UAlbany News Podcast

Michael Leczinsky, a professor of practice in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity (CEHC), and Don Berchoff, CEO and founder of TruWeather Solutions, join the series to share their predictions for what ethical and technological challenges the drone industry will face in the new year.

TruWeather Solutions is a UAlbany-affiliated company that focuses on providing weather data and business analytics for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).

It’s been about a month since Evo Morales resigned as president of Bolivia following weeks of civil protests over disputed results of the country’s general election in October.

After initially seeking asylum in Mexico, Morales flew to Argentina on Thursday to be granted refugee status.

Gabriel Hetland, an assistant professor of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies, shares his insights on the political crisis and why he believes the resignation was a military coup.

James Acker, a distinguished teaching professor at the School of Criminal Justice, and Brian Keough, head of the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, are among the founders of the University’s National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA).

The NDPA contains a repository of publicly-accessible materials that track the history of capital punishment in the United States.

Acker and Keough join the series to share about the digitization efforts of a collection by M. Watt Espy, a researcher who spent three decades of his life gathering and indexing documentation of legal executions for what would become the nation’s largest database on capital punishment.

Ahead of the UK's General Election this Thursday (on Dec. 12), we brought Timothy Weaver of Rockefeller College to the show to share what's at stake and what to look out for in the last three days of the campaign trail.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced a bill on Nov. 22 to repeal the now controversial Opportunity Zone Program. Other politicians, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, have begun criticizing the tax incentive following reports from The New York Times and other media outlets on the high-profile beneficiaries of the program.

We first spoke with political scientist Timothy Weaver last winter on the program and his major concerns with its potential repercussions. We’ve invited Weaver back to the series to share his insights on what 2019 revealed about the provision's effects on American cities and which of his predictions have already come true.

Kevin Knuth is an associate professor of physics whose research focuses on exoplanets, and quantum mechanics and relativity.

He is a former computer scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA’s Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he designed algorithms to analyze astrophysical data as well as earth science data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Knuth is preparing to lead a team of scientists to track unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) off the coast of California.

Frankie Bailey is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice and a crime novelist. Her research focuses on crime history, mass media and pop culture. She is the author of the Lizzie Stuart and Hannah McCabe mystery series.

Bailey is working on a reference book that maps the cultural and historical significance of nine of the most renown gangster movies (including The Grandfather (1998), White Heat (1949), Scarface (1990), American Gangster (2007) and Good Fellas (1990), among others) as well as the television series The Sopranos.

The book explores the impact of the Motion Picture Production Code or the "Hays Code" of the 1930s, the emergence of the "G-Man" as a protagonist, and the role of fashion in the genre.

Tomoko Udo of the School of Public Health has examined the connections between eating disorders and mental health.

Fewer than 30 percent of people with eating disorders (i.e. anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating) seek help from a counselor or psychologist. As a result, researchers have found that those suffering from eating disorders are often at higher risk of suicide attempts.

According to Udo, health-care providers should carry out routine screenings for eating disorders along with suicide attempt history in order to inform a more comprehensive treatment plan.

Udo is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior. She conducted the study with Sarah Bitley of UAlbany's School of Public Health and Carlos Grilo of the Yale University School of Medicine.

Parents whose infant is admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit often experience a sense of exclusion from their role as caregivers and separation from their child. Due to the distressing environment that NICUs can facilitate, many parents suffer from higher rates of postpartum depression and even PTSD as a result.

Beth DuFault, an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business, is collaborating with colleagues from the University of Turku in Finland to improve the parent experience in the NICU.

DuFault shares on the episode about one Finnish hospital that has a different approach to an infant's hospital care, one that is more inclusive of parental participation.

As more countries in Central Asia transition to market economies, women are being left behind in the workforce despite high levels of education and employment. Jildyz Urbaeva, an assistant professor in the School of Social Welfare, has conducted a study on how opportunity structures and social mobility influence women's views on gender roles in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.