SMU Experts by Subject

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Anthropology

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Michael Adler
Department Chair and Associate Professor
Expertise: Complex ancestries of Native American, particularly Puebloan, communities in the American Southwest.

Matthew Boulanger
Lecturer
Expertise: North American archaeology (focus on Paleoindian archaeology - the first humans to reach the Americas), pseudoscience/fringe science, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and curation of archaeological collections/information.

Maryann R. Cairns
Associate Professor
Expertise: Using creative research design and cultural understanding to safeguard environmental resources and human health, focus on apparel and textile industry. 

Kelly McKowen
Assistant Professor
Expertise: Political economy, culture, and technology in contemporary Norway.

David Meltzer
Professor
Expertise: The origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age, including how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of significant climate change.

Neely Myers
Associate Professor
Expertise: Social determinants of mental health; youth mental health and illness; and, the role of culture in the experience; understanding and treatment of mental health and illness around the world. 

Nia Parson
Professor
Expertise: Interpersonal and collective forms of violence, and mental and physical health and how they relate to gender.

Christopher Roos
Professor
Expertise: Wildfires (mainly historical perspective), Indigenous or cultural burning practices, and United States Southwest archaeology.  

Art

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Elizabeth Bacon Eager
Assistant Professor
Expertise: Transatlantic history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and material culture, with a focus on intersections between art, science and technology.

Roberto Conduru
Endowed Distinguished Professor of Art History
Expertise: Modern and contemporary art and architecture in Brazil with an emphasis on Afro-Brazilian art, as well as Constructivist art and architecture, global art history and current debates in the arts of Latin America and the trans-Atlantic world.

Amy Freund
Associate Professor and Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History
Expertise: 18th-century European art, politics and visual culture, portraiture and the history of selfhood, the visual representation of animals, gender and representation, the history and decoration of mechanical objects.

Randall Griffin
University Distinguished Professor
Expertise: American art and photography, from the Civil War through the 1950s.

James Hart
Director of Social Innovation, Creative, and Arts Entrepreneurship
Expertise: Arts Management and Arts Entrepreneurship.

Adam Herring
Emily Rich Summers Endowed Professor in Art History Department Chair
Expertise: Art of the pre-Columbian Americas, visual theory and semiotics, anthropological and materialist critique of visual experience, and the history of the discipline.

Sam Holland
Professor
Algur H. Meadows Dean and Professor of Music
Expertise: Piano pedagogy, music and human learning.

Zannie Voss
Professor and Director SMU DataArts and Professor of Arts Management  
Expertise: Arts management, including cultural event attendance, and arts entrepreneurship.

Business

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Michael Cox
Executive in Residence at the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom
Expertise: Impact of competitive market forces on freedom and prosperity in the global economy.

Michael Davis 
Clinical Professor
Expertise: Intersection of government and business

Albert Niemi
Professor and O’Neil Chair in Global Markets and Freedom
Expertise: Economic growth, economic forecasting, and American business history.  

Elfi Kraka 
Professor
Expertise: High performance computing, method development and application, Artificial Intelligence, vibrational spectroscopy, catalysis, materials and drug design.

Brian Zoltowski
Associate Professor
Expertise: Effect of blue light on people  

Corporate Communications

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Maria Dixon Hall
Associate Professor and Chief Diversity Officer
Expertise: Organizational strategy and planning. The intersection of power, identity, and culture in corporate, non-profit, and religious organizations.

Cybersecurity

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Suku Nair
Professor and Vice Provost for Research and Chief Innovation Officer
Expertise: Cyber security and fault-tolerant computing.

Mitch Thornton
Professor
Expertise: Hardware Security including IoT and embedded systems, system and network modeling, computer architecture, quantum computing, and formal methods.

Dispute Resolution

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John Potter
Clinical Associate Professor
Expertise: Dispute resolution and conflict management. Mediated more than 3,000 disputes with many of those occurring in the health care field.

Earth Sciences and Hazards

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Heather DeShon
Professor and Department Chair
Expertise: Earthquake physics, induced seismicity (earthquakes and tremors that are caused by human activity), earthquake generation, volcano seismology and plate tectonics.  

Zhong Lu
Professor and Shuler-Foscue Chair
Expertise: Use of InSAR technology to analyze changes in the Earth, like the emergence of sinkholes in West Texas and previously unidentified landslides on the U.S. West Coast.

Maria Beatrice Magnani
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Expertise: How the land and ocean floor were made and change over time.

Maria Richards
Geothermal Lab Coordinator
Expertise: Geothermal energy -- the use of the earth's natural heat to general electrical power.

Brian Stump 
Albritton Professor
Expertise: Seismic wave propagation, earthquake source theory and explosions as a source of seismic waves, and science and politics in the nuclear age. 

James Quick 
Professor, Associate Vice President for Research, Dean of Graduate Studies
Expertise: Early warning of eruptions, dangers of active volcanoes, volcanic ash.

Economics

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Cullum Clark 
Director Bush Institute - SMU Economic Growth Initiative and Adjunct Professor of Economics
Expertise: Macroeconomic policy, economic geography and urban economics, modern economic history

Michael Cox
Executive in Residence at the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom
Expertise: Impact of competitive market forces on freedom and prosperity in the global economy.

Michael Davis
Clinical Professor
Expertise: Intersection of government and business

Tom Fomby
Professor
Expertise: Economic forecasting and data mining. 

Daniel Millimet
Department Chair and Dedman Trustee Professor
Expertise: Understanding the causal effects of public policies (labor, educational, environmental, trade) on economic outcomes.

Albert Niemi
Professor and O’Neil Chair in Global Markets and Freedom
Expertise: Economic growth, economic forecasting, and American business history.

Education

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Stephanie Knight
Leon Simmons Endowed Dean of the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development
Expertise: Relationships between instructional strategies, classroom processes, learning environments and student outcomes; teacher professional development, and the use of observational techniques to study classroom processes.

Jill Allor
University Distinguished Professor
Expertise: Reading acquisition for students with and without disabilities, including students with learning disabilities or intellectual disabilities.

Stephanie Al Otaiba
Professor and Patsy and Ray Caldwell Centennial Chair in Teaching and Learning
Expertise: School-based literacy interventions, response to intervention, learning disabilities, diverse learners, and teacher training.

David Bertrand
Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Sport Performance Leadership program
Expertise: Leadership coach with two decades of blended experience in human development, high-performance coaching, and education.

Corey Brady
Associate Professor
Expertise: Mathematical and computational modeling, with a particular emphasis on supporting and understanding the collective learning of classroom groups.

Peter Carton
Director of Sport Management and Clinical Assistant Professor
Expertise: Sports management and academic excellence, oversees placement of SMU interns in the professional sports teams in Dallas and beyond.

Mark Chancey
Professor
Expertise: Recognized authority on the constitutional, political and academic issues raised by Bible courses in public schools.

Karla del Rosal
Clinical Assistant Professor
Expertise: Bilingual education, ESL instruction, student diversity, and classroom assessment.

Leanne Ketterlin Geller
Professor
Expertise: Mathematics education, including procedures and decision-making targeting student needs.

Francesca Go
Clinical Associate Professor
Expertise: Behavior, reading, cognitive disabilities, autism, assessment and measurement.

Michael Harris
Department Chair of the Department of Education Policy and Leadership, and Director of the Ed.D. in Higher Education program
Expertise: The culture, strategy, and behavior of higher education institutions.

Watt Lesley Black, Jr.
Clinical Professor in Education Policy and Law
Expertise: Legal and policy issues in K-12 and higher education; First Amendment expression rights of both students and teachers, Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection analysis, affirmative action and diversity in the public schools.

Lin Lipsmeyer
Professor and Department Chair of Teaching and Learning
Interdisciplinary research in learning sciences, cognition, and innovative technologies, bridging learning sciences, artificial intelligence, and STEAM learning.

Scott Norris
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Expertise: Importance of mathematics education, likelihood of winning the lottery or the Powerball.

Candace Walkington
Professor, Annette and Harold Simmons Centennial Chair, and a Gerald J. Ford Research Fellow in the Department of Teaching
Expertise: Mathematics education; “personalizing” mathematics instruction to students’ out of-school interests in areas like sports, music, shopping, and video games, and their intended careers like nursing or software design.

Johnitha Watkins Johnson
Clinical Assistant Professor
Expertise: Equity in education; developed the Urban Education specialization in the Department of Teaching and Learning. 

Willis A. Jones
Associate Professor
Expertise: Exploring how intercollegiate athletics influence organizational and student outcomes, college student retention, college rankings, historically Black colleges and universities, faculty governance, community colleges, and adult learners.

Magdalena Pando
Associate Professor
Expertise: Teacher preparation and professional development aimed at fostering culturally and linguistically inclusive teaching methods in early childhood and K-12 education, model-based inquiry methods in STEM education.
 

Energy Industry

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Bruce Bullock
Director, Maguire Energy Institute
Expertise: Management, marketing and policy issues related to the energy industry, including oil, gas, wind and geothermal. 

Engineering

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Joe Camp
Professor and Interim Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Expertise: Drone communications, wireless systems.

Sila Çetinkaya
Chair and Professor of OREM and Cecil H. Green Professor of Engineering
Expertise: Supply chain systems, manufacturing, providing quantitative evidence to assess healthcare operations.

MinJun Kim
Robert C. Womack Endowed Chair Professor of Engineering
Expertise: Nanobiotechology, such as nanopore technology and nano/micro robotics.

Nicos Makris
Addy Family Centennial Professor in Civil Engineering
Expertise: Structural and earthquake engineering.

Barbara Minsker
Bobby B. Lyle Endowed Professor of Leadership and Global Entrepreneurship
Expertise: Infrastructure equity and urban sustainability.

Andrew Quicksall
Associate Professor
Expertise: Water contamination in the natural environment by probing both solution and solid chemistry of natural materials.

Kathleen Smits
Professor, Department Chair Civil & Environmental Engineering
Expertise: How water and energy interact with the environment, including greenhouse gas emissions, soil contamination, land/atmosphere interactions and mercury emissions from gold mining.

Jia Zhang
Professor and Interim Chair, Department of Computer Science, and the Cruse C. and Marjorie F. Calahan Centennial Chair in Engineering
Expertise: Machine learning, data science and cloud computing.

Ethics

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Rita Kirk
William F May Endowed Director of the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility
Expertise: Ethics in corporate communications and public affairs.

Tom Mayo 
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor and Professor of Law
Expertise: Medical ethics, health care law, bioethics, medical-legal humanities, constitutional law, family law, administrative law and legislation.

Evolution

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Mark Chancey
Professor
Expertise: Recognized authority on the constitutional, political and academic issues raised by Bible courses in public schools.

Pia Vogel
Professor
Expertise: Biological sciences, evolutionary science and scientific inquiry.

Fashion and Sustainable Fashion Practices

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Jenny B. Davis
Professor
Expertise: Fashion trends, business of fashion, plus streetwear fashion and culture.

Maryann R. Cairns
Associate Professor
Expertise: Using creative research design and cultural understanding to safeguard environmental resources and human health, focus on apparel and textile industry. 

Healthcare

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Eric Bing
Professor of Global Health
Expertise: Worldwide health issues and initiatives, obstacles to adequate health care, health care in Third World countries.

Nathan Cortez
Co-Director of the Tsai Center for Law, Science and Innovation
Adelfa Botello Callejo Endowed Professor of Law in Leadership and Latino Studies 
Expertise: Health law, administrative law, and FDA law, as well as emerging markets in health care and biotechnology.

Tom Mayo 
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor and Professor of Law
Expertise: Medical ethics, health care law, bioethics, medical-legal humanities, constitutional law, family law, administrative law and legislation.

History

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Edward F. Countryman
University Distinguished Professor History
Expertise: Social consequences of cultural clashes in America.

Melissa Barden Dowling
Department Chair and Associate Professor
Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director of Classical Studies
Expertise: Ancient Rome and Greece, and related topics.

Jeffrey Engel
Director of the Center for Presidential History and Professor
Expertise: U.S. presidency and American diplomatic history.

Andrew Graybill
Director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies and Professor
Expertise: North American West with particular interest in expansion, borders, race, violence, and the environment.

Alexis McCrossen
Professor
Expertise: temporal studies (emerging area in historical research), a new way of looking at the past through the study of measurement, importance and recognition of time.

Holiday

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Oldest Christmas Card
What is believed to be one of the first mass-produced Christmas cards -- dating back some 175 years -- can be found among the extensive special collections of Bridwell Library at SMU's Perkins School of Theology.  

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at SMU
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a standing-room-only audience in SMU's McFarlin Auditorium on March 17, 1966. A historical marker honoring the visit was installed in 2023.

Human Rights

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Rick Halperin
Director of the Human Rights Program and Professor
Expertise: Human rights, genocide, and historical and current abuse of human rights in various countries. Past chair of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA.

Natalie Nanasi
Associate Professor and Director of the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women
Expertise: Survivors of intimate partner violence, human trafficking, and sexual abuse in a broad range of legal matters.

Beth Wheaton-Páramo
Research Assistant Professor
Expertise: Using economics to better understand and analyze human rights issues, leading the SMU human trafficking research team.

Immigration

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Jim Hollifield
Director of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs
Expertise: Global migration, immigration assimilation in Dallas-Fort Worth.

George A. Martinez
Professor
Expertise: Immigration law, federal courts, legal history, and jurisprudence.

Pia Orrenius
Fellow at the Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center and John Goodwin Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs
Expertise: Border region, causes and consequences of Mexico–U.S. migration, illegal immigration, and U.S. immigration policy.

Harold J. Recinos
Professor
Expertise: Popular religion; race, ethnicity, and religion; Hispanic/Latino/theology; Latin American immigrants/refugees in the United States, liberation theologies, congregational studies.

Matthew Wilson
Associate Professor
Expertise: Politics and voting behavior of religious voters, public opinion, elections, religion and politics, and political psychology

Journalism

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Jake Batsell
William J. O’Neil Chair in Business Journalism and Associate Professor
Expertise: Business journalism, media entrepreneurship, digital journalism, and the shifting economics of the news industry.

Jenny B. Davis
Professor
Expertise: Fashion trends, business of fashion, plus streetwear fashion and culture.

Karen Thomas
Professor
Meadows School of the Arts diversity officer and a special adviser to Dean
Expertise: Spent more than 25 years in the trenches of daily journalism.

Legal Matters

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Lackland Bloom
Professor and Larry and Jane Harlan Senior Research Fellow
Expertise: Freedom of speech, the rhetoric of Supreme Court opinions, copyright, and constitutional law.

Dale Carpenter
Professor, Judge William Hawley Atwell Chair of Constitutional Law and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor
Expertise: Constitutional law, First Amendment, LGBTQ Rights, Civil Rights.

Carliss Chatman
Associate Professor
Expertise: Corporate law, ethics, and civil procedure, the interplay of business entities, government and natural persons.

Anthony Colangelo
Professor
Expertise: Conflict of laws, civil procedure, U.S. foreign relations law, and private and public international law and theory.

Nathan Cortez
Co-Director of the Tsai Center for Law, Science and Innovation
Adelfa Botello Callejo Endowed Professor of Law in Leadership and Latino Studies
Expertise: Health law, administrative law, and FDA law, as well as emerging markets in health care and biotechnology.

Julie Forrester Rogers
Professor
Expertise: Property, real estate transactions, and land use, as well as real estate finance, predatory lending, and bankruptcy law.

Jeffrey Kahn
Professor
University Distinguished Professor
Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor
Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow at SMU Dedman School of Law
Expertise: U.S. Constitutional Law, Russian Law, National Security Law, International Human Rights Law, European Convention on Human Rights, Administrative Law

Tom Mayo
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor and Professor of Law
Expertise: Medical ethics, health care law, bioethics, medical-legal humanities, constitutional law, family law, administrative law and legislation.

Natalie Nanasi
Associate Professor
Director of the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women
Expertise: Survivors of intimate partner violence, human trafficking, and sexual abuse in a broad range of legal matters.

Meghan Ryan
Professor and Co-Director of the Tsai Center for Law, Science and Innovation, Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor
Expertise: Intersection of criminal law and procedure, torts, law and science, impact of evolving science, technology, and cultural values on criminal convictions and punishments, as well as on civil liability and remedies.

Christina Sautter
Professor
Expertise: Corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, transactional law, and exploring the new generations of investors’ power to transform corporate governance.

Marc Steinberg
Professor
Rupert and Lillian Radford Chair in Law
Expertise: Securities law, corporate law and business ethics.

Jessica Dixon Weaver
Professor
Associate Dean for Research
Expertise: Family law regulation (also known as child welfare law), the intersection of race, gender, and family law.  

Literary Experts

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Thomas DiPiero
Professor
Elisabeth Martin Armstrong Dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences
Expertise: Recognized authority on Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, world languages and literatures, psychoanalysis of race and gender, French literatures, value of liberal arts education, and STEM.  

Mental Health

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Center for Family Counseling
The clinic, associated with SMU’s Master’s in Counseling program, provides a variety of counseling services to adults, adolescents and children who are dealing with anxiety, depression, behavior difficulties, grief and loss, stress and parenting. 

Mario De La Garza
Counseling Director and Clinical Assistant Professor
Expertise: At-risk adolescents; facilitated classroom lessons that focused on bullying prevention, resisting pressures, decision-making, diversity, suicide prevention, relationship violence prevention, and other topics of importance for young people.

Chrystyna Kouros
Associate Professor
Expertise: Effects of marital conflict on spouses’ and children’s depression/mental health, how to constructively handle marital/relationship conflict, effects of parental depression on children.

Neely Myers
Associate Professor
Expertise: Social determinants of mental health; youth mental health and illness; and, the role of culture in the experience; understanding and treatment of mental health and illness around the world.

Brandy Schumann
Clinical Associate Professor
Expertise: Full-time counseling program faculty member serving as Internship Director, recognized worldwide for research and training contributions to the Play Therapy field.  

Misty Solt
Clinical Professor
Expertise: Anxiety, attachment and has worked in the areas of school crisis counseling, general crisis counseling and assessment, in-home counseling, agency counseling, and private practice.

LaKaavia Taylor
Clinical Associate Professor
Expertise: Multicultural counseling and trauma-informed practices.

Paleontology

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Louis Jacobs
Emeritus Professor and President of Institute for the Study of Earth and Man (ISEM) 
Expertise: Dinosaurs, mosasaurs and other prehistoric creatures.Vertebrate paleontologist who utilizes the fossil record to answer significant questions about Earth and life history.

Physics

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Jodi Cooley
Associate Professor
Expertise: Improve our understanding of the universe by deciphering the nature of dark matter (about a quarter of our universe consisted of dark matter).

Fred Olness
Professor
Expertise: elementary particle physics, the origin of the universe, quantum mechanics, "Physics Circus" public demonstrations, and CERN-related experiments.  

Ryszard Stroynowski
Professor
Expertise: Experimental High Energy Particle physics and the structure of matter, Higgs particle.

Politics and Political Discourse

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Cal Jillson
Professor
Expertise: State and national politics, development of American institutions and ideas and how they continue to shape national debates. The Dallas Morning News and the San Antonio Express-News have profiled him as one of Texas’ top political experts.       

Rita Kirk
Professor
William F May Endowed Director of the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility
Expertise: Ethics in corporate communications and public affaDebate, argumentation, communication, public speaking and rhetoric.irs.

Joe Kobylka
Professor
Department Chair Political Science
Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor
Expertise: Constitutional law and politics, Supreme Court, judicial decision making, and American Political Thought.

Ben Voth
Associate Professor and Director of Debate and Speech 
Expertise: Genocide, political debate, humor and politics, and general public controversies.

Matthew Wilson 
Professor
Expertise: Politics and voting behaviors of religious voters, public opinion, elections, representation, political psychology.

Psychology

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Nathan Hudson
Associate Professor
Expertise: How people's personalities change across time, people's desires and attempts to change their own personality traits and how individuals function in romantic relationships. 

Ernest Jouriles
Professor, Dale McKissick Endowed Professor of Psychology, and Director of Clinical Training
Expertise: Interpersonal violence, preventing violence, helping survivors of violence, adolescent and young adult relationships. Exploring how technology, such as virtual reality, can enhance understanding of how people behave in challenging interpersonal situations, including those that pose a risk of relationship violence.

Sarah Kucker
Assistant Professor
Expertise: Word learning, cognitive development, and the influence of digital media on infant and toddler’s language development.

Renee McDonald
Professor
Associate Dean for Research, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences
Expertise: Understanding how children’s exposure to family conflict and violence contribute to child psychological maladjustment, and on developing interventions for children exposed to violence.

Religion and Theology

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Mark Chancey
Professor
Expertise: The Gospels, the Historical Jesus, early Judaism, archaeology and the Bible, and the political and social history of Palestine during the Roman period.  

Craig C. Hill
Professor
Expertise: New Testament   

Jack Levison
W. J. A. Power Professor of Old Testament Interpretation and Biblical Hebrew
Expertise: Pneumatology, interpretation of the Adam and Eve tradition; Second Temple Judaism; gender, Judaism, and Christianity

Teaching and Learning

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Alexandra Pavlakis
Associate Professor
Expertise: Ways in which various policies and the actions of schools and communities mold the schooling experiences of homeless, highly mobile, and low-income families.

Magdalena Pando
Associate Professor
Expertise: Teacher preparation and professional development aimed at fostering culturally and linguistically inclusive teaching methods in early childhood and K-12 education, model-based inquiry methods in STEM education.

Video Games and Games Industry

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Gary Brubaker
Director of SMU Guildhall
Expertise: Game studies, programming

Corey Clark
Deputy Director of Research at SMU Guildhall and Assistant Professor
Expertise: Finding solutions to large-scale problems by combining several areas of study, such as gaming, systems biology, distributed computing, and artificial intelligence; utilizing immersive gameplay, crowdsourcing, dynamically distributed HTML5 computing infrastructure and machine learning to find new therapeutic treatment for cancer and other diseases.

Steve Stringer
Director of Game Lab at SMU Guildhall and Professor
Expertise: Esports appeal to consumers, video game development and video games for simulation and training. 

 

Click here for an alphabetical list of experts.