 as the lowest rating.

Yep's research integrates oral historiography research methodologies and looks at working-class Chinese American men and women who played basketball in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s. Analyzing how racial formations occur in media representations of basketball players and in basketball practices, this project examines how the sport is a contested terrain.

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Santa Clara University

Laura Nichols, Associate Professor, Sociology

Laura Nichols is associate professor of sociology at Santa Clara University where she has worked since 2000. After working in non-profit organizations and doing organizational and policy-based research, Laura decided to pursue graduate work to learn research skills that could be used to inform program and policy-makers about the needs and desires of those most influenced by programs and policies.

She received her M.A. in sociology from Western Michigan University and her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Akron. Her areas of specialization as a graduate student were applied sociology and family inequalities and social policy. As a doctoral student she took a year off from graduate studies to be a research fellow at the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C. In that role Laura focused primarily on research and education in the area of welfare reform. She has also worked on a number of research projects to study the effects of policy changes on recipients of SSI/Disability and public assistance.

Laura's research has been in the areas of participatory evaluation, the programmatic needs of homeless women, the experiences of first generation college students, and the use of economic and social supports by families after the birth of a child. In an upcoming sabbatical she will be studying symbolic boundaries and how people cross into and subsist in new social boundaries.

At Santa Clara University Laura was hired to contribute to the Sociology Department's Applied Sociology program. She has taught Principles of Sociology, Social Stratification, Sociology of Families, Applied Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, Sociology Internship, and Group Dynamics.

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University of California, Los Angeles

Jennifer A. Jay, Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Jennifer Jay has been an Assistant Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UCLA for the last five years. She teaches courses in aquatic chemistry, environmental microbiology, and chemical fate and transport, as well as a service-learning course in which UCLA undergraduates conduct community-based environmental research with a local 6th grade class. In 2003 she received the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) to study mercury cycling in environmental biofilms. She currently directs an active program research related to mercury and arsenic biogeochemistry, as well as bacteria survival in beach sand. Jenny received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT. Her PhD research was an investigation of the effects of reduced sulfur compounds on the methylation of mercury by sulfate-reducing bacteria, and her post doctoral topic was the mobilization of arsenic in a Bangladeshi aquifer.

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University of the Pacific, Stockton

Marcia Hernandez, Assistant Professor, Sociology

Marcia Hernandez views teaching as an instructional form of social activism that can demonstrate to students how knowledge gained in a "traditional" classroom setting is useful for understanding and addressing complex political and social issues. Yet, until she joined the faculty at the University of the Pacific, she did not have the opportunity to fully develop what this vision could look like in practice. While at Pacific, she has revised her teaching goals to include service-learning as a way to support the ethos of student-centered learning, a core value of Pacific's mission. To develop her instructional tool kit she is a member of the Peer to Peer Pairs Training program organized by the Center for Teaching Excellence at Pacific, and is also enrolled in the Crossroads Online Institute Seminar hosted at Georgetown University.

Hernandez's joint appointment in the Sociology Department and the Jacoby Center for Public Service and Civic Leadership provides ample institutional support to develop innovative service-learning activities. Fostering connections between research and service-learning is an important function of her role at Pacific. By blending her duties as an instructor and researcher, she is able to fulfill this responsibility. For example during the spring 2006 semester she supervised students in a Jacoby Center research orientated service-learning course. Also as a member of the Partnership for Assessment of Communities (PAC), an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team coordinated by the Great Valley Center, a non-profit organization with whom the Jacoby Center has an ongoing relationship, she is able to involve students in research that explores civic engagement with the goal of improving quality of life for residents in targeted, local communities. Her on-going research efforts with PAC and the lessons learned from previous courses serve as the foundation for her proposed CACC-Carnegie Foundation Fellow Program service-learning project.


Dari Sylvester, Assistant Professor, Political Science

Dari E. Sylvester, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor Political Science and a Senior Research Fellow at the Jacoby Center for Public Service and Civic Leadership at the University of the Pacific. The Jacoby Center ".encourages the civic engagement of Pacific students and faculty through community service and research." In her capacity at the Jacoby Center, she has engaged in grant research and writing for programs that support student leadership.

Dr. Sylvester has been an active researcher in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Dr. Sylvester is a two-time participant in the Georgetown University's Crossroads Online Institute and will be serving as a facilitator for the online program in the Evidence week. Through the online institute, Sylvester has carefully engaged in challenges in her teaching and her students' learning while interfacing with colleagues who evaluate and critique her work. Furthermore, Sylvester is a two-time participant in the University of the Pacific's Center for Teaching Excellence Peer to Peer Mentoring Program. The program was established for pre-tenure faculty who seek to improve their teaching and their understanding of student learning through peer partnering to analyze and critique each other's teaching and subsequently develop course portfolios.

Sylvester's current research is focused on quality of life issues for residents of California's greater San Joaquin Valley. She and five other faculty members across three universities and disciplines were chosen by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's office to develop a tracking component of the Governor's San Joaquin Valley Strategic Action Proposal. Her responsibilities include identifying and monitoring a comprehensive set of benchmark indicators for quality of life improvements as a part of a ten-year longitudinal study in the Strategic Action Proposal. The San Joaquin Valley Strategic Action Proposal was developed in response to the Executive Order by Governor Schwarzenegger creating the California Partnership with the San Joaquin Valley to assess quality of life issues in the Central Valley of California.

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University of San Diego

Judith Liu, Professor, Sociology

Since joining the faculty at the University of San Diego in 1984, Judith Liu has utilized a number of pedagogical methods in her passion to find ways of teaching sociology that both captures the essence of the discipline and to make the course content meaningful to students. Those efforts have resulted in two awards: the Sears Teaching Excellence Award and the Council for the Advancements of Secondary Education (CASE) California Professor of the Year for teaching innovation. The teaching innovation was to embed service-learning components in her classes. Community service-learning has been the one method that has enabled her to make sociological concepts come alive for students, to pique their intellectual curiosity, and to inspire them to take collective action in efforts to address social problems.

Liu's consistent use of community service-learning has become the foundation of her teaching philosophy, and it now has become a serious professional commitment. Not only does she utilize service-learning, she is now a mentor to other faculty members. As the faculty liaison for the Center for Community Service-Learning, she assists faculty members who are incorporating course-based service-learning for the first time, and is also helping to create a cohort of committed faculty through an innovative pilot program known as the Community Service-Learning Scholars. Her collaboration with the Center for Community Service-Learning has resulted in a co-authored article on campus-community partnerships, and she will continue her research and writing in the field.

Sandra Sgoutas-Emch, Professor, Psychology

Dr. Sgoutas-Emch is a professor in the psychology department and the director of the gender studies program at the University of San Diego. She received her masters and doctorate degrees in biological psychology at the University of Georgia and then received a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychoneuroimmunology at the Ohio State University. She has been at the University of San Diego for the last 14 years and teaches course in both health psychology and biological psychology. Other courses that she has taught include research methods, statistics, brain, behavior and immunity, hormones and behavior, the psychology of stress, and advanced research methods in health psychology. Her research interests include assessing the effectiveness of service-learning on learning outcomes, women's health issues (focus on premenstrual symptoms), predictors of use and efficacy of alternative medical approaches and both reactions to stress and how stress can be managed. She is a member of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science as well as the Society of Behavioral Medicine, the Western Psychological Association and other local and national associations.

Dr. Sgoutas-Emch has a 12-year history of including service-learning as part of many of the courses. In 1998, she received USD's innovation in Experiential Education Award for the development of a health fair project. She has been an active member and the chair of the experiential education committee at USD and has participated in many events sponsored by the office of community service learning.

Dr. Sgoutas-Emch is the mother of two children ages 3 and 8 and has been married for the past 15 years. She is actively involved in her community as a member of several organizations as well as a member of the school board for St. Spryidon Greek School.

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University of San Francisco

Chris Brooks, Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Chris Brooks received his B.A. and J.B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, 1991, his M.S. from San Francisco State University, 1997 and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, 2002. He is the director of Community Connections, a service-learning project within the CS program. His research interests lie within the union of the sets of Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems and include multiagent systems, social impact of technology, collaborative mining and organization of Web data, peer-to-peer systems, machine learning, and electronic commerce.

Corey Cook, Assistant Professor, Politics

Professor Corey Cook joined the Department of Politics at the University of San Francisco as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2006 after having earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His doctoral dissertation considers the impact of race and gender on political representation and explores the contemporary significance of identity politics.

Professor Cook has published academic articles in the DuBois Journal of Social Science Research on Race, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. He is completing several research projects surrounding the usage of Ranked Choice Voting in San Francisco and two articles about promoting political engagement among students through community-based research. However, his largest current project assesses the phenomenon of reactionary populism in California and the periodic emergence of mass revolts against the public sector in the state.

Professor Cook teaches courses in American Politics specializing in political institutions, urban and state politics, and the dynamics of political representation.

Prior to joining the faculty at USF, Professor Cook has taught courses in American politics at the University of Wisconsin, San Jose State University, Rutgers University, and San Francisco State University.

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