Appendix C

Biographies of Speakers

Ikhlas Abdalla is a professor of management at Kuwait University. She is a graduate of Imperial College of Science and Technology, London University. She has wide academic and professional experience in the Arab region. Her main research interests are in management and organizational behavior with specific focus on leadership, human resources management, careers, gender, expatriations, and Arab socioeconomic issues such as employment and education.

Malak Abed AlThagafi is an American board-certified physician-scientist in clinical pathology, anatomical pathology, neuropathology, and molecular genetics pathology. She studied and worked in world-renowned universities, including Georgetown University; University of California, San Francisco; Stanford University; Johns Hopkins University; and Harvard University. She is a national and international awards winner in her field and has published more than 100 original and conferences papers. She was selected in 2018 and 2019 as one of the most powerful people around the globe in pathology and lab medicine by The Pathologist. Currently, she is the director and primary investigator of the Saudi Human genome lab at King Fahad Medical City (KFMC) in Riyadh, associate research professor at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), medical director at King Faisal Specialist Hospital International (KFSHI), and founder of CID (a genomic startup company). Dr. AlThagafi hopes to improve the applica-

tion of personalized medicine and targeted therapy, which can be utilized in the clinical management of patients.

Huda Akil has made groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, including pain, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Early on, she and her colleagues provided the first physiological evidence for the role of endorphins in the brain and showed that endorphins are activated by stress and inhibit pain. In investigations of the mechanisms underlying stress reactivity in anxiety and depression, she demonstrated that social defeat in rodents activates unique neural pathways resembling those altered in human depression. Dr. Akil and her team have focused on the role of specific genes and molecules in the pathology of mood disorders. These include the glucocorticoid receptor, which mediates the stress response, and the family of fibroblast growth factors (FGFs), which are critical for brain development. She, along with her collaborators, showed that the FGFs play a key role in shaping the vulnerability to anxiety and depression. Dr. Akil is one of the leaders of the Pritzker Consortium, which uses a combination of genetic, genomic, and neuroscience tools to discover the biological bases of major depression, manic-depressive illness, and schizophrenia. The goal is to both understand the causes of these illnesses and identify new targets for their treatment and prevention. Dr. Akil has received numerous honors and awards, including election to the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, Dr. Akil received the National Association for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Patricia Goldman Rakic Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Munirah AlAjlan is an English as a Second Language instructor in the College of Engineering and Petroleum in Kuwait University (2008–present). She has an M.A. in applied linguistics from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and a Ph.D. in applied sociolinguistics from King’s College, London. Dr. AlAjlan has researched Kuwaiti women who are studying engineering in Kuwait. Drawing on sociocultural linguistic and interactional perspectives, with focus on the small-story approach to investigate how the women constructed a female identity in engineering. Dr. AlAjlan’s research interest falls in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and translation. She has been a member of the Pluricentric and NDV-Working Group (nondominant varieties) representing Kuwaiti Arabic (University of Graz, Austria). Dr.

AlAjlan published three conference proceedings (2011, 2012, and 2013) and presented many papers in the area of language, linguistics, and education. Currently, she is involved in a subtitling and translation project and a political narratives project.

Abrar AlAwadhi is an assistant professor of special education in the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education at Kuwait University. She earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University, in special education with a focus on intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder. She has a B.S. in childhood/special education from Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. Her academic interest and research concentration is in early childhood development, general and special education development, inclusion, and the transition of individuals with disabilities from adolescence to adulthood. Dr. AlAwadhi also consults for the Ministry of Education and nonprofit organizations in Kuwait. She is a board member of the Special Olympics Kuwaiti team.

Zaha AlSuwailan is an assistant professor at Kuwait University in the Foundations of Education Department. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2006 with a focus on philosophy of education. The title of her dissertation is “The Impact of Societal Values on Kuwaiti Women and the Role of Education.” She worked as a manager of the Education Development Centre. She is currently the coordinator of the Khalifa Award in Abu Dhabi. Her research interests are in philosophy and women’s education. She is a member of Phi Kappa Phi and the American Educational Studies Association. Dr. AlSuwailan received the Poster Award in Social Sciences in 2014 for her article “The Reasons behind Students’ Choices of Certain Majors and Its Impact on Society Needs.”

Hessa Amin is the deputy chief executive officer of FAWSEC Educational Company, a K–12 education company in Kuwait. In this role, Ms. Amin oversees Al-Bayan Bilingual School and Al-Bayan International School, as well as the FAWSEC support departments—human resources, professional development, information technology, education technology management, and admissions. Over the past few years, she has worked on several STEM-related projects, including co-creating new science standards with teachers, updating the methods of technology instruction, and planning and managing a schoolwide initiative to implement design thinking and

creative problem solving. Ms. Amin holds an M.Ed. in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in business administration from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Lin Bian is the Milkman Evalyn Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. She obtained her B.S. at Zhejiang University in China and her Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the development of social cognition, with an emphasis on children’s reasoning about social groups. In this vein, she has pursued two major lines of research: One line of work focuses on the acquisition and consequences of stereotypes about social groups for children’s interests and motivation. The other line of work focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral expectations, especially how they apply to behaviors within and across group boundaries.

Claudia Buchmann is a Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and chair of the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. She is internationally known for her research on gender inequalities in education, with a focus on how women have come to attain more education than men in most regions of the world today. She is coauthor of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools (2013, Russell Sage Foundation), which was awarded the Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award by the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on Sociology of Population and the Outstanding Book Award of the ASA Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility. Her early research focused on educational processes and inequality in African societies, during which she received a Fulbright award to conduct fieldwork in Kenya. Dr. Buchmann’s influential scholarship has been published in many top journals and has received widespread attention from the academic community and the news media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Dr. Buchmann is a member of the Sociological Research Association and a recipient of the Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellowship. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Buchmann received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin and her Ph.D. from Indiana University.

Amani S. Bu-Qammaz is an assistant professor of civil engineering at Kuwait University. She received her Ph.D. in civil engineering from The Ohio State University in 2015; her M.S. in civil engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2007; and her B.S. in civil engineering from Kuwait University in 1999. Prior to pursuing her graduate studies, Dr. Bu-Qammaz joined a specialized training program for fresh graduate engineers and then spent 12 years working for the Ministry of Public Works, Kuwait. She was a specialist engineer when she left the ministry to join Kuwait University. Her research interests are in construction management, risk management, contract claims and extension of time, international construction, and decision-making analysis. In addition to her academic activities, Dr. Bu-Qammaz works as a consultant in the Public Authority of Manpower and participates as a member in governmental committees. Additionally, she has been working as the risk consultant for Kuwait International Airport New Terminal Project since 2016. Dr. Bu-Qammaz is the advisor and academic director of the Kuwait’s Engineer Girls (KEG) project, a women’s empowerment program established in 2017. KEG targets young female engineers in Kuwait to help them succeed in their future careers.

Nagwa El-Badri is the founding chair of the Biomedical Sciences Programs and the director of the Center of Excellence for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at Zewail City of Science and Technology in Egypt. She has more than 100 publications and patents in the field of stem cells and regenerative medicine. She has established several undergraduate and graduate programs in Egypt and the United States in the fields of regenerative medicine, women’s health, and gender medicine. She has received grants and awards from the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the Science and Technology Development Fund of Egypt, and recently from the Women in STEM Exemplary Leader in Management Position Award by the Meera Kaul Foundation.

Alice Hogan served as the inaugural program director of the ADVANCE Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). She was invited by the NSF Office of the Director to lead an effort to design, and then to implement, a new approach to addressing the underrepresentation of women in academic science and engineering careers, particularly at the senior ranks. This effort resulted in the creation of the ADVANCE Program. Ms. Hogan

served as the first program director of ADVANCE, from 2001 to 2007. Prior to work with the ADVANCE Program, she was a senior program manager with NSF’s Division of International Programs with responsibility for strategic planning, oversight, and management of bilateral science and engineering programs with the People’s Republic of China and other countries in the Asia Pacific region. She worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on detail from the foundation, with responsibility for a variety of international cooperative science initiatives, and at Motorola under a White House program, the President’s Commission on Executive Exchange. Since her retirement from NSF, she has worked as an independent higher education consultant working with academic institutions on programs and policies to advance the participation of women in academic science and engineering. Ms. Hogan has served as an invited member of international advisory boards for European projects on women in science supported by the European Commission, including PRAGES, STAGES, GenderNet, and TRIGGER, and was a member of the European Commission Expert Group on Structural Change.

Yasmine Kanaan is an associate professor at the Howard University College of Medicine and the Howard University Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. She has authored and coauthored more than 105 publications and abstracts in breast and prostate cancer research. Dr. Kanaan has an extensive collaborative research effort in directions that delineate molecular differences in breast cancers among African Americans and Caucasians. The aim of her research efforts is to help identify ethnicity-specific markers for breast cancer progression and to develop a more tailored treatment approach, leading to better management of breast cancer in African American women. Dr. Kanaan’s lab focuses on the following: (1) conducting research to refine the diagnostic criteria for the basal-like phenotype, particularly as related to cancers in African American women, while simultaneously identifying molecular features that can be used as markers and clues for further studies into the pathogenesis of these cancers; (2) developing novel approaches for prevention and treatment of breast and prostate cancers (together, these exploratory analyses will provide clues regarding specific chromosomal regions, and genes within those regions, which are important for this phenotype of breast cancer); (3) determining associations between metabolic syndrome and molecular profiles (particularly related to fat metabolism) in breast cancers of African American women; and (4) using breast cancer cell lines with gene expression patterns parallel to those of

major categories of basal-like breast cancer, to evaluate critical endogenous lipid metabolic pathways and endogenous growth requirements. Dr. Kanaan is an educator and has trained 12 doctoral students and served on various other doctoral candidate committees. Because of her academic accomplishments, Dr. Kanaan has been an invited speaker in several national and international venues.

Erin L. Kelly is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management and is affiliated with the Institute for Work and Employment Research. Dr. Kelly’s research investigates the adoption, implementation, and consequences of work-family and antidiscrimination policies in U.S. workplaces. She is part of the Work, Family & Health Network, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has also investigated noncompliance with the Family and Medical Leave Act, how U.S. companies manage flexible work arrangements, and the effects of corporate affirmative action, diversity, and family policies on the representation of white women, women of color, and men of color in managerial and professional positions. Dr. Kelly received the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Work-Family Research and has published articles in leading journals, including the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. Prior to her appointment at MIT Sloan, she held the Martindale Chair in Sociology at the University of Minnesota and was an affiliate of the Minnesota Population Center and the Life Course Center. She was also a member of the graduate faculty at the Carlson School of Management. Dr. Kelly received her B.A. in sociology from Rice University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.

Yingyi Ma is an associate professor of sociology and a senior research associate at the Center for Policy Research. She is a sociologist of education and migration. Her work on STEM education focused on who studied in STEM fields and why, including the formation of aspirations, college major choice, and degree attainment in STEM fields. She has another strand of research on international education and has a forthcoming book on Chinese international students, titled Ambitious and Anxious, to be published by Columbia University Press. Dr. Ma received her Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University in 2006.

Janet Malley is director of research and evaluation for the University of Michigan ADVANCE Program and is responsible for evaluations of all program initiatives, internal research studies, and climate assessments undertaken by the program. Prior to that, she was associate director of the university’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She received her Ph.D. in personality psychology from Boston University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Survey Research. Dr. Malley has significant expertise and experience with quantitative and qualitative data analysis of institutional data.

Lama Moussawi is an associate professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), conducting research and teaching in the field of management science. Dr. Moussawi graduated with a B.S. in computer science from AUB, an M.B.A. in supply chain management and a Ph.D. in management science from the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Moussawi teaches courses in decision modeling, supply chain management, business statistics, and operations management. Her research focuses on applications of operations research and management science in revenue management, inventory management, and supply chain management. In revenue management, she studies business problems with multidimensional capacity, such as the ones arising in the air cargo and cruise ship industries. In inventory management, she studies stochastic inventory models and deterministic periodic inventory models. Part of her research expertise is in coordinating decisions among supply chain partners to improve supply chain performance through designing coordinating supply contracts, under asymmetric information. Dr. Moussawi is actively involved in promoting and supporting women in data science. She is the founder and chair of the Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference at AUB, and the founding chair of the AUB Committee on the Lives and Careers of Women at AUB. She is also a co–principal investigator of a $1.5 million funded research project to develop an index on the status of women in the formal economies in the Arab Middle East and North Africa region. She is actively engaged in issues related to women in operations research at the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and Management Science) meetings at the annual international INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Science) conference, as well as the WIEA (Women in Industrial Engineering) workshops.

Chandra Muller is Alma Cowden Madden Professor in the sociology department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research

focuses on the long-run effects of high school coursework on midlife work and financial security, health, and political participation at the intersections of gender, race and ethnicity, social class, disability status, and immigration status. She is a principal investigator on the High School and Beyond Midlife Follow-ups and the National Study of Learning Mindsets. She has previously led studies of high school curriculum and effects on education and health (the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study, which added an educational component to Add Health), and of postsecondary curriculum (which added a postsecondary transcript component to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1997). Her elected memberships include the National Academy of Education, fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the AERA Grants Board, and the Sociological Research Association.

Dara Norman is a full scientist and deputy associate director of the Community Science and Data Center at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona. Her research interests primarily include active galactic nuclei—their triggering, environments, and influence on galactic evolution. She is also co–diversity advocate at NOAO, focusing on advancing efforts at NOAO/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy to bring more underrepresented minorities and women into the “astronomy enterprise.” She has served on the governing board of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), been an active member of the AAS’s Committee on the Status of Minorities, chair of the Astro section of the National Society of Black Physicists, and is currently chair of the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Women in Astronomy. She has led efforts on the white papers “Significantly Increasing the Numbers of Minorities in Astronomy in the Next 10 Years” for the 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey and “Women of Color in Astronomy and Astrophysics” for the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Women of Color in Academia 2012 Conference, and “Maximizing LSST’s Scientific Return: Ensuring Participation from Smaller Institutions” for the NRC’s Strategy to Optimize the U.S. Optical and Infrared System in the Era of the LSST panel. Dr. Norman holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in astronomy from the University of Washington and an S.B. in earth, atmospheric, and planetary science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Adia Harvey Wingfield is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines how and why racial and gender

inequality persists in professional occupations. Dr. Wingfield has lectured internationally on her research in this area, and her work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Social Problems, Gender & Society, and American Behavioral Scientist. She recently completed a term as president of Sociologists for Women in Society, a national organization that encourages feminist research and social change, and is a regular contributor to Slate, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review. Dr. Wingfield is the author of several books, most recently, Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy, and is the recipient of the 2018 Public Understanding of Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association.