Scientific Sense ®

Mental illnesses, stigma, ADHD, design of education, Berkeley girls longitudinal study  Professor Stephen Hinshaw is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF.  His work focuses on developmental psychopathology, clinical interventions in attention deficits and hyperactivity, and mental illness stigma.  His excellent teaching and research over the years brought him numerous awards including those from the Society for Science of Clinical Psychology, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the American Psychological Association. He has authored over 360 articles and chapters plus 12 books

Hunger in America, SNAP/Food Stamps, SSTAR Act, Obesity, Decision-making Dr. Sara Abiola is an assistant professor of health policy & management at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and co-director of the Better Health Systems Lab that analyzes law, policy, and technological innovations designed to facilitate health systems strengthening and transformation through multisector collaboration and integration. She has constructed legal databases to map noncommunicable disease prevention policy and food policy at the global and national level and currently explores statutory and regulatory mechanisms to integrate the delivery of health and social services to address inequality and the social determinants of health.

Population health, Transformational Collaborative Outcomes Management (TCOM). Dr. John S. Lyons is a Professor of Health Management and Policy and the Director of the Center of Innovation in Population Health at the University of Kentucky.   After receiving a doctorate in clinical psychology, John has founded the Mental Health Services and Policy Program at Northwestern University, been the inaugural chair of Child and Youth Mental Health at the University of Ottawa, and a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Chicago.  He has designed and implemented outcomes management approaches in all fifty states and on every continent except Antarctica.

Memristors, Neuromorphic Computing, Mysteries of the brain and the future of Computing  Dr. Mehdi Anwar is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut. As a Jefferson Science Fellow, he served as Special Adviser for Technology Transfer and Innovation in the office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, Economic Bureau, U. S. Department of State. At present, Dr. Anwar is assisting U. S. Department of State and other U. S. Government organizations and the United Nations Office for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island Developing States to stand up the newly established United Nations Technology Bank.

Microstructures of financial markets, order routing, high-frequency trading, oil prices  ..... Prof. Bruce Mizrach is a professor in the Department of Economics at Rutgers University. He has held appointments at Boston College, the Wharton School, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,  and NYU Stern School of business. Bruce is the founder and editor of Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, which is devoted to using the nonlinear analysis to understand economic and financial markets. His most recent work is on the market microstructure of electronic limit order markets in bonds, equities, and commodity markets.

Causes of chronic liver diseases, emerging treatments, COVID-19 Dr. Scott Friedman is the Dean for Therapeutic Discovery and Chief of the Division of Liver Diseases, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He has performed pioneering research into the underlying causes of scarring, or fibrosis associated with chronic liver disease, affecting millions worldwide. His work has spawned an entire field that is now realizing its translational and therapeutic potential, with new anti-fibrotic therapies for liver disease reaching clinical trials.

Evolution of cancer, plague, pandemics, COVID, policymaking under uncertainty Jeffrey Townsend is the Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale University. He is an experimentalist and a theoretician; someone who performed the first experiments to show how extensively genome-wide gene expression varies in one individual organism to another within a population; who has developed theory to reveal not just what is known, but what is unknown and unknowable in how organisms have descended from their ancestors; who has pioneered both experimental and theoretical approaches enabling us to understand the evolutionary changes that give an organism its form, function, and ability to survive and propagate. Currently, he spends the majority of his time working on evolutionary theory applied to tumor genome sequencing, revealing how cancer evolves from normal tissue to malignant tissue—how cancer evolves within us.

Decisions under uncertainty, shocks, supply chains, and autonomous vehicles Prof Warren Powell taught at Princeton for almost 40 years, where he was drawn to the opportunity of bringing advanced analytics to the trucking industry which introduced him to the challenge of making high-dimensional decisions (such as assigning drivers to loads) under uncertainty.  This problem guided a lifetime of research in stochastic optimization using approximate dynamic programming. His research produced over 250 papers and two books with the help of 60 graduate students and post-docs, supported by $50 million in research funding.

Democratizing our data - A manifesto. Improving the design of metrics, collection of data, analysis and decision-making at the federal level Prof. Julia Lane is a Professor at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and an NYU Fellow for Innovation Analytics. She is a senior advisor in the Office of the Federal CIO at the White House, supporting the implementation of the Federal Data Strategy. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects, and a secure data facility.

Humans, bacteria, intelligence, consciousness, life and everything else Ian Williams was born in England in 1954. He trained as a biochemist at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford and received an MFA from Bennington College in Vermont. He worked for Pfizer for twenty years heading the Molecular Sciences Department and serving in the Research strategy group. He and his wife, Nancy Hutson, have a farm in Connecticut containing over 50 large-scale sculptures that Williams has made over the last decade. Together with Nancy, he has ridden in horseback safaris in many parts of the world. He may be reached at ian.inc@mac.com