Campus Shout Outs

Tisha King-Heiden, Biology, co-authored the article "The Importance of Diverse Mentors in the Sciences" in SETAC Globe published on Thursday, Jan. 14 by ET&C. This opinion piece was written with colleagues from SETAC North America in response to the recent Wall Street Journal op-ed condemning first lady elect, Jill Biden, for using her doctoral prefix and the now retracted Nature Communications article that used inappropriate analyses to suggest female mentorship has a negative impact on the careers of others in science. Our piece is intended to highlight the current data that actually supports the opposite findings, to identify data gaps that remain in this field, and to offer a call to action to increase diversity of mentors in the sciences.

Submitted on: Jan. 14

Kristina LaPlant, Political Science & Public Administration, authored the article "Cocked, Locked, and Loaded: An Analysis of the Five Policy Regimes of Concealed Carry on College Campuses" in Politics & Policy published on Jan. 9 by Wiley-Blackwell. LaPlant and colleagues explore how gun culture, state policy liberalism, and racial politics influence legislation allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on college campuses in the United States.

Submitted on: Jan. 12

Marco Vriens, Marketing and Chad Vidden, Mathematics & Statistics, co-authored the article "The benefits of the Shapley Value for key drivers analysis" in Applied Marketing Analytics and was accepted for publication by Henry Stewart. Linear (and other types of) regression are often used in what is referred to as ‘driver modelling’ in customer satisfaction studies. The goal of such research is often to determine the relative importance of various sub-components of the product or service in terms of predicting and explaining overall satisfaction. Driver modelling can also be used to determine the drivers of value, likelihood to recommend, etc. A common problem is that the independent variables are correlated, making it difficult to get a good estimate of the importance of the ‘drivers’. This problem is well known under conditions of severe multicollinearity, and alternatives like the Shapley-value approach have been proposed to mitigate this issue. This paper shows that Shapley-value may even have benefits in conditions of mild collinearity. The study compares linear regression, random forests and gradient boosting with the Shapley-value approach to regression and shows that the results are more consistent with bivariate correlations. However, Shapley-value regression does result in a small decrease in k-fold validation results.

Submitted on: Jan. 11

Lexie Weghorn, Physics BS and Shelly Lesher, Physics, designed the podcast "My Nuclear Life" for "general dissemination on all podcatchers". This podcast is based on a course taught at UWL and explores the relationship between nuclear science and society.

Submitted on: Jan. 4

Karina Billings, Occupational Therapy, presented "How Do I Do THAT Over Video: Telehealth Tools to Enhance OT Practice" at Veterans' Administration (VA) National OT Webinar on Jan. 1, online. Billing's, along with three other OT fieldwork students at the VA from July 2020-September 2020, worked on components of a large project focusing on enhancing telehealth experiences for current faculty members and future students. "With the increasing use of telehealth across occupational therapy settings, the purpose of this project was to prepare and support clinicians and trainees with knowledge, experience, and resources to enhance telehealth utilization." Billing's specific component of this project involved writing a manuscript about the experiences of three OT students at the VA using telehealth as a primary platform for their fieldwork experience. Billings is excited to be able to share this project nationally to OTs in the VA system and disseminate findings and experiences across the country.

Submitted on: Jan. 4