Awardees

Vanderbilt’s Global Voices Fellowship is a semester-long program designed to expand Vanderbilt’s global reach by amplifying the impact of faculty academic research.

The fellows will work with the Division of Communications to develop a highly tailored communications and promotion plan that builds recognition for their scholarship and public profile, and connects their work to new audiences.

SPRING 2021 FELLOWS

Eunji Kim

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Kim, a scholar of American public opinion, political communication and political psychology, will work to build awareness for her book project on why many Americans believe in the prospect of upward economic mobility despite growing wealth inequalities.Using popular television programs such as Shark Tank and America’s Got Talent, which have “rags-to-riches” narratives, Kim explores viewers’ distorted perceptions of economic mobility and belief in the American dream.

FALL 2020 FELLOWS

Erin Calipari

Assistant Professor of Pharmacology

Calipari will enhance her communication skills for building awareness for her research—the neural basis of substance use disorder and the implications for understanding the opioid epidemic and other substance use disorders. A large focus of her work is on how sex differences in behavior and neural function interact with environmental factors to make women differentially vulnerable to psychiatric disease states. Calipari has a strong commitment to educating general audiences about her findings to reduce the incidence of substance use disorders, prevent overdose deaths and encourage treatment.

Kelly Haws

Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker Jr.
Professor of Marketing

Haws will seek to expand attention for her research on food decision-making. She studies consumer behavior, with an emphasis on food decision-making and health-related issues and the underlying decision-making processes involved. Her research has significance for obesity-related health conditions, such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer. Haws hopes to respond to this medical crisis by increasing the public’s understanding of underlying consumer decision-making processes related to food.

Marybeth Shinn

Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Human, Organizational and Community Development

Shinn will promote ways to prevent and end homelessness. Her research is the focus of a new book, In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What to Do About It, in which she draws on three decades of her work. Areas she has written about include the causes of the rise in modern homelessness, programs to restore people to housing, prevention programs for people at high risk, and the broader societal changes necessary to reduce the number of people living on the streets.

SPRING 2020 FELLOWS

Lisa Fazio

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Fazio will work to increase public attention for her research on how people learn false information from the world around them. A leading expert on the on the effects of misinformation on belief, she studies how people learn new information—both true and false—and how to correct errors in people’s knowledge. Fazio’s research informs basic theories about learning and memory, while also having clear applications for practitioners, such as journalists and teachers.

Rena Robinson

Associate Professor of Chemistry

Robinson will work to build public awareness for her body of work related to racial and ethnic disparities in Alzheimer’s disease. An analytical chemist, she studies the science behind Alzheimer’s through the large-scale study of proteins. The disease disproportionately affects African Americans and Hispanics, likely contributed by socioeconomics, genetics and overlapping health conditions—such as hypertension.

FALL 2019 FELLOWS

Hiba Baroud

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Hiba Baroud will focus on “Measuring Impact and Building Resilience in Infrastructures and Communities.” Her areas of study include critical infrastructure systems modeling, risk analysis, statistical modeling, risk-informed decision analysis and resilience monitoring.

Jeffrey Bennett

Associate Professor of Communication Studies

Jeffrey Bennett will work to increase public attention for “Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease.” He specializes in critical studies of health and medicine, citizenship, LGBT/queer studies, cultural studies, and rhetorical theory and criticism. Bennett, who began teaching in the College of Arts and Science in 2016, has been honored for his outstanding contributions to LGBT scholarship in communication studies.

Suzana Herculano-Houzel

Associate Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences

Suzana Herculano-Houzel will explore best promotional practices for “The Secret to a Long Life Is in the Brain: A New Framework for Understanding How Long We Take to Develop and Age.” She pioneered the method for rapidly and accurately measuring the number of neurons in brains and was a 2018 TEDxNashville speaker.