Julia Cen Chen (’18 PhD, Public Health) is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. Her research focuses on flavored tobacco use, and perceptions among vulnerable populations such as youth, young adults, and racial and ethnic minorities. Julia’s doctoral dissertation involved investigating the predictors, and perceptions of flavored e-cigarette use among young adults as well as local flavored e-cigarette sales restrictions in the U.S. She hopes her research will help inform national/local regulations, and public health programs aimed at reducing the use of flavored tobacco products among vulnerable groups. She currently lives in College Park, MD, with her husband, young son, and their dog. Julia enjoys long-distance running, biking, movies, music, and arts and crafts.
Megan C. Masters ('18 PhD, Program Evaluation and Assessment) is the Director of Academic Technology Experience within UMD's own Division of Information Technology. In this position, Megan provides leadership, guidance, and management of enterprise-wide initiatives related to student, faculty, and staff experiences with academic technology. She uses a quantitative approach to provide evidence-based insights, guidance, and recommendations concerning the use and efficacy of DIT systems and services. Her research interests include: program evaluation and assessment, impact assessment, assessment of student learning, changes in proficiency, and skill development over time, the impact of training on job performance and criterion test scores, and the validity of self-assessment instruments.
Taylor B. Rogers ('18 MPH, Public Health) earned her B.S. in Community Health in 2015, after working for Baltimore County Health Department for about a year. She recently relocated to Los Angeles, California to pursue doctoral studies in Health Policy and Management from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She aspires to become a tenure-track professor, and in that role, contribute to the elimination of health disparities by producing research that will influence health and public policies. Her research interests include the impact of structural racism on health and healthcare quality, and racial and gender disparities of human papillomavirus vaccine uptake.
David Sprecher ('63 PhD, Mathematics) is Professor Emeritus with the University of California, Santa Barbara. He retired in 1993 after serving 15 years as Dean and Provost. David's professional accomplishments include six mathematics books, the most recent published in 2017 entitled From Algebra to Computational Algorithms (Docent Press). He has also written four novels and an autobiography published on Amazon, and four photography books. David has had half a dozen exhibitions of his photography in California and Canada. He is currently working on two papers in the area of neural networks and computational algorithms, and possibly a book with a collaborator.