Researchers

Colleen Galambos is Professor and Helen Bader Endowed Chair in Applied Gerontology, School of Social Welfare. Her particular interests in Smart Cities Initiatives include health care and electronic health records system development and applications. Dr. Galambos served as a co- investigator on projects funded by The National Institutes of Health and The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that developed in-home health monitoring and alert systems. This work won the Best Health Care Application Award at the U.S. Ignite 2013 Application Summit. Additionally, Dr. Galambos served as co-investigator on a project to reduce potentially avoidable hospitalizations for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that researched health data sharing platforms. She is serving on a Data and Safety Monitoring Board in an advisory capacity to the National Institute of Aging on a project that is simulating reminiscing for memory loss. Currently, she is Secretary General North American Chapter, International Society of Gerontechnology and Associate Editor for the Gerontechnology Journal.

Paul Roebber, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences in the UWM Department of Mathematical Sciences, and Founder and Director of Innovative Weather, has extensive experience in public and private weather forecasting and data science. His research has led to improvements in the forecasting of hurricanes, snowstorms, ice storms, thunderstorms and flash flooding, and climate change impacts on Great Lakes water levels; these improvements have been or are in the process of being incorporated into operations at the National Weather Service, NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center, and the Climate Prediction Center, WE Energies, and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. His advanced machine learning techniques are readily adaptable to problems well beyond atmospheric science and have gained the interest of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he has been a Visiting Scientist, and the government of Taiwan, with whom he is currently collaborating on a weather forecast improvement project.

Noelle Chesley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UWM. Dr. Chesley’s research is focused on understanding the social implications of new and emerging technologies. As cities become “smart”, how will innovation reshape social relationships and interaction? Can technological designs be designed and implemented to reduce existing inequality? Dr. Chesley is also a founding member of the TecHealth Initiative at UWM, which aims to harness and develop regional, inter-institutional and transdisciplinary research strength to solve problems at the intersection of health & technology. Her work has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the State of Wisconsin.

Jacques du Plessis is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies. He is a co-founder of the UWM Disruptive Technology Lab, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Connected Systems Institute at UWM. Related to Smart Cites, his research includes the Internet of Things, Blockchain, and Environmental Justice. He is a member of the South African Academy of Science and Arts. He is interested at the macro perspective of smart city developments, considering goals such as sustainability, privacy, openness, etc.

Michael J. Carvan III is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences where he conducts research that is focused on genome-environment interactions and identifying pathways and genes that influence sensitivity and resistance to environmental chemicals, especially those that cause birth defects or developmental problems. He serves on a number of professional committees including the Council (Executive Board) of the Society of Toxicology, and recently served on the Institute of Medicine Committee for Review of the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides Updates 9, 10 and 11. Current work focuses on the effects of developmental exposure to low levels of neurotoxic chemicals and their potential to result in adult disease or dysfunction. Work is also underway to explore epigenetic changes that may lead to inheritance of phenotypes by future generations. This work has been funded by the EPA and NIH (and others) as it has implications for ecosystem health, human health, and the health of generations to come.

Razia Azen teaches basic and advanced statistics courses. Her research focuses primarily on general linear models, which are statistical models that have a wide range of applications. The main goals of her research are to develop methods that can address a wide variety of research questions and to aid researchers in properly applying statistical methods and interpreting statistical information.

Azen has published in the area of psychological and educational statistics in journals such as Psychological Methods, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, and the British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology. In addition she has collaborated on research projects in the area of educational measurement that were published in Educational and Psychological Measurement as well as Applied Measurement in Education. She has also co-authored research projects using meta-analysis and mediation analysis in applied areas such as counseling psychology, and co-authored a textbook on categorical data analysis.

Rina Ghose is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at UWM. She specializes in Geospatial technologies, urban planning and policies, environmental and social justice. She has conducted extensive research on advancing citizen participation in urban governance through innovative Public Participation GIS, Web 2.0, crowdsourced data mining, citizen science and subjective cartographies. She is involved in a smart city research project that examines how to build sustainable cities through smart technologies, smart planning and smart citizen participation.

Arijit Sen is an architect and vernacular architecture historian who writes, teaches, and studies urban cultural landscapes. His research explores immigrant histories, post disaster reconstruction, and community-based design. He directs the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School, a multi-disciplinary project where students, faculty, scholars, and community members explore ways to see and interpret their city by engaging in storytelling, ecological conservation, heritage preservation, and civic engagement. Sen cofounded Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures, an interdisciplinary doctoral program area shared by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW Milwaukee, and has served on the boards of Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Society of Architectural Historians. His writings include articles and book chapters on South Asian immigrant cultural landscapes and early 20th Century immigration in the United States. He has coedited Landscapes of Mobility: Culture, Politics and Placemaking (Ashgate Publishers, UK, 2013, Jennifer Johung coeditor) and Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City (Indiana University Press, 2014, Lisa Silverman coeditor).

Xiao Qin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has published over 150 papers and reports in the areas of highway safety analysis and evaluation, traffic operations and management, intelligent transportation systems, and application of geographic information system (GIS) in Transportation. Dr. Qin’s research has been instrumental in identifying critical transportation issues and addressing them using evidence-based, data-driven methods. Dr. Qin has been supporting transportation improvement and investment decisions for state and local governments through extensive research and consulting services. Dr. Qin is a member of national transportation committees. He serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Transportation Safety & Security, Paper Review Chair for Transportation Research Board, and editorial board member of Accident Analysis and Prevention. Dr. Qin received his Ph.D. in the Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Connecticut.

Jenny Kehl examines the relationship between water security and economic development. Kehl is the Global Water Security Scholar for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a political economist in School of Freshwater Sciences and Global Studies. Kehl connects science and social science to analyze how water security affects urban development, economic growth, food production, energy consumption, and political stability in local and global water systems. Dr. Kehl has worked in Africa, Asia, the American Southwest, and the Great Lakes on water security, development, and equity issues, with a focus on environmental stressors and dispute resolution. Kehl addresses water issues that are politically charged and economically driven. She articulates the need for strategic thinking, multidisciplinary education, and innovative policies to promote political and economic stability, environmental sustainability, and responsible stewardship of water resources.

Tracy Boyer is a Professor and Environmental Economist at the School of Freshwater Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee since 2018. Current work examines recreational values in the Great Lakes and preferences for funding conservation and restoration of Great Lakes Parks and Areas of Concern. An environmental economist, Dr. Boyer was formerly an Associate Professor in Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University for 15 years. She holds a doctorate in Applied Economics and a M.A. in public policy from the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, both from the University of Minnesota. She conducts research in the areas of environmental and resource economics focusing on valuing water and water-based amenities, soil and water conservation, adaptation to climate change, and estimating market demand for food and agricultural products. She has extensive experience working with city, state, and federal natural resource agencies in water policy and teaching environmental and natural resource economics.

uwm.edu/freshwater/people/boyer-tracy/

Tomas A. Lipinski is the Dean of the School of Information Studies (SOIS) at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He holds law degrees from Marquette University Law School, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, Illinois, and the Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Lipinski has worked in a variety of legal settings including the private, public and non-profit sectors. His research and teaching relate to the intersection of law, ethics and policy regarding information and technology including data policy and intellectual property rights. He is co-founder of the Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR). The Center obtained Permanent Observer at World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland in 2018 and he heads its Delegation there annually. He is the author, with Mary Minow and Gretchen McCord of The Library's Legal Answer Book for Makerspaces (ALA Editions) (2016); and with Kathrine Andrews Henderson, "Legal Issues Surrounding the Collection, Use and Access to Grey Data in the University Setting: How Data Policies Reflect the Political Will of Organizations" in the Summer 2019

Andrews Henderson, Legal Issues Surrounding the Collection, Use and Access to Grey Data in the University Setting: How Data Policies Reflect the Political Will of Organizations, AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREY LITERATURE, Summer 2019, at 77 (Special Issue: Open Access to Grey Research Data) (pp. 77-90). He is interested in the legal and ethical aspects of the control, ownership, access and use of grey data generated in Smart City environments.

Celeste Campos-Castillo is an Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies digital inequalities and privacy. Much of this work examines the health care context, where she researches the adoption and use of patient portals and electronic health record systems. Her research is interdisciplinary and has been published in top-ranked health policy and sociology journals and received recognition from the International Medical Informatics Association and the American Sociological Association. Her current research projects that are relevant for understanding smart cities include: 1) interviewing Latino youth in Milwaukee about how their privacy norms on social media shape their well-being; and 2) using machine learning to characterize and predict consumer’s privacy preferences in a pervasive computing environment.

More to come ....