Speakers and Poster Presenters
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE SPEAKERS AND PRESENTERS (alphabetical)
Stephen M. Barr is President of the Society of Catholic Scientists and Professor Emeritus of theoretical particle physics at the University of Delaware. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1978. His research has centered mainly on “grand unified theories” and the cosmology of the early universe. In 2011, he was elected to be a Fellow of the American Physical Society “for his original contributions to grand unification, CP violation, and baryogenesis”. He writes and lectures extensively on the relation of science and religion. He is the author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and The Believing Scientist: essays on science and religion (Eerdmans, 2016). He was elected in 2010 to the Academy of Catholic Theology and was awarded the Benemerenti Medal by Pope Benedict XVI.
Maureen Condic is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Utah, with an adjunct appointment in Pediatrics. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the role of stem cells in development and regeneration and has been recognized by both the Basil O'Connor and the McKnight awards. She is currently a member of Pontifical Academy for Life, and in 2018, was appointed by the President of the United States to the National Science Board. Dr. Condic is co-author of Human Embryos, Human Beings (CUA Press, 2018), which explores the nature of the human embryo from a scientific and philosophical perspective, and the author of Untangling Twinning (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2020), which considers the biological and philosophical issues raised by human twinning. Dr. Condic participates in both graduate and medical education, having taught Human Embryology in the Medical School for 20 years. She has presented over 250 seminars and interviews, both nationally and internationally, on science policy, bioethics and her own research. Dr. Condic is a Director of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Timothy Dolch is Associate Professor of Physics at Hillsdale College. He received his BS from Caltech and his Ph.D. in Physics & Astronomy from the Johns Hopkins University in 2012. Before joining the faculty of Hillsdale College, he held postdoctoral positions at Oberlin College and Cornell University, both with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration. In NANOGrav he chairs the Education and Public Outreach Working Group. He is also a research scientist with Eureka Scientific, Inc. Primarily a transient radio astronomer, his research focuses on pulsars and using them as tools to detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes. He is an author on 49 refereed publications and has taught courses in quantum mechanics, general relativity, computational physics, and astronomy. With Hillsdale students, he constructed the Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor, an on-campus radio telescope.
Cory Hayes is a professor of Philosophy and Theology at St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington, Louisiana. He holds a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He has lectured widely for the Science and Religion Initiative of the McGrath Institute for Church Life of the University of Notre Dame. Prof. Hayes’s research and teaching interests include Byzantine and Eastern Christian theology, Philosophy of Nature, and the relation between Catholic theology, philosophy, and empirical science. He a member of the Theological Advisory Committee of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Stephen Patrick Joly, O.P., Ph.D., is a perpetually professed member of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. She earned her Ph.D. in Cell and Microbial Biology from The Catholic University of America in 2018. Her dissertation was titled “Identification of SUP5: A Protein that Interfaces with the Deviant ATP-Binding Site of the Yeast Pdr5 Multidrug Transporter.” Sr. Stephen Patrick is currently a high school science teacher at Lansing Catholic High School and has taught Honors and General Chemistry, Anatomy & Physiology, AP Biology, Physical Science, and Meteorology & Astronomy. She is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Robert McCarthy is Associate Professor of Biology at Benedictine University. He received his Ph.D. in hominid paleobiology from George Washington University in 2004. His areas of research are evolution of human speech and language; growth and development of the primate and hominin skull, geometric morphometrics; comparative methods and primate life history. He is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Mariel Ortega just graduated as a Wildlife and Fisheries Science major from Texas A&M University in December 2021. She does avian research within the broader fields of Wildlife Ecology, Avian Behavior, and Conservation. She is a student member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Christopher Raub is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Catholic University of America. His research goal is to determine microscale mechanisms of tissue injury, remodeling, and repair, with insights that lead to novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. To achieve this objective, Dr. Raub’s laboratory is designed to merge tissue engineering, biomedical optics, and microfluidics. He received his PhD in from the University of California at Irvine in 2009. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, he developed microfluidic assays for the detection of cancer mutations. He is President of the CUA/DC-area Chapter of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Timothy Raub is Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) in Earth Sciences at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He received his doctorate from Yale University and had a postdoctoral position at Caltech. At Univ. of St. Andrews he has been director of the Biogeomagnetism Lab, director of the Drillcore Analytical Facility, and a member of the Geothermal Energy Research Group. He is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Chris Stoughton is Senior Scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He received his Ph.D. in particle physics from Columbia University in 1987, where his thesis work searched for neutrino oscillations. Since then, he has worked on a variety of experiments in particle physics, astronomy, and related fields. He led the team that produced the first public data releases of a map of the Universe made by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He works on the Fermilab Holometer, which is sensitive to effects of quantized space time at the smallest distance scale envisioned by modern physics: the Planck scale. Currently he is working on Fermilab’s g-2 experiment, which is measuring the magnetic strength of muons to sensitively test the Standard Model of particle physics. He is also working on systems to use novel astronomical detectors for optical light and cosmic microwave background measurements. He is collaborating to apply these systems to quantum systems (QUBITS) used in quantum computing. He is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Natasha Toghramadjian is a fourth-year PhD student at Harvard University studying geophysics, with a focus on earthquakes and strong ground motion predictions. Funded by a U.S. Fulbright Research Grant, she spent 10 months in Armenia as a geophysical researcher on the NSF-funded, Caucasus-wide “Transect Project,” designing a collaborative statistical seismology study on reservoir-triggered earthquakes and aiding in the deployment of 100+ new seismic stations and analysis of incoming seismic data for tomographic modeling of the Caucasus’ crustal and mantle structure. She has done several field studies in the Seattle area. Her research is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and Harvard Ashford Fellowship. She is a student member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Cara Westmark is Assistant Professor of Neurology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Her field is neuroscience, especially the study of how synaptic function is affected by the over-expression of amyloid beta protein precursor (APP) and amyloid beta (Aβ) in Alzheimer’s disease, Down syndrome, and autism. In particular, she studies pharmaceutical and dietary interventions for the treatment of fragile X syndrome, a rare developmental disability on the autism spectrum. She received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Notre Dame. She is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Matthew Wiesner is Assistant Professor of Physics at Benedictine University. He received his Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University in 2014. His research is in observational astrophysics, and specifically on “gravitational lensing,” galaxy clusters, interacting galaxies, and large astronomical surveys. He is a member of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Dark Energy Science Collaboration. He is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists.