The academic mission of DePaul University is to serve as an incubator and repository of knowledge and to transfer that knowledge between faculty and students as well as between university and society. Fulfilling that mission places research at the center of the university life.  DePaul promotes faculty research work as public intellectuals and its teacher-scholar model allows faculty to bring cutting-edge and societally impactful ideas and projects into their classrooms.

Join us for a panel style discussion about the teacher-scholar model with two DePaul recipients of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award and one recipient of the DePaul Spirit of Inquiry award. The panelists will share their strategies and experiences for integrating teaching and research while keeping abreast with the latest advancements in their fields.

Bala Chaudhary is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Studies at DePaul University. Research in her lab examines plant-soil-microbial ecology to address landscape-scale questions in natural and managed ecosystems from deserts to rain forests to cities. In 2020, Dr. Chaudhary received the Early Career Motivator Award by the Association for Women in Science and the Woman of Spirit and Action Award for her work on promoting antiracism in STEM. She has almost 30 peer-reviewed publications and, in 2019, was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study fungal dispersal as well as ways to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the environmental sciences.

Blair Davis is an Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. He teaches courses in film, media and comics studies, and his books include The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema (Rutgers UP, 2012), Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page (Rutgers UP, 2017), Comic Book Movies (Rutgers UP, 2018) and Of Women and Comics (University of Texas press, 2021). He has written about comics and pop culture for USA Today, The Washington Post and Ms. Magazine and has comics-related essays in numerous anthologies, including Comics and Pop Culture (2019), Working Class Comic Book Heroes (2018) and the Eisner-Award-winning The Blacker the Ink (2015). Dr. Davis serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Inks, for which he edited a roundtable on comics and methodology in its inaugural issue, and has served on the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society. He has been interviewed about comics and pop culture for AMC, ABC-7, CBC, The Chicago Tribune, PRI, Reel Chicago and Voice of America. In 2017, he won DePaul University’s Spirit of Inquiry award for excellence in research.

Tanu Malik is an assistant professor in the School of Computing and directs the Data Systems and Optimization Lab. Her research interests span topics in database systems, data provenance, distributed systems, and cyber-infrastructure for scientific data management. Her group is currently developing methods and systems for improving conduct of reproducible science in computational and data science disciplines. Dr. Malik received the 2019 NSF CAREER award for her work on computational reproducibility. She is also chosen as a 2019 Fellow for Better Scientific Software.

Dr. Malik has actively collaborated with scientists across several institutions. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Sloan Foundation, and the Bloomberg Foundation.

Daniela Stan Raicu is the Associate Provost for Research and Professor of Computing in the College of Computing and Digital Media. She is also the Founding Director of the DePaul Center for Data Science and a co-director of the Medical Informatics Lab and Intelligent Multimedia Processing Lab. As an associate provost, she serves as DePaul’s chief research officer and is responsible for fostering research collaborations across the campus, overseeing faculty research support, the pursuit and management of external grant funding, as well as research integrity and protection, including patents and intellectual property transfer.

For over 20 years, Dr. Raicu has conducted research in biomedical and health informatics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, medical imaging and computer vision. She has been successful in developing internationally recognized research programs, has authored more than 150 journal and conference papers, and has secured nearly $4.5 million in funding from a variety of internal and external sources, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Education, Department of Energy and the McArthur Foundation. She has mentored over 200 graduate and undergraduate students, including students participating in research through the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program.

Dr. Raicu is a recipient of the DePaul Excellence in Teaching Award received in 2008, Spirit of Inquiry Award in 2010, and a St. Louise de Marillac Women of Spirit & Action Award in 2016. Dr. Raicu also received an IBM Faculty Innovation Award in 2010. Since 2008 Dr. Raicu has been on the Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) Honor Society in Computing and Information Disciplines Executive Council overseeing hundreds of UPE Chapters across the world and served as its President between 2012 and 2014.