Eleven faculty and instructors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have been named Morgridge Fellows.
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:
Angela Richardson, Aesthetics and Business Project Coordinator, Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the School of Business
As the aesthetics and business project coordinator, Angela coordinates art-based learning activities for business faculty, staff, and students. She received her MFA from UW–Madison. Angela is also a performer and visual artist, focusing on drawing, installation, and dialogue; her work investigates how artistic, intuitive, embodied approaches to research can yield different perspectives than scientific, empirical, and mechanical ones. Previously, she served as a project assistant to cartoonist and author Lynda Barry, arts program manager for the Division of the Arts, a multimedia designer at the Center on Education and Work, and a freelance media and event producer.
Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Associate Professor, English
Dr. Druschke directs an interdisciplinary group of researchers working at the intersection of public engagement and natural resources management. Through the study of rhetoric, her team builds critical theory and conducts social and ecological research and public outreach about stream restoration, migratory fish passage, trout conservation, dam removal, wetlands restoration, watershed-based agricultural outreach and coastal storm impacts. Dr. Druschke’s work aims to better understand and intervene in dynamic, multispecies aquatic systems. Currently, she is working with the Driftless Writing Center on the Stories from the Flood project.
Claire Barrett, Healthy Academics Specialist, University Health Services
Dr. Barrett graduated from UW–Madison with a joint PhD in educational psychology and civil society and community research in 2017. As part of her dissertation, Dr. Barrett studied the experiences of underrepresented and minoritized college students who participated in various types of community-engaged learning experiences and how those experiences impact psychosocial wellbeing. Dr. Barrett previously served as the assistant director of academic engagement for the Center for First-Year Experience and now is the healthy academics specialist at UHS Prevention Services and Campus Health Initiatives, and specializes in working with faculty, instructional staff and TAs to implement systems, policies and environments that promote student wellbeing.
Dan Grupe, Associate Scientist, Center for Healthy Minds
Dr. Grupe received his PhD in psychology from UW–Madison. Dr. Grupe is interested in understanding the psychological and brain characteristics that make certain individuals more resilient to the effects of chronic and traumatic stress. He uses behavioral, peripheral physiological, and neuroimaging methods to understand why and how different individuals experience potentially stressful events in dramatically different ways. He also conducts mechanistic behavioral intervention research, primarily using mindfulness-based interventions, in an effort to provide individuals with skills and strategies to increase stress resilience, and uses these studies to test hypotheses about underlying mechanisms of stress resilience.
Jules Reynolds, Doctoral student, Department of Geography and The Nelson Institute
Jules holds an M.S. in Agroecology from UW–Madison. As a political agroecologist, she researches resilient change within community-based agroecological systems in Wisconsin. She conducted community-engaged work with agricultural communities in Malawi and in Oregon prior to coming to Wisconsin, and has shaped community-engaged curriculum for agroecological and agricultural-based courses at UW. When she’s not on campus, she works for a local cidery out in Mt. Horeb.
Kim Whitmore, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing
Dr. Whitmore is interested in better understanding and addressing the needs of families of children with special healthcare needs. Her current research is focused on examining the respite needs of family caregivers to inform the development of a care delivery system that promotes family self-management in families of children with special healthcare needs across the lifespan to optimize individual and family outcomes while promoting health equity. Dr. Whitmore also serves as an affiliate on the public health program faculty at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Previously, she worked as a home-care nurse manager, local health officer and policy section chief and state health plan officer for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health.
Linda M. Pheng, PhD Candidate, Department of Educational Policy Studies
Grounded in her identity as the daughter of Khmer refugees, Linda’s research centers the voices of Southeast Asian American communities to examine the policies, practices and contexts that impact their experiences in- and out-of-school spaces. She has investigated these areas through various qualitative research projects which make use of a variety of methodologies, including in-depth interviews, participant observations, ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis and surveys. Her dissertation project examines how a community-based youth program in Philadelphia works with Southeast Asian American high school youths to cultivate critical consciousness around race and class inequalities in their schools and communities; and, in turn, how youth use this knowledge to negotiate and challenge the effects of neoliberal education and urban reforms in their schools, communities and city.
Maitreyee Sanjiv Marathe, Graduate Student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Maitreyee is a graduate student advised by professor Giri Venkataramanan and is a student member of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium. She has worked at SELCO Foundation, a leading organization in the rural electrification space in India. She has also worked at the Centre for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technologies, India in collaboration with UW–Madison for the study and deployment of real-world microgrids. Her graduate work on microgrids involves exploring the nexus between healthcare and energy resilience, assessing energy needs of medically fragile families and developing microgrid-technology based solutions.
Nathan Larson, Director, Cultivate Health Initiative, Environmental Design Lab, Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture
Nathan works in partnership with colleagues representing various organizations and sectors on initiatives and networks focused on health equity, nature and garden-based education, food systems, climate action, and well-being. He currently works on the Cultivate Health Initiative–a joint public health project of the nonprofit Rooted and the UW Environmental Design Lab with support from the Wisconsin Partnership Program–to grow and sustain the school garden network and movement in Wisconsin through policy, systems, and environmental changes. Nathan also serves as a co-lead on the Dane Climate Action Team and on the advisory council for the national School Garden Support Organization Network. Previously, Nathan served as the education director at Rooted.
Susan Andreae, Assistant Professor, Department of Kinesiology
Dr. Andreae focuses on health equity and health promotion. She received her MPH and PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the UAB Division of Preventive Medicine. Her research interests include the development, evaluation, and management of family-centered chronic disease self-management programs delivered by community peer coaches.
Vivian Tamkin, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology
Vivian L. Tamkin received her PhD in counseling psychology, with a minor in child clinical psychology from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 2009. She also holds a MA in marriage and family therapy from Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School in Pasadena, California as well as state licensure (CA) as a psychologist. Dr. Tamkin has over a decade of experience in graduate-level clinical training/ supervision and direct service provision to children and families in high need, low resourced neighborhoods of color, specifically, with the African American community. Broadly, Dr. Tamkin is interested in the larger problem of disparities in access to high quality, inclusive health care for African Americans. She is particularly interested in developing and testing culturally-based and community-driven strategies to improve the African American mother and infant mortality rates. As such, as a HDRS postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Tamkin will incorporate her years of clinical experience, rooted in an ecological systemic perspective, to examine health outcomes of African American mothers and infants in the first year postpartum/postnatal.