Brown Bag Lecture Series
Lectures may be proposed and given by any WVU Institute of Technology Faculty member, and sessions are open to all departments and disciplines. Lectures are typically scheduled for the third Tuesday of each month of the academic year, beginning at 1:00pm.
WVU Institute of Technology Faculty who are interested in presenting are encouraged
to contact the coordinators or complete the following form.
Priority in scheduling will be given to research-grounded scholarly and pedagogical presentations.
For more information, please contact Dr. Douglas Terry (
dterry5@mail.wvu.edu) or Dr. Alecia Barbour (
alecia.barbour@mail.wvu.edu).
Upcoming Lectures:
Past Speakers and Topics:
November 2023: Faculty Panel, “Humanities Scholarship in the Department of History, English, and Creative Arts: A Year in the Life,” featuring contributions from Dr. Alecia Barbour, Associate Professor of Music; Dr. Cortney Barko, Associate Professor of English; Dr. Rachel Bragg, Associate Professor of English; Dr. Patrick Brown, Assistant Professor of History; and Dr. Douglas Terry, Associate Professor of English.
April 2023: Ms. Lauren Fowler, Teaching Instructor of English, “ ‘To keep the devil away’: Examining Folk Traditions and Spirituality in Appalachia.”
February 2023: Dr. Patrick Brown, Assistant Professor of History, “Toward a War Economy: The Battle for the Shop Floor and Industrial District in Sormovo, 1937-1941.”
November 2022: Dr. J. T. Hird, Associate Professor of Mathematics, “Second-Maximal Subalgebras of Leibniz Algebras.”
April 2022: Dr. Jemma Cook, Assistant Professor of Psychology, “TPA-023B Has Chlordiazepoxide-Like Discriminative Stimulus Effects but Lacks Acute Withdrawal-Like Effects.”
November 2021: Dr. Crosby Hipes, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, “‘Moral Panic’ or Public Sympathy? Social Factors and Punishment of Drug Offenders.”
October 2021: Dr. Scott Fleming, Interim Dean, College of Business, Humanities, and Social Sciences, “An Experimental Examination of Factors Impacting Task Selection when Examining Occupational Fraud (a working paper by Fleming, Jones, and Al Hasan)”
April 2021: Dr. Horng-Jyh Yang (Tigra), Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, “West Virginia’s Infrastructure Condition”
March 2021: Dr. Joshua Price, Assistant Professor of Economics, “ Learn by Doing: Introducing Survey Design with Student-Collected Data"
February 2021: Dr. William Clough, Assistant Professor of English, “Gamification of True Crime: The Rise of True Crime Podcasts and Subscription Service Detective Games”
January 2021: Dr. Andi Kent, Associate Professor of Political Science, “The Power of Play: Game Creation to Enhance Student Learning ”
November 2020: Ms. Caroline McKelvie, Visiting Instructor, Department of Sport and Recreation Management, “Invest in Yourself – Your Students Will Thank You!”
October 2020: Dr. Patrick Brown, Assistant Professor of History, “Soviet Atheism and Working-Class Religiosity: The Struggle to Close the Sormovo Cathedral”
April 2020: Dr. Crosby Hipes, Assistant Professor, Department of Criminal Justice, “The Use of ‘Book Clubs’ in Criminal Justice-Related Courses”
October 2019: Dr. William Clough, Assistant Professor of English, “Historical Vision and Re-Vision: Historiographic Metafiction in Vonnegut's Mother Night and Rushdie's Midnight's Children”
April 2019: Ms. Caroline McKelvie, M.S., Visiting Instructor, Department of Sports Studies, “Cultural Diversity Among International Student and Student-Athletes at West Virginia University Institute of Technology”
March 2019: Dr. Horng-Jyh Yang (Tigra), Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, “The Factors of Safety in Civil Engineering Design”
November 2018: Mr. Andrew Wheeler, Associate Professor of Forensics,
“The Impact of Cartridge Characteristics on Muzzle to Target Estimates.”
October 2018: Dr. Jason Roberts, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, “The Anti-Imperialist Empire, The Soviet Union as Empire”
March 2018: Ms. Melissa Minter, Visiting Instructor of English, “English 100 Studio, Making the Co-requisite Model Work for Tech.”
November 2017: Dr. Nigel Clark, Campus Provost, “Dada, Fortuna, People, Energy and Mobility.”
October 2017: Dr. Alecia D. Barbour, Assistant Professor of Music, “Home is Together: WWII Japanese American Families’ Remembered Sounds of Belonging”
September 2017: Dr. Douglas Terry, Assistant Professor of English, “Negotiating Race in James W. C. Pennington’s Common School Review, 1840-41 ”
February 2017: Dr. Houbing Song, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, “Secure and Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems”
November 2016: Mr. Roger Jefferys, Instructor of Forensics, “Determining the Angle of Impact from the Analysis of Bullets Following Perforation with Glass.”
October 2016: Dr. Bill Clough, Assistant Professor of English, “’This is the guy my dad wouldn’t shut up about?’ Tony Stark and Steve Rogers as Sibling Rivals”
September 2016: Dr. Deborah Chun, Professor of Mathematics, “Structural Matroid Theory and Some Results?”
April 2016: Dr. Farshid Zabihian, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, “Future of coal in the US: opportunities and challenges for West Virginia. ”
March 2016: Mr. Mark Jones, Teaching Professor of Sports Studies, “The Benefits of Fitness”
February 2016: Dr. Deb Beutler, Professor of Biology, “Ten Years of Bird Data – Why?”
January 2016: Dr. Richard Squire, Professor of Chemistry, “Reflections upon Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”
November 2015: Mr. Andrew Wheeler, Associate Professor of Forensics, “How training and smarts increase errors – Investigator Mistakes”
October 2015: Dr. Cortney Barko, Assistant Professor of English, “West Virginia Women Writers”
September 2015: Dr. Greg Lieving, Associate Professor of Psychology, “The World’s Greatest Illusion: How the Outdated Concept of “free will” Continues to Impede the Development of Meaningful Social Science”
April 2015: Ms. Rachel L. Bragg, Assistant Professor of English, “Font This and Picture That: The Art of Document Design.”
March 2015: The AWESOMES (Tech Women in STEM), A panel of students and faculty speaking about their experiences in STEM fields
February 2015: Dr. Stephany Coffman-Wolph, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Information Systems, “Artificial Intelligence (AI): Trying to Get Computers to Think Like Us”
January 2015: Dr. Cortney Barko, Assistant Professor of English, “Putting the 'A' in Assessment ”
November 2014: Mr. Andrew Wheeler, Associate Professor of Forensic Investigations, “ Trial Review: A WV murder case in review. ”
October 2014: Dr. Richard Squire, Professor of Chemistry, “Is CO2 a real threat to civilization and if it is, is there some practical method of mitigating the CO2 generation?”
September 2014: Dr. Melissa Sartore, Assistant Professor of History “’That’s so medieval!’ – are we still living in the ‘Dark Ages’?”
April 2014: Mr. Mark Jones, Lecturer in the Department of Physical Education, “Societal Trends and Youth Sport.”
March 2014: Dr. Melissa Sartore, Assistant Professor of History, “Animals, Criminals, and the Hunt in Medieval England”
February 2014: Martha Maus, Assistant Professor of Spanish, “Chivalry and spiritual healing: the many faces of Chilean Indians and Conquistadors in La Araucana ”
January 2014: Ms. Rachel L. Bragg, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, “It Takes Two to Tattoo: Exploring Tattoos as Collaborative Texts.”
November 2013: Dr. Andi Kent, Assistant Professor of Political Science, “Winners’ High, Losers’ Lament: The Effect of Election Results on Voters’ Attitudes and Behaviors.”
October 2013: Dr. Paul Rakes, Associate Professor of History, “’Is Somebody Dead Here?’: Gunplay on Fayette County’s Coal Mine Frontier, 1890-1910”
September 2013: Mr. Frank Robbins, Interim Aviation Program Coordinator, “Who’s at The Controls? Assessing What It Takes to Be A Pilot”
April 2013: Mr. Tom McGraw, Assistant Professor of Health Services Administration, “Rising Healthcare Costs: A View from the Other Side”
March 2013: Dr. Richard Squire, Associate Professor of Chemistry, “Developing one of the most useful (?) Chemical Products Ever? – You Decide”
February 2013: Dr. Deb Beutler, Associate Professor of Biology, “Research on Acid Mine Drainage on Morris Creek: Effects and Treatment Options”
January 2013: Dr. Cortney Barko, Assistant Professor of English, “Mary Anning, Nineteenth-Century Fossil Hunter”
October 2012: Cynthia Hall, Assistant Professor of Psychology, “ The New Abortion Debate: Selective Termination.”