The Academic Minute for 2026.02.16-2026.02.20
Monday
Andrea Luangrath – University of Iowa
Silver Medalists Appear Less Happy Than Bronze Medalists
Andrea Luangrath is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in Marketing in the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. She received her Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Andrea’s research investigates how sensory and nonverbal cues influence consumer attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, among others.
Tuesday
Jesse Ellis – North Carolina State University
The Moral Roots of Financial Misconduct
Jesse Ellis is the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished Professor of Finance at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. His research explores financial advisor behavior, institutional investing, and the cultural and psychological foundations of financial decision-making. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including The Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science.
Wednesday
Vered Shwartz – University of British Columbia
How Persuasive is AI?
Vered Shwartz is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and the author of “Lost in Automatic Translation: Navigating Life in English in the Age of Language Technologies”. Her research interests focus on natural language processing, with the fundamental goal of building models capable of human-level understanding of natural language.
Thursday
Rin Yoon – University of Iowa
Let Me Show You to Your Room
Rin Yoon is assistant professor of marketing at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. She studies consumer psychology at the moment of transaction, with the goal of helping organizations design more effective incentives and payment environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, a B.A. in Communication Studies, with a minor in Statistics, from UCLA, and an M.S. in Marketing from Korea University Business School.
Friday
Benjamin Katz – Virginia Tech
Ultra-Processed Foods and Dementia Risk
Ben Katz, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor within the Department of Human Development and Family Science and the Director of the Cognitive Aging and Translational Science Laboratory at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the development of executive function throughout the lifespan. Executive function refers to a broad set of cognitive skills, including working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, that are closely linked to our abilities to learn, reason, think and decide.