Conversationalist Bios
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Ki-Joon Back holds a B.S./ M.S. in hotel administration from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Ph.D. in hotel, restaurant, and institution management from The Pennsylvania State University. He is a co-guest editor of Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing–Gambling Issue and Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes–Gambling Themes. He has industry experience in casinos in Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Perth, and Seoul. Back is a three-time recipient of the International Council on Hotel and Restaurant and Institutional Education's Best Paper Awards, as well as a recipient of 13 other research and teaching awards.
Michelle Belco (’10, ’13) is an attorney and political science lecturer in the Honors College at the University of Houston. Her research explores the president's use of executive orders, proclamations, memoranda, and regulatory policy. Belco’s work illustrates how the president's power is checked and balanced both within the executive branch and by Congress. Presidents have the power to act first, but in turn, presidents must rely on Congress to enact their policy and the bureaucracy to implement it.
Dr. Belco’s research has been published in political science journals and a book coauthored with Brandon Rottinghaus, The Dual Executive: Unilateral Orders in a Separated and Shared Power System (Stanford University Press). She holds a doctorate from the University of Houston and J.D. from South Texas College of Law. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she practiced environmental and administrative law and specialized in working with governments, negotiated agreements, and regulation.
Laura Bland teaches the Human Situation course as well as courses for the Medicine & Society and Phronêsis minors. She has written on the history of Early Modern science, religion, and magic and has taught courses on monsters in scientific thought, food history, the history of astronomy and physics, ancient science, and the Scientific Revolution. Before joining the Honors faculty in 2017, she taught Great Books at the University of Notre Dame, where she received her doctorate in the history and philosophy of science program. She graduated from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin.
Jeffrey Church is a political theorist whose research area is the history of modern political thought, with particular interest in Continental thought from Jean-Jacques Rousseau through Friedrich Nietzsche. His work examines the reflections of past philosophers on freedom, individuality, education, and culture, and shows how these reflections can inform contemporary liberal and democratic theory. He also teaches and writes about the value of literature and film to help us understand crucial political problems.
Martin Cominsky (’80) serves as the CEO and President of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston. Martin is responsible for directing the IM’s efforts to bring Houston’s diverse community together for dialogue and service.
Previous to his work at Interfaith Ministries, Martin served as the Director of the Southwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League, which is headquartered in Houston. Martin oversaw the League’s efforts to combat prejudice, hate and anti-Semitism in this dynamic region.
At the ADL, Martin developed the school-focused No Place for Hate® program, which now engages and recognizes more than 350 schools in the region in the effort to create K-12 campuses that emphasize respect for diversity and inclusion. Martin also created the Community of Respect™ program which encourages businesses, houses of worship and organizations to build respectful work and faith environments in the same way that schools are recognized as No Place for Hate®.
Prior to joining the ADL in 1999, Martin founded the SERVE HOUSTON YOUTH CORPS, which was the AmeriCorps program that recruited high school graduates to serve as tutors and mentors to students in under-resourced schools.
Previously, Martin served as the national director of the Business Volunteers for the Arts program, headquartered in New York City, bringing together partnerships of corporate executives with nonprofit arts organizations. Martin also served as Assistant to the President of the University of Houston.
Martin has a B.A. from the University of Houston in Journalism, graduating with membership in the UH Honors College, and earned his M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University. He is married and is the proud father of twins.
Aaron Corsi is a faculty member in the University of Houston Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management. His expertise and research interests include brewing science, viticulture, enology, and distillation science. Corsi is co-founder and master brewer of 8th Wonder Brewery. He has restaurant experience in both the United States and Europe, including positions as a general manager for Food Maker, Inc. and managing partner of Café Metro in Copenhagen, Denmark. Aaron is a member of the American Society of Brewing Chemists and the American Chemical Society, and he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in molecular and environmental plant science at Texas A&M University.
Andrew Davis is Founding Dean of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston. A music theorist by training, he is the author of two books on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style (2010), and Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narrative in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms (2017). As Dean, his work has focused on interdisciplinary training in the curriculum and on establishing the arts as a leading force for social engagement and community impact. He holds the Ph.D. in music theory from Indiana University, was appointed to the University of Houston faculty in 2003, holds the Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair—and has been a whisky enthusiast (and a conversationalist on this topic for the Great Conversation) for years.
Jeff Dodd (’76, ’79) has practiced law for forty years in Houston, though for a good portion of his career, he was more of a resident of United Airlines (and its predecessor). He is currently a partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth, LLP. His connections to UH root deep: he received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Houston (B.A. magna cum laude, 1976; JD summa cum laude, 1979), he met his long-suffering wife at the UH Law Center (who received her JD in 1979; her father also graduated from the UH Law School), his daughter also received her JD from UH Law Center (three generations of lawyers!), and he is and has been a member of the Honors College Advisory Board and has been a member and President of the UH Law Foundation. He has taught courses at UH, both in the Political Science Department and at the Law Center, and he was a lecturer at Beijing Normal University. In addition to being the author of several law review articles or contributions to books relating to the law, he is the author or co-author of four treatises on the law--Drafting Effective Contracts, Modern Licensing Law, Information Law and The Law of Computer Technology. As you can tell from the titles, none are humorous (or at least intentionally so); but all started with Ray Nimmer, the late dean of the UH Law Center, and teacher, then friend and colleague/co-author for forty years. Jeff has given lectures and talks all over the place. You can read more about him and his career at https://www.huntonak.com/en/people/jeff-dodd.html.
Doug Erwing (’93, ’05) is an Honors College professor of history who, when he isn't teaching about American history, can be found in Florence exploring his favorite city and showing people its notable and hidden treasures on walking tours. Along the way he was awarded a Mellon Fellowship, he was a management consultant, and he practiced real estate law and was corporate counsel for a number of start-ups. He taught as a visiting professor of law and history at a university in Beijing for a year before coming to the Honors College. He serves on a number of boards, including the Midtown Redevelopment Board, focusing on urban development in Houston.
Ted Estess was the leader of Honors education at the University of Houston for thirty-one years, first as director of the Honors Program, and then, in 1993, as founding dean of the Honors College. He is a proud recipient of the University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award. Though he left the deanship in August of 2008, Estess remains a member of the Honors College faculty and a professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. In Honors, he also holds the Jane Morin Cizik Chair. He has published a book on Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel and a number of articles on various writers and topics. Most recently, he has been writing and publishing non-fiction life stories—his collections The Cream Pitcher: Mississippi Stories, Be Well: Reflections on Graduating from College, and Fishing Spirit Lake. Dr. Estess’ teaching of Honors classes has concentrated in the humanities, especially in a yearlong, ten-hour, team-taught course required of all Honors students at the University of Houston entitled The Human Situation. He also has taught upper-level English Honors seminars dealing with contemporary American fiction. (Ph.D., Syracuse University)
Irene Guenther is a history professor with specializations in modern American and European history. She received her doctorate in history from the University of Texas in 2001. Her teaching interests include genocide and human rights, comparative European home fronts during the Second World War, and U.S. history from the Civil War to the present. She has published on the Nazi takeover of the German-Jewish fashion industry; the hotly contested politics of women’s clothing in the four occupied zones of Germany after World War II; Magical Realism from 1920s German art to 1940s Latin American literature; and the anti-war art of the second-generation German Expressionists. Her first book, Nazi ‘Chic’? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich, won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Award for ‘best fashion history book’ of the year and the Sierra Prize, given by the Western Association of Women Historians. Her newest publication, Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier’s Testimony of the Great War, was published in November 2018. She has received the Ross Lence Teaching Award, the Wong Student Engagement Award, and the UH Provost’s Teaching Excellence Award.
Terry Hallmark is a faculty member in the Honors College at the University of Houston, where he teaches the Human Situation sequence, along with courses in ancient, medieval, and early modern political philosophy, American political thought, American foreign policy, and energy studies. His current research is focused on the political rhetoric and writings of Will Rogers. Prior to his appointment in the Honors College, Hallmark worked in the international oil and gas industry, where he served for more than 30 years as a political risk analyst. He has been an advisor to international oil exploration and service companies, financial institutions, and governmental agencies, including the World Bank, U.S. Department of Defense, and members of the intelligence community. He is the Honors College coordinator for the minor in Energy and Sustainability Studies.
Brandon Lamson (’10) is a poet and a meditation instructor who has been teaching various mindfulness practices for the past ten years. He is versed in the Soto Zen tradition, and has trained at several monasteries including the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Big Sur and the Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York.
Alison Leland’s work and passion is teaching Political Science. She is the 2019 winner of the University’s Steele Teaching Award. Her teaching focuses on law, politics and the Constitution. Professor Leland leads the Honors College 3+3 Law/ Dual Degree Program, an internship with the Smithsonian Institute and a partnership with the Osgood Center for International Affairs in Washington, D.C.
A graduate of Spelman College and the Georgetown University Law Center, she serves as a trustee for the Menil Museum and the boards of the Texas Defenders Service, which represents indigent death row inmates on their final appeals and the Leland Kibbutzim Internship Foundation, among others. Professor Leland worked in investment banking with a Wall Street firm prior to joining the University.
Christine LeVeaux-Haley is a political science professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston. She received her B.A. from Spelman College in Atlanta and her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Her teaching and research interests include legislative politics, black politics, and political behavior. LeVeaux-Haley has fused these research areas together, focusing much of her attention on minority representation in Congress and black electoral politics. She is also a political commentator for local and national news outlets, including CNN. Her work appears in the Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, and an edited volume titled Eye of the Storm: The South in an Era of Change.
Robert Liddell (’96, ’05) and Aaron Reynolds (’06) watched the final season of The Sopranos together in the mid-2000s, and have since then continued to get together virtually every Sunday night to watch, debate, and finish far too many landmark television series to list here. In those early days, Robert also earned his M.F.A. from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, while Aaron later received his PhD from the same program. Both have now taught at the University of Houston for nearly twenty years, as well as in the greater Houston area in a variety of capacities, including Writers In The Schools and Inprint writing workshops for Aaron, and continuing education courses at Rice University for Robert. Aaron is currently an academic advisor and instructor at the Honors College for the Medicine & Society and Creative Work programs, while Robert teaches the Honors College’s signature Human Situation course as well as Medicine & Society courses.
Stuart Long is the associate dean of the Office of Undergraduate Research and the Honors College and is the academic advisor for all Honors students majoring in electrical and computer engineering. Additionally, Dr. Long regularly teaches the Honors section of the undergraduate introductory course in applied electromagnetic waves. He has been a research mentor to over 90 undergraduate students during his 44-year career at the University of Houston. He holds a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University, and his research involves antenna design, wireless communications, and applied electromagnetics.
Jost Lunstroth studied at the UH Hotel & Restaurant School in the late 70's and had a long career in the restaurant industry, ending in 1988 after seven years as manager of Tony's Restaurant. In 20005, he started a business building custom wine storage and in 2009, founded Nos Caves Vin, the wine storage company. He currently serves on the Honors College Advisory Board.
Gerald McElvy (’75) retired after a distinguished 33-year career with Exxon Mobil Corporation. A rapid rise to the executive ranks was followed by assignments as the Finance Director of Esso Australia, ExxonMobil’s Upstream Controller, and General Auditor of the Corporation. He also served nearly 6 years as president of the Exxon Mobil Foundation and focused on improving math and science education, fighting malaria and other infectious diseases, and empowering women and girls in developing countries. Notable programs included construction of more than 20 primary schools in Angola and expansion of the ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp from 1 to 30 university campuses.
Mr. McElvy was appointed to the University of Houston System Board of Regents in 2015 by Governor Greg Abbott and currently serves as Vice-Chairman. For fiscal year 2019-20, he serves as Chairman of the Finance and Administration Committee, and is a Member of the Facilities and Construction and Audit Committees.
William Monroe is professor of English and dean of the Honors College at the University of Houston. His book Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation was selected as an outstanding academic book of the year by Choice magazine and nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa/Christian Gauss Award. His other publications include the play Primary Care, which deals with personhood issues related to Alzheimer’s Disease, and articles on T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Willa Cather. He also publishes in the interdisciplinary field of literature and medicine and contributes to the scholarship of teaching, including a forthcoming essay on the “old school” methods of Wayne Booth, his mentor at Chicago. He teaches honors courses in literature and medicine and contemporary American fiction, and in 2004 the University of Houston awarded him its Teaching Excellence Award. He directs The Common Ground Teachers Institute and founded the Medicine & Society Program at Houston. He is currently at work on The Vocation of Affliction: Flannery O’Connor and American Mastery.
Iain Morrisson is an Associate Instructional Professor of Philosophy in the Honors College. He works largely in the history of ethics with a focus on Kant and Nietzsche. He has published more than 15 journal articles on Kant and Nietzsche and a book on Kant, Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action. He has been team leader of Alpha in the Human Situation course since 2005.
Dr. Virginia A. Moyer, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Adjunct Professor of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, having recently retired as the Vice President for Maintenance of Certification and Quality at the American Board of Pediatrics. She graduated from Rice University and from Baylor College of Medicine. She trained in Pediatrics at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC and subsequently joined the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine and of the University of Texas at Houston. Dr. Moyer is a former member (2002-2008) and chair (2011-2014) of the US Preventive Services Task Force, and is the former Associate Editor of the journal Pediatrics. She has extensive expertise in evidence-based medicine, guideline development, health care quality, and patient safety, and has authored more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Dr. Moyer was the first Chief Quality Officer for Medicine at Texas Children's Hospital. In her previous role as Associate Director of the Center for Clinical Research and Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Texas-Houston, she co-directed the Master’s Degree program in Clinical Research that was a part of the K30 Clinical Research Curriculum Program. Dr. Moyer also serves as a liaison member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Quality Improvement and Patient Safety. Among her many awards are the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award, being named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year/People Who Mattered” in 2011, and being named a Rice University Alumni Laureate in 2016.
Richard Murray is a political science professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston. The Richard Murray Endowed Scholarship was established in 2008, honoring his service to the Houston community and his 40 years of teaching and research at UH. Murray’s research interests include political parties and elections, political interest groups, urban politics, and state and local electoral politics. He has worked on several redistricting projects for local governments, and has been an election analyst for KTRK-TV Houston 13. He is frequently quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications.
Mike Pede (’89) became the president and CEO of the University of Houston Alumni Association in March 2010. He graduated from UH's Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management and also served as Shasta, the university's mascot. Prior to starting his role with the UHAA, Pede was the director of sales for Live Nation's North American Music Division and he also serves as partner and founder of GameDay Consultants, LLC, an event marketing and sponsorship consulting firm. He also spent three years as general manager, chief operating officer and minority owner of the Bay Area Toros minor league baseball team. All of these experiences allowed Pede to form relationships with local and national corporations and community partners.Not only did Pede attend school at UH but his professional career has roots here as well, having spent six years as director of marketing for the university's athletics department.
Dan Price is a faculty member in the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author of Touching Difficulty: Sacred Form from Plato to Derrida, as well as many others. His Ph.D. is in 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, and he directs a number of interdisciplinary projects on community health and data. Continuing projects involve air quality and asthma, and a new initiative for creating a network of community health workers who can sustain a data-driven culture of health in communities.
David Rainbow is a professor at the Honors College, where he teaches Russian history and “The Human Situation.” Before coming to Houston in 2015, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and a writer-in-residence at New York University's Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. He holds a Ph.D. in modern European history from New York University (2013). Before becoming a historian, Dr. Rainbow worked aboard a ship on the Pacific and on a cattle ranch in Western North Dakota. He has also lived in Russia and Siberia several times.
Ben Rayder is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Honors College and the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Major Awards. Prior to joining the Office of Undergraduate Research and Major Awards in 2017, he worked as the Assistant Director in the Fellowships Office at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Ben holds a doctorate in Comparative Politics from the University of Bamberg and a master’s in Modern European Studies from the University College London. He earned a bachelor’s in Political Science and German from the College of the Holy Cross. In addition to his academic interests, Ben is an avid beer connoisseur who taught a course to undergraduates about the history and culture of beer while at Drexel. He also had the privilege of completing his doctorate in the region of Germany with the highest density of breweries in the world, many of which he frequented. He despises IPAs.
Dave Shattuck (aka Dr. Dave), Ph.D., Duke Univ., was born at a very young age in upstate New York. Based on his research in medical ultrasonic imaging, and on his assists/game average, he was hired by the University of Houston in 1982. He has since earned 20 separate teaching awards, culminating in the UH Career Teaching Award in 2013. He is the reigning faculty slide-rule champion and the faculty 3-point shooting champion. In other achievements, he hit .097 in Little League, earning a trophy for “Conspicuous Ineptitude”. His goal is to win the lifetime teaching award, twice.
Rita Sirrieh (’10) is an instructional faculty member in The Honors College. Rita is a molecular biochemist who studied the structure and function of receptors involved in neuronal signaling. She teaches Honors Introductory Biology, Cell Biology, and Science Communication. Rita also serves as the Associate Director of the Energy and Sustainability minor. Rita is a graduate of The Honors College at the University of Houston with a bachelor's in Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences. She received her doctorate in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston.
Tamler Sommers is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston with a joint appointment in the Honors College. He received his PhD at Duke University. Tamler is the author of several books, including Why Honor Matters (Basic Books 2018). Along with David Pizarro (psychology Cornell) he is the host of the popular Very Bad Wizards podcast on issues in science and ethics. The podcast averages over 200,000 downloads per episode and has featured guests such as Paul Bloom, Laurie Santos, Robert Wright, and Sam Harris.
Dr. Stephen Spann, M.D a family physician leader, educator and researcher, is the Founding Dean of the University of Houston College of Medicine. Dr. Spann has dedicated his career to improving health and health care around the world by training future health care professionals, contributing to the scientific knowledge base of primary care, leading medical school faculty, physician medical groups and hospital medical staffs, and striving to practice excellent, evidence-based family medicine.
Dr. Spann has been active in the development of the specialty of Family Medicine both in the United States and abroad. He has served as a member of the Commission on Public Health and Scientific Affairs, the Task Force on Clinical Policies, and as member and chair the Commission on Clinical Policies and Research and the Task Force to Enhance Family Practice Research, of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). He served as a member of Task Force 1, and chaired Task Force 6 of the Future of Family Medicine Project, focusing on the development of the New Model of Family Medicine practice, now known as the Patient Centered Medical Home, and the development of financial models to predict its success. He served as the lead consultant to the AAFP planning process to develop a national practice resource center to support the implementation of the New Model, resulting in the development of Transformed, a subsidiary of the AAFP. He has served as a consultant to medical schools, residency programs, ministries of health, and health care delivery systems in many countries, focusing on primary care training program and clinical practice development and implementation.
Dr. Spann served as Chief Medical Officer of Tawam Hospital, a 460-bed tertiary care teaching facility in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, which is managed by Johns Hopkins Medicine International, and as senior advisor on primary care and academic affairs to SEHA, the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, from December 2012 through May 2015. Previously, he served as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas from April 1997 to November 2012. He served as Senior Vice-President and Dean of Clinical Affairs of that institution from November 2008 through September 2012. He was previously Professor and Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas (1990-1997), a member of the faculty and Vice-Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine (1982-1990), and a member of the voluntary clinical teaching faculty of the Department of Family Medicine, Wake Forest Bowman Gray School of Medicine (1979-1982). Prior to entering fulltime academic medicine, Dr. Spann spent four years practicing rural family medicine in Arkansas and North Carolina.
A graduate of Baylor University and Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Spann completed his residency training in Family Medicine at Duke University Medical Center, and received the M.B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Dallas. He and his wife Nancy have two married children and four grandchildren, who live in Texas.
Marina Trninic (’03) received her master's and doctoral degrees in English from Texas A&M University for her work on antebellum American literature, including questions of race and politics in literary representation. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and is interested in its relationship to identity, belonging, and violence. Her interests also include early American literature, American modernism, modern rhetorical theory, and writing and literature pedagogy. Since 2005, she has taught courses in American literature and the humanities as well as composition and technical writing. She has held several positions in academic publishing, including acquisitions and editing, and she currently teaches Human Situation and other courses in the Honors College.
Michael Twa was appointed Dean of the College of Optometry on June 1, 2019. He previously served as a faculty member at the college from 2007 to 2014. From 2014 to 2019, Dr. Twa served as the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Optometry. His undergraduate training in biology was completed at UC San Diego and his clinical doctoral training in optometry was completed at UC Berkeley. He practiced for more than 10 years in the department of ophthalmology at UC San Diego before pursuing a Ph.D. in machine learning, data sciences, and biomedical image analysis at the Ohio State University. Dr. Twa currently serves as a grant reviewer for the NIH/NEI, he is a member of the American Academy of Optonetry Research Committee, and is the current Editor-in-Chief of Optometry and Vision Science.
Daniel Wallace (’16) is a Human Situation professor in the Honors College, and a staff writer for the communications department. He has a master's in Fiction from Columbia University and a doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. A former reporter for The Arizona Republic, Daniel left a career in journalism to pursue graduate studies. Daniel has written for Phoenix New Times, The Arizona Republic, The Villager, Downtown Express, The New Yorker, and others.
Kirk Watson is Founding Dean of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. There, he leads a team that puts creative public policy to work for the world. For three decades, Watson has been immersed in public policy, spanning local and state government in Texas. He was elected mayor of Austin in 1997, where he won praise for bringing different political sides together around transformative environmental and economic development initiatives.
Jonathan Williamson (’95) is Associate Dean for Academic Programs adn Faculty Affairs and the Michael Andrew Little Professor in the Honors College. Dr. Williamson graduated from the UH Honors College magna cum laude ('95), majoring in political science and psychology. He recieved his masters and doctoral degress in Political Science at Emory University.
He returned to UH after having served Chair of the Department of Political Science and Associate Professor of Political Science at Lycoming College in Willamsport, PA. In additon to his academic roles, Williamson was elected to serve for nearly twelve years on the Williamsport City Council, including terms as President, Vice-President, and Chair of the Finance Committee.