Arizona State University

Dr. Olga Idriss Davis - Experienced Researcher

Dr. Olga Idriss Davis is Full Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University and Principal Investigator of Health Literacy and Community Engagement with the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC), a NIH/National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities P20 Center of Excellence for the Study of Health Disparities in the Southwest at Arizona State University. Davis’s research area is in the domain of critical cultural studies and health communication. Her work explores the socio-cultural determinants of health and the impact of identity on health of the African Diaspora. Involved in community health issues for the past decade, Davis was appointed in 2008 by former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to serve on the Commission on Women’s and Children’s Health. Davis served as Chair for the Cultural Health Initiative of the American Heart Association Tempe Affiliate (2006-2008); is a founding coalition member of Maricopa Integrated Health System’s Refugee Women’s Health Clinic (2008-present); and is among the advisory team of the Phoenix-based Coalition of Blacks Against Breast Cancer (CBBC) (2009-present). Additionally, Davis is Lead Research Investigator on an NIH/NIMHD health literacy demonstration project—a community based collaborative of African American barbers and SIRC to address cardiovascular disease through culturally-centered health literacy among African American men in partnership with Black barbershops in Phoenix, Arizona. As an alumna of The Juilliard School, she weaves oral history, communication, and storytelling to explore cultural issues of health and well-being. Central to her work in health communication is the study of narrative—how narrative empowers, creates, and fosters cultural awareness to provide a space for social change. Her current health literacy project entitled, The Journey: Living Cancer Out Loud, is a narrative performance based on interviews of the lived experience of African American women and men survivors and caregivers living with breast cancer. She has numerous essays published in interdisciplinary academic journals and is co-editor of Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies of Discourse published by Hampton Press. She is President and CEO of Davis Communication Group, LLC, a communication and multimedia consulting company located in Phoenix, Arizona.

Dr. Brian J. Gerber - Experienced Researcher

Dr. Brian J. Gerber is an Associate Professor in the College of Public Service and Community Solutions, Arizona State University, where he is Academic Director of the Master of Arts in Emergency Management and Homeland Security and the Master of Arts in Public Safety Leadership and Administration programs. He is also an Honorary Associate Professor at the School of Public Health, University of New South Wales in Australia, a Senior Sustainability Scholar with the Wrigley School of Sustainability, Arizona State University and a PLuS Alliance Fellow.

Dr. Gerber’s research interests include disaster policy and management, homeland security policy and administration, and environmental regulatory policy. He has lead catastrophic incident planning projects and conducted critical program evaluations and policy analyses on topics ranging from large-scale disaster evacuations to pandemic preparedness through funding agencies at federal, state and local government levels. Likewise, he has collaborated frequently with major national nonprofits engaged in disaster relief and recovery work in the United States.

Dr. Danielle McNamara - Experienced Researcher

Dr. Danielle McNamara is the Director of the Science of Learning and Educational Technology (SoLET) lab at Arizona State University. The overarching theme of her research is to better understand the cognitive processes involved in comprehension, writing, knowledge acquisition, and memory, and to apply that understanding to educational practice by developing and testing Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and educational technologies (e.g., Coh-Metrix, iSTART, Writing Pal). Much of her research employs computational linguistics—such as NLP techniques—as a means of analyzing discourse. Such tools allow for quick, efficient, and reliable analyses of large corpuses of text, which is particularly relevant and valuable when analyzing big data. Dr. McNamara has been involved in the development and testing of multiple NLP tools that have been used in various research projects involving essay writing, reading comprehension, second language learning, and creativity. She continues to explore how these tools can be applied to other learning environments, such as computer supported collaborative learning environments, massive open online courses (MOOCs), as well as digital communications.