Detailed Agenda (SSI 2023)

Dr. Juliana Ivancik

Erica D’Eramo

Assistant Director, Center for Women in Technology, UMBC

• Erica D’Eramo has coached women in computing and engineering through the salary negotiation process as the Assistant Director of the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
• She aims to empower women and their allies to negotiate more confidently and competitively in each aspect of their financial lives.
• With enthusiasm and practical advice, she demystifies the negotiation process, providing each person with the tools needed to advocate for themselves now and in the future.
• D’Eramo holds a BB.A. in Business from Franklin & Marshall College and an MM.A.in Higher Education Administration from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dr. Karsonya Whitehead

Founding Director at The Karson Institute for Race, Peace, and Social Justice and Professor of Comm & African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland; Radio Host, Today With Dr. Kaye

• Karsonya “Kaye” Wise Whitehead is the founding director of The Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice and a professor of communication and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland. She is the host of the award-winning radio show Today with Dr. Kaye on WEAA, 88.9 FM, and the recent recipient of the John LaFarge Award and the Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence for her outstanding reporting on the impact racial reckoning has had in helping to close social/racial wealth gap for Black people in America.
• In 2022, Today With Dr. Kaye received the Chesapeake Associated Press Award for Best in Show and Best Radio Talk Show. In 2021, Dr. Whitehead received the Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; the Afro newspaper selected her as one of their “2021 Newsmakers of the Year;” and the Baltimore Business Journal chose her to receive the Leaders in Diversity Award.
• She is the author of four books, including the recently released my mother’s Tomorrow: Dispatches from Baltimore’s Black Butterfly; the award-winning Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis, which received both the 2015 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2014 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians; and Letters to My Black Sons: Raising Boys in a Post-Racial America.
• She received her BB.A.in History from Lincoln University, her Master’s Degree in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Culture from UMBC. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated. She is the daughter of Rev. Carson and Bonnie Wise, originally from Columbia, South Carolina. She currently lives in Baltimore with her husband and her two sons.

Jelila Stanton, MS

Head of the Materials Engineering Branch at NASA Goddard Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)

• Ms. Stanton is currently the Head of the Materials Engineering Branch at NASA Goddard Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), which performs materials and processes engineering, testing, and analysis for spacecraft, science instrument payloads, and aerospace technology programs.
• She received her BB.S.in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she did undergraduate research on fluid mechanics of bacterial infections.
• She then attended graduate school at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she received an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, studying oxide dispersion strengthened molybdenum for high-temperature structural applications.  Before coming to NASA, she worked as a process control engineer at a high-volume manufacturing semiconductor fab at Intel Corporation in New Mexico.
• She initially joined NASA as an electronics engineer, supporting electrical parts selection, testing, failure analysis, and electronic packaging studies.  In 2010, she originally transferred to the Materials Engineering Branch to work on evaluating space environmental effects on returned thermal insulation from the Hubble Space Telescope.  Ms. Stanton lives in the D.C. area with her husband and son.

Dr. Leopoldo Torres 

Senior Chemist at Senseonics Incorporated

• Leopoldo Torres Jr graduated with Tau Beta Pi honors in 2014 with a B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Riverside.
• He obtained his Ph.D. in 2019 from the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the University of Maryland College Park as an NSF Bridge to the Doctorate and Graduate Fellow.
• He worked for Dr. Peter Kofinas, and his work focused on nanoparticle self-assembly for applications in structural color and protease detection.
• After his doctoral studies, he was a postdoctoral scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, working for the American Dental Association until December 2020.
• Leopoldo is now a senior scientist at Senseonics Inc, leveraging his background in polymer science to design long-lasting implantable continuous glucose monitors.

Dr. Brittini Brown

Associate Vice Provost for Student Engagement and Dean of Students

• Dr. Brittini R. Brown is the Associate Vice Provost for Student Engagement and Dean of Students at Johns Hopkins University. In her role, Dr. Brown plays a vital part in leading the university’s strategic efforts to facilitate and support student engagement and enhance the student experience, focusing on fostering a strong sense of community and student belonging.
• Before joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Brown served as the Associate Vice President for Student Affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she led areas including student life and engagement, event and conference services, facilities and operations, student affairs creative services, off-campus student services, civic life and democratic engagement, and risk management. She also provided university-wide service in response to COVID-19 in health, safety, and compliance. Additionally, she led the Free Speech and Political Activity group, developing resources and providing consultation on on-campus protest and activism activities.
• Dr. Brown has presented her work and research at the NASPA Assessment and Persistence Conference, American College Health Association Annual Conference, Maryland Student Affairs Conference, and Association for the Study of Higher Education Conference. As a result of her expertise, Dr. Brown is a former member of the Dean’s Advisory Council for the Glenn W. Sample College of Agriculture at Purdue University, where she earned her Ph.D. She was named a Distinguished Alumna of the Department of Agricultural Education and Communication at Purdue. Her analyses, editorials, and research have been published in MSIs Unplugged, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, and the American Council on Education Blog.
• Brittini is a native of Augusta, Arkansas, and a proud graduate of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where she received her B.S. in Regulatory Science with a concentration in Industrial Health and Safety. She also holds a M.S. in Industrial and Agricultural Technology from Iowa State University. Dr. Brown received her doctoral degree in Youth Development and Agricultural Education (YDAE), now ASEC, from Purdue University. For fun, Dr. Brown enjoys working out, dabbling in golf and gardening, and playing with her petite Goldendoodle, Broadway.

Dr. Nandadevi Cortes-Rodriguez

Assistant Professor at Ithaca College

• Nandadevi Cortes is currently an Assistant Professor at Ithaca College, teaching Ornithology and Ecology Evolution for first-year students.
• Her research focuses on Evolutionary Biology and conservation genomics of birds, and her students at Ithaca College are working on the population genetics of Raven (Corvus corax) populations from Mexico and Central America and song variation between populations of neotropical Orioles, such as the Yellow-backed Oriole (Icterus Chrysler) and the Streak-backed Oriole (Icterus pustulatus).
• Before starting as a Postdoctoral Teaching fellow at Ithaca College, she completed a Postdoc at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute at the National Zoological Park, where she worked on the Population genomics of the Mariana Crow (Corvus kubaryi) in Guam and Rota in addition to other projects involving conservation and genomics of island birds.
• She conducted her Ph.D. with Kevin Omland at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), working on a multidiscipline analysis of the divergence of two tropical Orioles. In addition, she worked as the Program Coordinator for PROMISE under the supervision of Renetta Tull, where she published work on the importance of community for Broden’s success.
• She obtained her master’s and undergraduate degrees from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), where she worked with Orioles and hummingbirds. In between degrees, she was a Teaching Assistant in Cannes, France.

Dr. Huguens Jean

SWE at Google

• With over a decade of experience with developing and building software models for light-based sensors and cameras, Huguens specializes in using modern and traditional approaches in computer vision and deep learning to extract or infer data from images. His industry experience includes NASA, Gameonstream, Booz Allen Hamilton, Google, and various technology startups in Silicon Valley.  At NASA, Huguens developed an unsupervised object extraction model using a three-dimensional time-of-flight camera and an intensity camera for autonomous space docking. He constructed and tested a tunable external cavity interband cascade laser for mid-infrared sensing. He also programmed data acquisition and analysis software for a miniaturized gas correlation radiometer for trace gas measurements on Mars.

• At Gameonstream, Huguens combined his passion for sports and computer vision to build an autonomous point-tilt-zoom camera model that takes a live panoramic stationary input video stream and generates a new sub-stream that follows the action in the game.  He also spent nearly a year teaching machine learning and data science to Booz Allen Hamilton employees in Virginia, USA, and Abu Dhabi.

• Huguens currently works at Google as a machine learning engineer. His core work includes creating a hybrid video solution platform that can enable building large AI-centric video analytics applications at scale.

• He received his Ph.D. and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. As a doctoral student, he focused on applying computer vision in resource-limited environments for digitizing paper information. His thesis eventually converted to a patent that presents an approach capable of analyzing the content of digital images.

Dr. Michael (MJ) Johnson

Senior Manager at DSM-Firmenich and the Head of the Biotech R&D Fermentation Process Development Lab in Columbia, Maryland

• Dr. Michael (MJ) Johnson is a Senior Manager at DSM-Firmenich and the Head of the Biotech R&D Fermentation Process Development Lab in Columbia, Maryland. In this capacity, he leads a team that works on projects of varying scales from inception to scale-up to production. The team also supports multiple North American production facilities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South.
• MJ has over 15 years of industry experience in fermentation and strain development. Over the course of his career, MJ has developed biofuel for the cars that transported 2012 London Olympics athletes and worked on nearly half a dozen multi-company collaboration projects. He has a large set of experiences, from novel early-phase innovation projects to large-scale production projects brought to market.
• MJ also serves as a board member of BUGSS (Baltimore Underground Science Space), a non-profit public laboratory offering classes, seminars, and lab access, so anyone can safely and affordably investigate the living world.
• MJ is a UMBC alumnus, where he was an M7 Meyerhoff Scholar and earned a degree in Chemical Engineering. MJ continued his stint as a Retriever and completed his MS and Ph.D. in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering.