天美传媒

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Dr. Nia Heard-Garris is a pediatrician and a researcher in the Department of Pediatrics at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University; and also in the Division of Academic General Pediatrics and Mary Ann & J. Milburn Smith Child Health Research, Outreach, and Advocacy Center at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children鈥檚 Hospital of Chicago. Dr. Heard-Garris is an active member in the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and serves as the Chair and founding member of the Provisional Section of Minority Health, Equity, and Inclusion.Dr. Heard-Garris recently completed a prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Fellowship at the University of Michigan. She earned her Master of Science in Health and Healthcare Research. At the University of Michigan, she studied the influence of social adversities, such as vicarious racism or racism experienced secondhand, and environmental adversities, such as the Flint Water Crisis on health. As a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, Dr. Heard-Garris served as a fellow at the United States Department of Health and Human Services with the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) and at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). She worked on the Flint Water Crisis and Zika while a fellow in those organizations. Dr. Heard-Garris trained at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC for her pediatric residency. During her residency, she completed a health policy fellowship and worked in Honduras, as a part of her global health track. She received her Doctor of Medicine (MD) from Howard University College of Medicine and helped to launch the student-run free clinic serving DC residents. Dr. Heard-Garris earned her Bachelor of Science in biology at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Heard-Garris's overarching research interests revolve around the relationship between adversities experienced early in childhood and health. Further, those interests also include the factors that contribute to a child鈥檚 ability to thrive despite these experiences. Through her research, she aims to generate the knowledge to help inform evidence-based interventions that help pediatricians and policymakers build resilience in children and in the communities that support children. Her long-term goal is to understand the role of childhood stress in the development of pediatric illnesses and key mitigating factors, so that family-centered, culturally appropriate strategies can be developed to treat, prevent, and ultimately lessen the burden adversity has on health throughout the life course.

Dr. Heard-Garris is a general pediatrician and enjoys caring for children from diverse backgrounds, including children from immigrant backgrounds. Through her research and clinical work, she hopes to help all children thrive.

Dr. Brian Southwell is Senior Director of the Science in the Public Sphere Program in the Center for Communication Science at RTI International. He is a social scientist who oversees quantitative and qualitative research to assess risk perceptions, mental models of scientific concepts, and public trust in science and scientists. Southwell also is an active participant in efforts to address public understanding of science through peer-reviewed publications as well as public commentary, talks in venues such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, and advising for projects such as NOVA Science Studio.  

Southwell has applied his background in communication and human behavior to a variety of dilemmas including public understanding of emerging infectious diseases and trust in science. In an effort to examine public attitudes and perceptions concerning the Zika virus, for example, he led a study in Guatemala to understand mental models of Zika virus disease. More recently, Southwell has written about public perceptions related to COVID-19.

Southwell is also an adjunct professor with Duke University, where he is affiliated with the interdisciplinary Social Science Research Institute and has served as a Duke-RTI Scholar. In addition, he has served the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2011; he currently is an adjunct associate professor with UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health and advises graduate students in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

He served almost a decade at the University of Minnesota prior to these appointments, most recently as a tenured associate professor and director of graduate studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and has worked for a variety of nonprofit and government organizations.

In 2015, Southwell created a public radio show for WNCU-FM, 鈥淭he Measure of Everyday Life,鈥� which he hosts. The show airs weekly on WNCU and focuses on the intersections between social science and public discourse.

Southwell's award-winning research and theoretical contributions appear in more than 100 journal articles and chapters. In 2013, he published the book Social Networks and Popular Understanding of Science and Health. He has served as senior editor for Health Communication and as a member of numerous other editorial boards, including Communication Research and Public Opinion Quarterly. He published the edited book Innovations in Home Energy Use: A Sourcebook for Behavior Change in 2016. In 2018, he coedited Misinformation and Mass Audiences, published by the University of Texas Press. Southwell's latest book, from RTI Press, is Measuring Everyday Life: Talking About Research and Why It Matters, curated from interviews featured on the public radio show.

Zachary Turpin joined the English Department at University of Idaho in 2017. His research focuses on nineteenth-century periodical culture, archival research methods, digital humanities, and the history of epistemology and the sciences. Prior to joining U of I, he rediscovered two book-length works by the poet Walt Whitman: a novella (Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, 1852) and an urban men’s wellness manifesto (Manly Health and Training, 1858). Besides hunting for further possible Whitman publications, Turpin has worked with a number of collaborators to uncover unaccounted-for periodical works by American authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Rebecca Harding Davis, Emma Lazarus, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anne Sexton, and Cormac McCarthy.
In 2017, he became a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and in 2020 he was awarded a short-term Peterson Fellowship by the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA). His teaching experience includes courses on American literature pre-1865, archival research methods, Great American Novels of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, nineteenth-century women’s literature, American Transcendentalism, and academic and professional writing.