Kim Ménard
Kim S. Ménard, associate professor of criminal justice and women's gender, and sexuality studies, earned her doctorate from Penn State in 2003. Her research focuses on interpersonal violence, specifically gender differences in the victimization and perpetration of these crimes, as well as victim reporting behavior and involvement in the criminal justice system. She is the author of Reporting Sexual Assault: A Social Ecology Perspective. Her work has also appeared in a host of journals, including "Criminal Justice and Behavior," "Journal of Interpersonal Violence,” “Law & Human Behavior," “Violence Against Women,” and "Violence and Victims.”
Sandra Petrulionis
Sandra Harbert Petrulionis is the author of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord, the editor of Thoreau In His Own Time, and Thoreau's Journal 8: 1854, and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism and More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s Walden for the 21st Century. In addition, she has published on Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and other American writers and reformers. Her current research includes two long-term projects--a cultural biography of 19th-century activist, author, and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and, with Noelle A. Baker, a scholarly, annotated, digital edition of the complete Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson. Sandy is also the Director of the NEH Summer Institute on "Transcendentalism and Social Reform."
Grant Risha
Grant A. Risha received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Penn State in 2003. His primary research interests are reactive flows/combustion, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and propulsion. He has performed research on the enhancement of hybrid rocket solid fuel performance by introducing nano-sized energetic particles, solid propellant airbag combustion, pyrotechnic igniter characterization, solid, hybrid, and bi-propellant rocket combustion, diffusion flame combustion, aluminum/water combustion, and solid fuel pyrolysis.
Yimin Zhu
Yimin Zhu, Associate Professor of Chemistry, earned his doctorate at Stony Brook University. His doctoral work focused primarily on synthetic organic chemistry. He completed his postdoctoral training in carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. More recently, he worked as an Assistant Scientist at the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at UW-Madison, where he started his research on lignin, a major barrier against effective utilization of cellulosic biomass for liquid fuels. His primary area of research lies at the interface of organic chemistry and biochemistry. He plans to continue his work in bioenergy, with a concentration on chemistry and biochemistry of lignin and carbohydrate.