This issue concludes the 2024-25 volume of ThoughtWork. Best wishes for the summer!

Sit Down and Write with the CFDE This Summer

Do you need to make headway on a writing project this summer? Sit Down and Write with the CFDE offers virtual camaraderie and accountability! Gather for shared writing time on Tuesdays and Fridays at 11 am, via Bluesky or Slack. For more information, visit this link.

Helena Pachón Announced as an Inaugural Excellence in Nutrition Fellow

The American Society for Nutrition (ASN) recently named Helena Pachón, research professor, Center for the Study of Human Health, Emory, as a 2025 Excellence in Nutrition Fellow for her work in food-based approaches to addressing malnutrition. She is one of 55 inaugural awardees of the ASN fellowship from across the globe. The fellowship serves as recognition of significant contributions to and excellence in the field of nutrition.

Pachón is a research professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health and a research director at the Food Fortification Initiative. She has more than 20 years of research and program experience focused on reducing malnutrition in low- and middle-income countries. Her research focuses on the scientific and public health benefits of adding vitamins and minerals to staple food products such as grains.

The Excellence in Nutrition Fellows of ASN program is new this year, designed to honor outstanding professionals in the field of nutrition who are 10 or more years past their terminal degree and who have worked for ASN for over five years. Fellowship signifies an awardee’s outstanding dedication and contribution to nutrition science and ASN.

Fellows will be celebrated at the NUTRITION 2025 conference taking place May 31 to June 3 in Orlando.

The Injustice of Poverty 

Reverend Dr. King in a 1966 editorial entitled "The Last Steep Ascent," wrote, "But many White people of even reasonable goodwill simply know too little of the agony of ghetto existence to make slums a dispensable standard to social and economic justice." So today, I'd like to sit in that editorial, "The Last Steep Ascent," and offer some examples from my work in racial and economic justice which highlight the definitions of poverty and economic injustice offered by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and by modern experts. Let's at least describe the agony of living in poverty. . . .      

Broken sanitation and broken water systems plague communities that I work with in Alabama and Mississippi. In the Black Belt of Alabama, conventional on-site water systems, or most commonly called septic systems, as we discuss them in common parlance, are incompatible with the impermeable Black Belt soil. When properly installed, these systems fail, so low-income resisdents resort to "straight piping" bathwater and waste water away from their homes. Straight piping refers to a system of ditches or crudely constructed piping systems that guide wastewater away from residences. The state of Alabama simultaneously denies individuals access to funds that are earmarked for wastewater and penalizes individual residents without adequate on-site sanitation through both fines as well as criminal statutes. So state law allows the Department of Public Health to compel connections to private disposal systems, the costs of which are recoverable through a lien placed on residents' properties. The EPA has stepped in and obtained a moratorium on those enforcement measures, and my clients and I have asked the EPA to also investigate whether Alabama's law violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by disproportionately burdening low income Black resisdents with the refusal to allow them to apply for those wastewater funds. . . . Poverty in America persists because people wish and will it to do so.             

-- Crystal McElrath, Senior Supervising Attorney, Economic Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center, Atlanta, “The Injustice of Poverty: King’s Fight for Economic Equality,” Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture, Emory School of Law, January 16, 2025

Resources and Information on Changes to Federal Funding

On May 1, the Office of Senior Vice President for Research hosted a webinar that covered topics such as grant terminations, compliance, Emory mitigation strategies, and F & A (Facilities and Administration costs). The slide deck from that session is now available for viewing at this link (behind Emory login gateway).

There are also numerous updates to the Federal Funding and Regulatory Updates website, so visit frequently to catch up.

Laura Juliana Torres-Rodríguez, Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Emory College

Laura Juliana Torres-Rodríguez received a B.A. in Hispanic sStudies from the University of Puerto Rico and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2024, Torres-Rodríguez was associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

Torres-Rodríguez's research interests are Mexican literature, film, and cultural studies; Asian-Latin American Studies; Caribbean and transpacific ecologies and poetics; Puerto Rican literature, performance, and arts; and disability studies. Her first book, Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia [Transpacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia] (2019), won the Best Book in the Humanities Award, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section (2020), and received an honorable mention for the 2019 Modern Language Association, Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. Her work has appeared in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Literary Review, Public Books, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Ciberletras, Hablemos escritoras, and 80 grados.

She is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a member of the Latinx Studies Advisory Council. She is also on the Board of Directors of Caborca, a bilingual theater ensemble based in New York City.

Her second book project follows a critical methodology that combines personal and familiar stories and hemerographic research on the topic of autism, cognitive disability, and debates around the implementation of "special education" in Puerto Rico from the 1980s to 2006–– the year that Section 936 of the tax code phased out. It explores how cognitive disability, understood as an identity and a legal framework, becomes regulated at the federal level through a series of educational discourses and laws, including the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which introduce tensions with the local logics and understandings of disability. It also combines cultural criticism with personal storytelling to analyze Caribbean literary and artistic examples from these years that center nonverbal expression and non-speaking voices in their aesthetics and politics.

Monday, May 12                          

At 8:30 a.m. at the main quadrangle, Emory University presents the Commencement Ceremony. For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 9 a.m. at the Children's Support Center and on Zoom, the Marcus Autism Center Spring Symposium presents Vivian Ibañez (University of Florida) who will give a talk titled "The Importance of Secondary Analyses During Behaviorial Feeding Treatment." For more information and to register, please visit this webpage.

At 1 p.m. at the Health Sciences Research Building II room N600 and on Zoom, the Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines Seminar presents Devyani Joshi, postdoctoral researcher, Emory, will give a talk. For more information, please visit this webpage.   

Tuesday, May 13                        

At noon at the Health Sciences Research Building II and on Zoom, the Children's Heart Research and Outcomes Center Research in Progress Seminar presents Yanxu Yang, research scientist, Department of Pediatrics, Emory, and Luke Shoemaker, Draganova Lab, Emory University. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At noon online, Emory HR presents Caregiver Conversations, a virtual caregiver meet-up to discuss caregiving strategies and stressors involved with caring for loved ones. For more information, please visit this webpage.   

At 12:30 p.m. at the Health Sciences Research Building II room N100 and on Zoom, the Aflac Research Conference presents Jason Fangusaro, director, Developmental Therapeutics, Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, and David Archer, associate professor of pediatrics, Emory. For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 2 p.m. on Zoom, the Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center presents Emory BrainTalk Live, a weekly webinar of discussions led by expert faculty clinicians. For more information and to register, please visit this webpage. 

Wednesday, May 14

At 10:30 a.m. at Whitehead Auditorium and on Zoom, the Department of Microbiology & Immunology presents the 2025 Antimicrobial Resistance and Therapeutics Discovery Training Program Fellowship Symposium. For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At 10:30 a.m. on Zoom, the Emory Video Production Team presents a drop-in during which Emory faculty and staff can ask questions about online video, lighting, audio, equipment, storyboarding, flipped classroom projects, graphic design, visual aids, and other media-related needs. For more information, please visit this webpage.

Thursday, May 15

At 10 a.m. at the Support II Rooms D310 and D314, the Research and Epidemiology for Adolescent and Child Health Center (REACH) presents the Inaugural REACH Retreat. For more information, please visit this webpage.

At noon at the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Support Building and on Zoom, the Marcus Autism & Behavioral Mental Health Centers Grand Rounds presents Nancy Rappaport, associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; consultant, Cambridge Health Alliance, who will give a talk titled "Keeping Our Schools Safe: A Safety Assessment Approach to Violence Prevention." For more information, please visit this webpage.

Friday, May 16 

At 11:30 a.m. at the Emory Quandrangle, Emory HR presents Staff Fest, an annual recognition event to say thank you to Emory University staff memers. All staff and faculty are invited to attend. For more information, please visit this webpage.

Saturday, May 17

At 10 a.m. at the Carlos Museum, the Carlos Museum presents Relaxed Morning, a chance for those who would appreciate a calmer visit to the museum. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

Sunday, May 18 

At 2 p.m. starting at the Carlos Museum rotunda, the Carlos Museum presents a Sunday Public Tour, a docent-led tour free with museum admission. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

Monday, May 19

At 10 a.m. at the Spelman College Archives, Writing Across Emory presents Ancestor Apprenticeship: A Writing Across Emory Workshop with Marina Magloire, assistant professor, English department, Emory. For more information, please visit this webpage and register by May 16.

At 3 p.m. online, Emory HR presents a webinar titled "Finding Calm in the Chaos: Skills for Everyday Life." For more information, please visit this webpage.

Tuesday, May 20

At 9 a.m. at the Grady Memorial Hospital Trauma Auditorium, the Emory School of Medicine presents the 2025 Department of Medicine Health Equity Day featuring keynote speakers Yolanda Wimberly, chief health equity officer, Grady Memorial Hospital, and Jada Bussey-Jones, Carter Smith, Sr. professor of medicine, Emory; chief, Grady General Medicine. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At 1 p.m. at the Rose Library, the Rose Library Open House Series presents Miscellaneous Monthly: an afternoon with archival items from Muscogee and broader Native American history. For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At 2 p.m. online, Emory HR presents a webinar titled "Leading Through Crisis and Change: Supporting Employee Mental Health." For more information, please visit this webpage. 

Wednesday, May 21

At 8 a.m. on Zoom, the Jay E. Berkelhamer, M.D., Pediatric Grand Rounds presents Allen D. Everett, professor of pediatrics, director of pediatric proteome center, Johns Hopkins University, who will give a talk titled "Predictors and Drivers of Outcomes after Neonatal Cardiac Surgery." For more information and to register, please visit this webpage. 

At 12:30 p.m. at the Arthur M. Blank Hospital and on Zoom, the Children's Heart Research Outcomes Center (HeRO) presents the 2025 HeRO Rapid Fire Seminar. For more information and to register, please visit this webpage. 

At 10:30 a.m. on Zoom, the Emory Video Production Team presents a drop-in during which Emory faculty and staff can ask questions about online video, lighting, audio, equipment, storyboarding, flipped classroom projects, graphic design, visual aids, and other media-related needs. For more information, please visit this webpage.

Thursday, May 22

At 8:30 a.m. at Cannon Chapel, the Candler School of Theology presents the 2025 Summer Institute for Global Charismatic-Pentecostal Studies. For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At 4 p.m. at the Arthur M. Blank Hospital South Tower, the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta presents Pediatric Fellow Research Day. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

Wednesday, May 28

At 2 p.m. on Brainer, Emory HR presents a webinar titled "Introduction to Neurodiversity." For more information, please visit this webpage.   

Monday, May 29

At 10 a.m. on Brainer, Emory HR presents a webinar titled "Navigating a Multigenerational Workplace." For more information, please visit this webpage.  

Wednesday, May 31

At 8 a.m. on Emory's campus, the Rollins School of Public Health presents an introductory summer course titled "Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact" (May 31-June 1). For more information, please visit this webpage. 

Wednesday, June 4

At 10:30 a.m. on Zoom, the Emory Video Production Team presents a drop-in during which Emory faculty and staff can ask questions about online video, lighting, audio, equipment, storyboarding, flipped classroom projects, graphic design, visual aids, and other media-related needs. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At noon on Zoom, the Latinx Employee Research Network presents Conversa & Aprende (Speak & Learn), a session to chat and practice Spanish. For more information, please visit this webpage.     

Friday, June 6

At 8 a.m. at the Georgia Aquarium, the Department of Pediatrics presents the 14th Annual Southeastern Pediatric Research Conference. For more information, please visit this webpage.

Tuesday, June 10

At noon online, Emory HR presents Caregiver Conversations, a virtual caregiver meet-up to discuss caregiving strategies and stressors involved with caring for loved ones. For more information, please visit this webpage.

Thursday, June 12

At 3:30 p.m. at the Hatchery, the Emory Pride Network presents an Ice Cream Social. For more information, please visit this webpage.

Tuesday, June 17

At 1 p.m. at the Rose Library, the Rose Library Open House Series presents Miscellaneous Monthly: Food History. For more information, please visit this webpage.   

Monday, June 23

At 3 p.m. online, Emory HR presents a webinar titled "The Men's Health Playbook: Tips for a Healthier Life." For more information, please visit this webpage.  

ThoughtWork: Emerging Knowledge and News in Emory's Intellectual Community

Monday, May 12, 2025, Volume 25, Issue 35

ThoughtWork is a publication of the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, which is supported by the Office of the Provost. This electronic newsletter list is moderated; replies are not automatically forwarded to the list of recipients. Please email aadam02@emory.edu with comments and calendar submissions. Calendar submissions are due 5:00pm the Wednesday before the week of the event. Dates and details of events on calendar are subject to change; please confirm with organizers before you attend.

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