Distinguished Global Professor and McKnight Presidential Professor  Dr. Abimbola Asojo is the Associate Dean for Faculty at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a Professor of Interior Design at the School of Architecture at the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Asojo has been at the University of Minnesota since 2011. Her leadership and contributions in the classroom and the community for over 25-years have been impactful both globally and locally. She has engaged her students in over forty community-based service-learning projects that tackle both local and global societal challenges. Dr. Asojo’s scholarly agenda focuses on cross-cultural design, architectural lighting design, African architecture, computing and design, global issues, sustainable design and K-12 spaces. Her work has been widely published in international journals and books. Her co-edited book with Professor Toyin Falola titled African Humanity Creativity, Identity and Personhood was published in 2021 by Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina. She is a licensed architect and holds a National Council for Interior Design Qualification (NCIDQ) certification. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA), the Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC), and the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES). She is a LEED Accredited Professional and serves on the Journal of Interior Design (JID) Review board and is a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Building Information Modeling (BIM) committee. She is a fellow of the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment and she co-founded the lighting design minor in the College of Design in 2019. Asojo was twice named a US DesignIntelligence top educator in 2010 and 2017. In 2018, Asojo received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Faculty of Environmental Design and Management, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Nigeria. In 2020, she received the University of Minnesota Outstanding Community Service Faculty Award, the highest honor the University gives to a faculty member for service to the community. Her work is charting the course for Interior Design globally in Africa and the Diaspora.  Asojo’s capacity building efforts led to the development of the first Masters of Interior Design in West Africa.  The inaugural class of the MID program graduated in 2021.  Asojo developed and has led the College of Design Diversity and Design program which exposes K-12 students to architecture and design careers since 2013.

My name is Jing Tian and I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Design (Interior Design track) at the University of Minnesota. I have a Bachelor’s degree and a Master's degree in Architecture. My research interests lie in exploring the relationship between built environments and human behavior. In my past research experience, I have published several articles on the impact of built environments on human health and behavior, which have appeared in publications such as the Huazhong Architecture Journal and the PLEA conference proceedings. I have also presented related research posters at conferences such as the ARCC and EDRA conferences.

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of eight acclaimed books and is currently at work on his ninth, which will be about Hubert Humphrey, Civil Rights, and the 1948 Democratic Convention.

 Freedman's previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life (2005); Letters to a Young Journalist (2006) and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013).

With his colleague Kerry Donahue, Freedman co-produced a radio documentary and authored a companion book, both entitled Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How it Transformed The New York Times. The documentary and book were released in conjunction with World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 2015, and since then the documentary has been broadcast on more than 500 NPR member stations.

Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman's books have been listed among The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year.

Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the "Forward Fifty" most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.

Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper’s “On Education” column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association’s annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the “On Religion” column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years.

Freedman is a contributing editor to The Forward and has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Salon, Slate, Tablet, Ha’aretz, The Undefeated, The Root, and BeliefNet.

A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 80 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and The Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Awards and Religion News Service. He has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and the PBS News Hour.

Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he received in May 1977. He lives in New York with his wife, Christia Chana Blomquist.

Ragui Assaad, professor, researches education, labor policy, and labor market analysis in developing countries with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. His current work focuses on inequality of opportunity in education, labor markets, transitions from school-to-work, employment and unemployment dynamics, family formation, informality, labor market responses to economic shocks, international migration, including the effects of forced migration.

Assaad is a Research Fellow of the Economic Research Forum in Cairo, Egypt and serves on its board of trustees. He is also Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. He served as Regional Director for West Asia and North Africa for the Population Council, based in Cairo, Egypt, from 2005 to 2008.

Assaad has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, the Ford Foundation, UNICEF and UNDP.

Nisha Botchwey, PhD, began serving as dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in January 2022. Previously, Botchwey served as associate dean for academic programs at Georgia Tech Professional Education. In that role she was responsible for developing academic programs, overseeing all academic offerings and curriculum, and leading outreach and student affairs. She played a key role in leading Georgia Tech’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Botchwey was also a tenured associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning, and director of the School’s Healthy Places Lab. She was on the Georgia Tech faculty since 2012, and also served as an adjunct professor at Emory University’s School of Public Health. Botchwey taught at the University of Virginia’s Department of Urban and Environmental Planning from 2003 to 2011.

Botchwey's research and teaching have been at the nexus of environmental and health policy and the built environment, with a special focus on youth engagement and health equity. Over her career, she has been awarded more than $16 million from leading agencies and foundations as principal investigator or co-PI on more than 30 grant-funded projects.

Botchwey is co-editor of Making Healthy Places, Second Edition (Island Press, 2022), which brings together scholars and practitioners in fields ranging from public health, planning, and urban design, to sustainability, social work, and public policy. They explain how to design and build places that are beneficial to the physical, mental, and emotional health of humans, while also considering the health of the planet. 

She is co-author of the book Health Impact Assessment in the United States. She is the convener of a national expert panel on interdisciplinary workforce training between the public health and community design fields, and has authored numerous articles, book chapters, scientific presentations, and workshops. 

The impact of Botchwey's public health and social justice work was recognized in 2021 with the prestigious Dale Prize for Excellence in Urban and Regional Planning, and in 2016 by the White House Council on Women and Girls. Botchwey also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

She has earned many other distinctions, including an NSF ADVANCE Woman of Excellence Faculty Award, a Hesburgh Award Teaching Fellowship from Georgia Tech, the Georgia Power Professor of Excellence Award, and a Rockefeller-Penn Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing. 

Botchwey earned a master’s degree and PhD in urban planning from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in public health from the University of Virginia, and an AB from Harvard University.