2013 Keynote Speakers
Katharine C. Lyall, University of Wisconsin System President (1992-2004)
Katharine Lyall is president-emeritus of the University of Wisconsin System, professor of Economics at UW-Madison, and currently, visiting senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the nation's oldest organization supporting teachers and excellence in teaching.
She headed Wisconsin's statewide public university system of 15 institutions and 160,000 students from 1992 to 2004. Prior to her appointment as president, she was an economist at the Chase Manhattan Bank on Wall Street, held faculty appointments at Syracuse University and Johns Hopkins, and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development & Research at the US Department of Housing & Urban Development in the Carter Administration. She has continued to teach economic theory and public policy courses throughout her administrative career; during her 12-year tenure as president, she signed the diplomas of more than 300,000 UW graduates, including about 4,000 of her own students.
Dr. Lyall serves as a director of the Council for Aid to Education, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin United for Health, the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Higher Education and many other civic and educational organizations. She is the author of numerous articles and several books in the fields of economic theory and po1icy evaluation and is co-author (with Dr. Kathleen Sell) of “True Genius of America at Risk”, a book documenting the privatization of public higher education and what we can do about it.
You may be more interested to know that Katharine is an avid sailor and watcher of Saturday morning cartoons which, she says, are an allegory on life and its challenges!
Constance Steinkuehler, Co-Director, Games+Learning+Society, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
Constance Steinkuehler is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also a co-director of the Games+Learning+Society Center in Madison, WI. She recently served as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President to advise on national initiatives related to games and learning. She researches cognition and learning in online games. She is especially interested in the forms of science, literacy, and sociocultural skills that young adults learn from online play.
Panel on Education Innovations
Craig Benson, Director, Office of Sustainability
Craig Benson is a Wisconsin Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he serves as Director of Sustainability Research and Education and Co-Director of the Office of Sustainability. He is also Chair of the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geological Engineering. He is an international expert in geoenvironmental engineering and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Benson has been conducting experimental and analytical research related to protection of the environment for nearly three decades, with a primary focus on beneficial use of industrial byproducts; environmental containment of solid, hazardous, radioactive, and mining wastes; and sustainable infrastructure.
Sarah Davis, Patient Partnership, Law School
Sarah Davis is Clinical Assistant Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Center for Patient Partnerships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches about patient advocacy and health law, and she serves as co-director of the JD-MPH dual degree program. Her research interests include the emerging field of patient advocacy, healthcare teamwork/collaboration, and the responsiveness of the health care system to consumers' experiences. Her current research projects include building an e-archive of literature on health advocacy to gather all peer-reviewed literature on health advocacy in one place; offer analysis of how advocacy is defined, portrayed, evaluated, and understood in the public domain; support learning, scholarship, policymaking, and field building in the advocacy domain; and highlight research on the efficacy of advocacy. Ms. Davis also serves as a consultant to health care organizations engaging patients in quality improvement efforts.
John Hawks, Associate Professor, Anthropology/MOOC experimenter and blogger
John Hawks is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a MOOC experimenter, and an avid blogger. Dr. Hawks has worked on almost every part of our evolutionary story, from the very origin of our lineage among the apes up to the last 10,000 years of our history. His work has taken him to Africa, Asia and Europe, where he has measured thousands of bones and investigated dozens of archaeological sites. His lab works with the bioinformatics of whole genome sequences from hundreds of living people (and a few ancient ones) to uncover the patterns of relationships that connect them. Hawks is the Associate Chair of Anthropology at UW–Madison, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) faculty fellow, and an associate member of both the Department of Zoology and the J. F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution. He’s the recent recipient of the UW’s H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship and its Vilas Associate award.