Liz Lyons is the inaugural Don and Stacy Rosenberg Professor in Innovation at the University of California, San Diego. An associate professor in the university’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, Dr. Lyons teaches courses on international business, innovation policy and management, and start-ups. Her research centers on organizational and innovation economics, with labor markets and management serving as a common underlying theme. She has been a UC San Diego faculty member since 2014.
Dr. Lyons is an honors graduate of the University of Toronto, where she earned both her bachelor’s degree in economics and her Ph.D. in strategic management.
Susannah Gibbs has joined the faculty of Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, as the Herrin Chair of Scientific and Professional Communication and assistant professor of public health. Dr. Gibbs is a social scientist and scientific writer with research and applied experience in global health. Her current research interests include global sexual and reproductive health and the impact of generative AI tools on scientific communication.
A graduate of Pomona College in California, Dr. Gibbs earned her master’s degree and her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
Carole Boyce-Davies is the Eric Eustace Williams, Ph.D., Endowed Chair in Caribbean Studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Dr. Boyce-Davies currently serves as chair of Howard’s department of English. A former endowed professor at Cornell University, she has edited and authored several books, including Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994).
Dr. Boyce-Davies is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, where she majored in English. She holds a master’s degree in African studies with a focus on literature and sociology from Howard University, a Ph.D. in English with a focus on African and Caribbean literature from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and a master of laws degree in international law from St. Thomas University.
Belinda McSwain Sturm was named the Moore Family Endowed Chair at Virginia Tech. Dr. Sturm is head of the university’s Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Before coming to Virginia Tech, she held various leadership roles at the University of Kansas, including interim vice chancellor for research, associate vice chancellor for research, and director of the Kansas National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. As an environmental engineer, she focuses her work on wastewater treatment, biofuel production, water quality, resource recovery from wastewater, and environmental impact assessment.
Dr. Sturm is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in environmental science and engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering and geological sciences from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.


