Month: January 2015

Dr. Julio Rivera Professor of Marketing, Carthage College

Dr. Julio Rivera is Professor of Management, Marketing and Geography at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  He is the immediate Past President of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR).   At Carthage he served as provost, dean of students, chair of the Geography department, and the director of the geographic information science (GIS) laboratory.  He has been a continual advocate for the advancement of undergraduate research in the Social Sciences, Humanities and Fine Arts.  His research has focused on the application of GIS to problems in business, and urban planning.  He has worked at the Global Institute for Sustainability at Arizona State University examining trends in the development of the urban fringe in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Rivera has directed over 100 undergraduate student senior thesis projects, many of which were presented at regional and national conferences. He continues to serve as a consultant to both government and business including Snap-on Tools, Racine County Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Racine Harbor Commission, and the Center for Advanced Technology and Innovation. Rivera is a member of the Association of American Geographers, National Council on Geographic Education, and the Council on Undergraduate Research. He is the recipient of the 2002 Carthage College Distinguished Teaching Award. Rivera earned his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, his B.A. in Journalism and Theology at Marquette University, and M.A. in Higher Education and Student Affairs at The Ohio State University.  He can be reached at [email protected]

Dr. Herb Childress, Boston Architectural College

Herb Childress is the Dean of Research and Assessment at the Boston Architectural College, a professional school with undergraduate and master’s degrees in several spatial design disciplines.  He came to the BAC in 2006 as their Director of Liberal Education, and was made Dean in 2009, where he has helped to coordinate a whole-College curricular reform and developed important educational assessment tools that make use of existing data to provide significant pedagogical direction. Prior to the BAC, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the University Writing Program at Duke University, where he taught first-year writing and led two major assessment projects of the effectiveness of the writing curriculum.  He has also worked in professional design practice, and as a researcher in K-12 school reform with the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools.

Since 2003, he has been a leader with the Council on Undergraduate Research.  He was a member of the Executive Board for four years, helped to organize the 2008, 2010, and 2012 national conferences, was part of the negotiating and planning team for the merger of CUR and NCUR (the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research, a student conference of 2500 undergraduate researchers), and has facilitated at eight CUR professional development workshops. He has worked as a consultant to colleges on educational assessment, on research and proposal writing for early-career faculty, on using the local environment as a curricular focus, and on facilities master planning and capital-campaign fundraising.  He and his wife Nora Rubinstein, an environmental psychologist, operate a consulting company called Place/Space Associates, which focuses on community development, qualitative research, and local-learning curricula.

He is committed to an interdisciplinary scholarship, and has published in architecture, adolescence, cultural geography, education, and qualitative research ethics.  His first book, Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy, shows the ways in which American suburban physical environments of home, school and community hinder the social, emotional and educational growth of teenagers.  His second book, The House of Ennui, is a particular examination of one 22-year old and the ways in which he was attempting to craft a satisfying adult life without models of adult living that he found appealing and trustworthy.  Through that examination, he raised important and difficult questions about whether contemporary adult life is worth emulation at all