Past Events

Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series -  Health communication has shifted from helping people find information to supporting real-time, personalized, and increasingly intelligent interactions. 

Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series - The locus coeruleus (LC), the main source of norepinephrine (NE) in the central nervous system, is one of the first brain regions to accumulate pathology in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease and undergoes catastrophic degeneration as disease progresses.

Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series - Many African American storytellers have work that contains a multitude of reference points, which scholars have long examined through close reading and historical interpretation. Yet, new questions emerge when we also examine the numerical patterns, circulation histories, and cultural data that shape how Black writers are read, taught, and remembered.

2026 Dyads Event Posting

This virtual workshop will cover an introduction to conducting dyadic data analysis using a structural equation modeling framework in Mplus. The workshop will introduce the conceptual and statistical background for dyadic data analysis. Common applications of dyadic modeling, including the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM), decomposition of interdependence effects in APIM, and power analysis for APIM will be introduced. Longitudinal applications will also be covered with a light touch. Example datasets and associated Mplus syntax will be provided.

This  virtual workshop will introduce participants to the field of biomarkers of acute and chronic stress. The workshop will begin with an overview of the stress concept and the incorporation of allostasis theory and allostatic load to the field of stress research. We will then introduce the main theme of biomarkers for measuring stress reactivity. 

The Power of Numeric Evidence in Science Communication.  Challenges exist in presenting numeric information in science communication. For example, public innumeracy—and experts’ concerns about providing numbers—suggest not showing them. On the other hand, people often prefer getting them and their provision can increase comprehension, trust, engagement, and healthy behaviors while reducing risk overestimates and supporting decision-maker autonomy.

Social and political turbulence in the United States and Western Europe has been rising over the past decade. My research, which combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, has identified the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability and resilience to internal and external shocks. Here I look beneath the surface of day- to-day contentious politics and social unrest, and focus on the negative social and economic trends that explain our current “Age of Discord.” One of the most important, but little appreciated, such hidden forces is a perverse “wealth pump” that, under certain conditions, begins to transfer wealth from the “99 percent” to “1 percent.” If allowed to run unchecked, the wealth pump results in both relative impoverishment of most people and increasingly desperate competition among elites. Since the number of positions of real social power remains more or less fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. In fact, in 2025 the USA finds itself in a situation that fits the definition of revolution, although, so far, fortunately a relatively non-violent one (by historical standards).