Kyle King

Kyle King is a sport rhetoric scholar who earned his Ph.D. in English at Penn State in 2017. His primary area of interest is the relationship among sport, athlete activism, and broader social movements, while he also writes about the use of sport as metaphor in literature and popular culture. His scholarship has appeared and will appear in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication & Sport, The International Journal of Sport Communication, The Common Reader, Journal of Sport History, Popular Communication, and Sport in American History. He is currently finishing a navigable annotated bibliography of sport rhetoric scholarship designed for graduate students and junior scholars for the journal Present Tense, while working on a longer book project on the rhetoric of contemporary athlete activism.

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.”

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.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of six critically acclaimed collections of poetry, including, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River is Rising, and a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea. She is also the editor of two anthologies, including her newest, the 2023, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, the most comprehensive volume of Liberian literature since Liberia’s independence. Her awards include the 2022 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, a 2022 Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine for her poems, “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America,” and “Healing Will Come: Elegy After Natural Disaster,” a 2021 Edward Stanley Prize from Prairie Schooner for her poem, “My Name is Dawanyeno,” a 2002 Crab Orchard Award for her second book, Becoming Ebony. Dr. Wesley has received numerous awards and grants, including two faculty fellowships from Penn State’s Humanities Institute, also, a recipient of Penn State’s three-year AESEDA Collaborative Grant for her research, “Liberian Women's Trauma Stories from the Civil War,” an investigation that took her to Liberia, and Ghana, West Africa, and to four communities of Liberian war survivors in four US states. Patricia’s research interest includes Poetry, African and African Diaspora Literature, Black American Literature and Poetics, the Liberian Civil War, and Women in War. She has a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University, a Master of Science in English Education from Indiana University-Bloomington, and a BA in English from the University of Liberia, West Africa.

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.