Beyond 1894

When Dr. Laura Bostick’s daughter was born blind, her life changed forever, and her focus shifted.

 

As an early biomedical engineering graduate, Dr. Bostick spent almost two decades with NASA before the birth of her daughter led her to investigate the best ways to teach a blind person. Through conferences, connections, and colleagues at Louisiana Tech, she earned her master’s degree in special education and eventually her doctorate, leading her to a director position with the UTeachTech program on top of her inspiring work as a professor and mentor at the university.

 

In this episode, Dr. Bostick has something to teach all of us, recounting her journey from a STEM field to motherhood to teaching, how they’re all connected in the current state of her career, and how teaching others to teach has a deeper impact than we may realize.

 

Website: https://1894.latech.edu/beyond/

 

Email: [email protected] 

 

Learn more about the UTeachTech program: https://www.UTeachTech.com/

Learn about CyberTeach-LA: https://www.uteachtech.com/cyberteach.html

 

Listen to our episode with Dr. Edward Bell, the director of the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness.

Since May 1, 2019, Adam McGuirt, Louisiana Tech’s Director of Disaster Recovery and Strategic Initiatives, has been doing “whatever’s next” as the University’s main point of contact between contractors and architects on athletic facilities destroyed by the EF3 tornado in April 2019. Here, he shares the vision for the project, the baby steps and giant strides along the way, and the tremendous amount of teamwork it’s taken to make this giant and gratifying step toward Tech’s 21st Century Campus. 

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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Check out our latest photo galleries.

Got hope? If you do, how would you define it?

Dr. Michael Ternes, an assistant professor of psychology here at Louisiana Tech University, introduces us to Charles Snider's Hope Theory. According to the theory, hope is an active process that, unfortunately, we too often use in a passive way. When we say, “Hope you have a good day,” what we usually mean is “I wish you to have a good day.”  See the difference?

If not, he helps us understand in this episode of Beyond 1894.

In his research concerning hope, he’s found hope is something we can foster in individuals to help them make better career decisions. Hope can also help someone be more flexible in their thinking style. Hope just might be a way society can circumvent the mental health process, get rid of the stigma surrounding it so students who need someone to talk to can put themselves in better position to use resources available on campus so they can make choices that are the healthiest and most adaptive for them.

He recommends a couple of books for your consideration:  Making Hope Happen by Shane Lopez and What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles.

P.S.: We wish you to draw something meaningful and helpful specifically to you from this podcast.

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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Learn more about the College of Education and the department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

Learn more about the Louisiana Tech University Digital Commons

Dr. Bob Cunningham doesn’t teach accounting as much as he teaches individual people who happen to be students.

A three-time College of Business graduate (1973, MBA 1985, DBA 1996), Cunningham is Louisiana Tech’s second Executive in Residence and the first to tell you that his faith calls him to make connections with people, specifically students, in ways that instruct and encourage in an atmosphere of authenticity and inclusion.

He was the president of his high school class in the late 1960s in Ringgold, came to Tech—and flunked out. But a couple of calls from home gave him the will to try again, and then several Tech professors reached out, convinced him they cared, encouraged him to chase the successful soul that was inside—and he did.

He talks about those experiences—not all of them uplifting—and how the sum total, along with a love of accounting, entrepreneurial spirit, and his desire to see students succeed, led him back into the classroom and back into the lives of business students.

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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Learn more about the College of Business

Learn more about the School of Accountancy

Learn more about Digital Commons

When Dr. Terri Murray was a child, she was the kid who turned every rock over, brought turtles home, and looked through magazines for pictures of wild animals. She was a born scientist and engineer — but she was also a female in high school in the late 1960s when women weren’t scientists and engineers.

As a young adult, she was successful in helping her husband start a couple of businesses, but none of that was her passion. She found it one night while watching a television show.

When she saw a paraplegic walk on his own after scientists and engineers put wires in his legs, she practically leapt from her sofa and told her husband, “I want to do THAT!”

And she is. After going back to college with students who were her children's age, Dr. Murray is an associate professor of biomedical engineering, a field she “stumbled into” before she even knew it existed. This little-girl explorer is now exploring ways to develop solutions to neurological disorders and traumatic brain injuries as the director of Tech’s Integrated Neuroscience and Imaging Laboratory.

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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Learn more about the Biomedical Engineering program in the College of Engineering and Science here at Louisiana Tech University.

Learn more about the Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science.

Learn more about the Parkinson Resource Center.

If you ask Libby Manning what she’s been reading, be prepared to stick around a while.

When she was 10, her little sister was the only 3-year-old in town who understood phonics, all thanks to “playing school” in the garage. Teaching is part of what Dr. Libby Manning, an associate professor in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University, was called to do.

After graduating from Louisiana Tech, she taught kindergarteners in Shreveport, first graders in Jackson, Miss., then taught for 17 years, mostly fifth grade, at A.E. Phillips Lab School in Ruston. Very few things she’s done in the classroom during her career encouraging and guiding students have been made up on the spot; Manning is all about strategy.

Her belief is that to learn in the classroom, you have to build a community, you have to be able to have fun while you’re learning “to help it stick,” and that we have to be physically, socially, and cognitively engaged.

In this episode of Beyond 1894, Manning shares with listeners some strategies on reading and on teaching, and why she believes that “we’re never finished learning. It’s an ongoing process we go through as readers. The way we get our world changed is one reader at a time and one writer at a time.”

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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Learn more about the College of Education.

While we’re trying to figure out how to baste a turkey or steal a decent dressing recipe to help us make it through the holidays, Dr. Gergana Nestorova, assistant professor in Louisiana Tech’s Department of Biological Sciences and program chair for Tech’s Molecular Science and Nanotechnology (MSNT) program, is aiding NASA in learning how to farm off Earth -- and with no earth.

Nestorova created a new technology to more effectively analyze plant material, which will be used by a team of scientists who are discovering how to grow vegetable gardens in microgravity. These vegetable gardens will provide nutrition to astronauts on missions to the moon, and later Mars.

When Man shoots for Mars, the journey alone will challenge any current “Use By” date: it takes six to nine months just to get there.

On this episode of Beyond 1894, Nestorova, her undergraduate researcher, Francesca Weis, and NASA astronaut and scientist Serena Auñón-Chancellor, who spoke at Tech as part of its New Frontiers series, offer space food for thought.

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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Dr. Nestorova's lab - The Applied Genomics and Biotechnology Lab

Dr. Davy Norris, Chief Research and Innovation Officer at Louisiana Tech, interviews Dr. Yuri Lvov, Tolbert Pipes Eminent Endowed Chair in Micro and Nanosystems, for this episode of Beyond 1894.

As a chemist, Dr. Lvov is recognized as one of the most influential nanoscience researchers in the world over the past 25 years. When he faced academic challenges in Russia, his home country, he started anew in Germany, where he teamed up with another chemist to invent the method he is now famous for - materials self-assembly.

In this episode, Dr. Lvov explains his method of materials self-assembly and how it impacts nanotechnology and the medical industry. The conversation also gets personal: Dr. Lvov discusses what it was like for his family living in a Siberian Soviet labor camp during Stalin's reign, what it was like growing up in Russia, and how he eventually made his way to Louisiana Tech University.

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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Dr. Yuri Lvov's Website

Dr. Yuri Lvov's Selected Works Page

Dr. Davy Norris, Chief Research and Innovation Officer at Louisiana Tech, interviews Dr. Leon Iasemidis, Rhodes Eminent Scholar Chair and Director of Tech’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science, for this episode of Beyond 1894.

Iasemidis has spent his academic career learning about the brain and discovering new insights for the larger scientific community. He's the lead scientist of the NeuroNEM project funded by the National Science Foundation, and through this research, his team of scientists are finding ways to predict, and perhaps even prevent, seizures. 

In this episode, Norris and Iasemidis discuss the scientific communities’ current knowledge of the brain, the research Iasemidis and his associates are conducting, and his inspiration for doing this most important and groundbreaking work.

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

Download the transcript to this episode.

NeuroNEM website

Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science website

Brain Dynamics Laboratory website

Dr. Leon Iasemidis's website

Theatre is storytelling brought to life — live and in person without a social media filter — and it has been entertaining people for centuries. There is magic in how real and authentic the story can feel, but when dramatic scenes include violence, it’s important the brutality remains an illusion.

Mark Guinn, Director of Louisiana Tech’s School of Theatre, is a Fight Master of Stage Combat with the Society of American Fight Directors and a Certified Teacher with the British Academy of Stage and Screen Combat. He makes sure every punch, stab, and swing on stage looks real while being fake.

In this episode, Davy Norris interviews Mark Guinn about his experiences as a fight master, a lighting design technician, a stage combat teacher, and a theatre professor here at Tech.

No legs were broken in the making of this episode.

Website: 1894.latech.edu/beyond/

Email: [email protected]

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