2023-2024
Officers
President
John is a Ph.D. candidate in the Experimental Psychology program with a concentration in Cognitive Science. His research involves semantic representation, embodied cognition, and literacy skill development.
Vice President
Brandon is a PhD candidate in the Communication Sciences and Disorders department whose research focuses on looking for neural correlates of turn taking in naturalistic conversational interaction.
Secretary
Deling is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. She comes from China and loves Memphis. Her research interests are to understand speech production and perception under neuromuscular and neurocognitive perspectives.
Treasurer
(Shao) Liam Chew is a third-year PhD student in the department of business information and technology. Prior to this, he earned his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering and an M.B.A. with a concentration in operations management and supply chain both at the University of Alabama. His research interests lie in socio-behavioral research settings, specifically the impacts of cutting-edge technology towards individuals. He enjoys individual level phenomena as well as quantitative research design and methodologies.
Research Coordinator and Physics and Materials Science Ambassador
David is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics and Material Science, with a major in Applied Physics. His research is in the field of computational condensed matter.
Social Coordinator
Jingjing joined the Fogelman College of Business and Economics as a Marketing Ph.D. student in the fall of 2021. She received her M.S. in Marketing Analytics and M.S. in Accountancy at the University of Houston. She worked as a marketing research project manager and instructional assistant at the Stephen Stagner Sales Excellence Institute at the C.T. Bauer College of Business. She is interested in quantitative research in marketing strategy, especially social media marketing, sales, and entertainment industries.
Recruitment Officer and Marketing Ambassador
Della Garner is a 4th year marketing Ph.D. candidate at the Fogelman College of Business. She received her B.S. in Marketing at Clemson University in 2007 and was working on her MBA at the University of Alabama at Birmingham prior to joining the program. She brings 13 years of relevant corporate experience within multiple facets of marketing and advertising. Della has experience teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her research interests lie within consumer behavior, specifically surrounding artificial intelligence and haptics. This is Della’s fourth year involved in IISSO.
Webmaster
Casey Waldsmith joined the Fogelman College of Business and Economics as a Marketing Ph.D. student in Fall 2021. Before beginning her Ph.D. program at the University of Memphis, she received her B.B.A. and M.B.A. from Kennesaw State University. She was a full-time Senior Program Manager for KSU Journey Honors College and instructor of Marketing for Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University (KSU). Casey's research interests reside in consumer behavior, digital marketing, and neuromarketing. In addition to her Ph.D., she is also pursuising a graduate certificate in Cognitive Science.
Program Ambassadors
Mahbubul Hasan is a doctoral research student working at the nexus of applied statistics and machine learning at the University of Memphis, supervised by Dale Bowman and Lih Deng. Hasan is also a part of the Learner Data Institute as well as a research assistant at the Institute for the Intelligence Systems for Deep Learning and Data Science project in the LDI team where he is affiliated with the variational autoencoder for learner’s assessment and data privacy project to support National Science Foundation (NSF) funded team with problem-solving and data-driven decisions. Hasan has served as the University of Memphis Graduate Student Association President from 2017 to 2020. To learn more about his research and science advocacy, visit his webpage.
Sophie Morrissey
Philosophy
Charles Ratcliff is a Texas native and Ph.D. student at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. He is a Speech-Language Pathologist and Certified Brain Injury Specialist. Currently, Charles’ academic interests include voice science and acoustics with coursework in Vocology. He is excited to support the organization and inform the CSD field concerning human psychobehavioral interaction with voice. Outside of his professional and academic pursuits, Charles enjoys the performing arts.
Jeevan Chapagain is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Vasile Rus. He earned his BSc in Computer Science and Information Technology in 2017 from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. His research interests are intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), automated assessment, NLP, AI in Education, and data science. His current research focuses on developing new models and techniques that help to automatically assess the student’s explanation/response during source code comprehension whose greater goal is to develop a dialogue-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for source code comprehension.
David is a second year PhD student in the Cognitive Area of the Experimental Psychology program. He is interested in language, interaction, and behavior across different scenarios and levels of analysis and especially how the patterns observable at different levels of analysis relate to one another.