Eleven faculty and instructors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have been named “Morgridge Fellows” in a professional development program of the Morgridge Center for Public Service.
The fellows were selected through a juried process to participate in the year-long learning community designed to further institutionalize and support community-engaged scholarship, defined as: teaching, research, and scholarly activities that are performed in equitable, mutually beneficial collaboration with communities to fulfill campus and community objectives. The program is led by Morgridge Center academic staff and guest speakers from campus and community perspectives.
The upcoming year will include sessions focused on developing and sustaining mutually beneficial community-university partnerships for community-based learning courses and research. In addition to receiving support for their classrooms, research, and other community-engaged projects, fellows will have the opportunity to build a unique interdisciplinary team of mentors and peers from the UW community.
The following instructors have been named Morgridge Fellows:
Olufunmilola Abraham, Assistant Professor, School of Pharmacy
Dr. Abraham received her BPharm Degree from University of Lagos, Nigeria and practiced as a hospital and community pharmacist in Nigeria. She received her MS and PhD in Social and Administrative Pharmacy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also received a PhD minor in Industrial and Systems Engineering from UW, focused on human factors and ergonomics and a graduate certification in patient safety. Dr. Abraham’s research goal is to improve medication use for vulnerable and underserved populations such as children, young adults, women, and people living with serious chronic health conditions.
Karla Ausderau, Assistant Professor, Kinesiology
Dr. Ausderau received her PhD from the University of Southern California. Dr. Ausderau’s research program focuses on families and child with autism spectrum disorder. She studies daily occupations, specifically eating and mealtimes, to elucidate the impact on the child’s health, family wellness, and overall daily participation. She also studies sensory features in children with autism spectrum disorder, including their development, characterization, and impact on daily participation. With better characterization of feeding and sensory behaviors, she hopes to be able to develop more effective assessment tools, targeted treatment strategies, and improved outcomes for children and families.
Kallista Bley, PhD student, Geography
Kallista received her MPH in Health and Social Behavior from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. Bley has worked extensively in community-based research and brings a depth of experience applying participatory approaches, developing research tools, and conducting quantitative and qualitative research and analysis. Bley is skilled in using video and photography as a means to identify shared concerns for collective action.
Heidi Brown, Assistant Professor, Urogynecology
Dr. Heidi Brown is a member of the UW Ob-Gyn Division of Gynecology, and is board-eligible and specializing in Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery. After graduating magna cum laude with a Liberal Medical Education (Community Health) degree from Brown University in 2000, Dr. Brown pursued her MD at Brown University’s Warren Alpert School of Medicine between 2001 and 2006. During medical school, she also completed a year-long fellowship in Applied Epidemiology with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga. Dr. Brown spent 2006 to 2010 as a resident in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Magee-Women’s Hospital. She completed her Fellowship in Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of California, San Diego, in June 2013 and received her Masters in Advanced Studies (Clinical Research) degree in March 2013 from the same institution. Her primary research focus is on barriers to care-seeking for pelvic floor disorders.
Patti Coffey, Faculty Associate, Psychology
Patricia Coffey is a Forensic Psychologist and UW-Madison Psychology Department Faculty Associate. She has undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Ibero-American Studies from the UW-Madison and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Vermont. She has been in private practice in Madison for over 20 years providing treatment and forensic evaluation services. In addition to private practice, she also worked half-time for Mendota Mental Health Institute and the Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center for 9 years. In 2014 she started working full time in the UW-Psychology Department.
Nathan Gibson, Ethnic American Music Curator, Mills Music Library
Nathan Gibson is a PhD candidate in the department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. He holds a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College and an MA in Ethnomusicology from Indiana University. He has designed and taught courses on American Vernacular Music, Nordic-American Folksongs, Music Cultures around the World, Socially Conscious Songwriting and co-teaches a summer Folklore field school. His work at the Mills Music Library is focused on folklore archives, audio preservation, the Global Centers-Local Sounds NEH project, as well as curating and documenting ethnic American and Nordic-American music collections pertaining to the Upper Midwest.
Maria Moreno, Associate for Experiential Learning in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture and Multicultural Outreach Specialist with the Earth Partnership
Maria Moreno, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist by training and works with the Undergraduate Certificate in Global Health program and the Earth Partnership program. She works with the undergraduate certificate team to develop curriculum and courses, document impact, and help manage the program. At Earth Partnership, she develops curricular materials and outreach programs centered on ecological restoration for youth, college students, community members and professional development for teachers. She also designs, teaches and supervises community-based learning as well as domestic and international internships on environmental education. She leads Earth Partnership Global Initiatives in Mexico, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Puerto Rico.
Lesley Sager, Faculty Associate, Design Studies
Lesley’s journey from photography, to social work, to interior design, has shaped who she is as a person and a teacher. She is passionate about design and how powerful the design process can be to help change how we live. She loves watching and guiding the students on their path to becoming inspired, innovative designers with an eye towards making the world a better place to live. Lesley’s students get to design everything from light fixtures, to furniture, to homes, to offices, to a women’s maker studio in Kenya! She believes that an education is a powerful toolbox that can open up many doors, but passion, motivation, and perseverance are the tools to get you to where you need to be.
Sarah Short, Assistant Professor, Educational Psychology
Sarah Short is an Assistant Professor and the Dorothy King Chair in Educational Psychology and a faculty member for the Center for Healthy Minds at UW. She received her PhD in Biological Psychology and Neuroscience from UW–Madison. Following her graduate studies, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Short’s current research focuses on the impact of poverty on early child brain development. She has recently been awarded a $2.5 million National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) grant to study the link between poverty, brain development, and cognitive processes that facilitate learning, self-monitoring and decision-making in children.
Traci Snedden, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing
Dr. Traci Snedden is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing. She earned her PhD from the University of Colorado and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with a joint appointment at the UW–Madison School of Nursing and School of Medicine and Public Health. She focuses her research on adolescent concussion, sports safety, injury prevention and recovery, and overall student health and wellbeing. A skilled collaborator, Dr. Snedden’s work is influenced by her diverse clinical background that reflects a long history in the highly-ranked Children’s Hospitals of Milwaukee, Seattle and Denver, where she provided care as an inpatient nurse in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and as a pediatric nurse practitioner in the Pediatric Emergency Department. She is a member of the Brain Injury Association of Wisconsin Advisory Board, the Society of Pediatric Research in Sports Medicine, the Badger Athletic Performance Team, and the Big Ten/Ivy League Academic Alliance on Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration.
Weihua Zhu, Assistant Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures
Dr. Zhu received her PhD from the University of Florida, and her current research interests include interactional features of Mandarin Chinese speakers in natural conversation, speech behavior and pragmatic perception and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.