Afshin Gharib - Dr. Gharib's research interests include the cognitive and neural mechanisms of associative learning - focusing on the role of attention, timing, and response learning in operant conditioning - and age-related changes in learning and memory. He is particularly interested in the effectiveness of antioxidants in reversing age associated declines in cognition. His teaching interests include Introduction to Psychology, Physiological Psychology, and Statistics and Research Methods.
Denise Lucy - Dr. Denise Lucy is a Professor of Business and Organizational Studies and Executive Director, Institute of Leadership Studies and Emerita Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean at Dominican University of California. Dr. Lucy is an expert in leadership and organizational change. She has 25 years experience in higher education as an educator and executive; first at the University of San Francisco and currently at Dominican University of California since 1993. As a professional manager and as a faculty member, Dr. Lucy’s expertise areas are in leadership and team development, management, strategic planning, facilitative leadership, organizational change systems, and conflict resolution. Her research interests include leadership and team development, community leadership/civic engagement and corporate social responsibility. Dr. Lucy is the Chair of the Marin Education Fund Board of Directors and is co-President of the Pt. San Pedro Coalition. She is a co-founder of Dominican’s Green Task Force and committed to environmental sustainability education.
Oliver Sacks - Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England into a family of physicians and scientists (his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner). He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen's College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist. In July of 2007, he was appointed a Professor of Clinical Neurology and Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was designated Columbia University's first Columbia Artist.
In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter ("A Kind of Alaska") and the Oscar-nominated feature film ("Awakenings") with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.
He has investigated the world of Deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and his most recent book is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf, 2007).
Sacks's work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as "the poet laureate of medicine," and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses his newest book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Dr. Sacks is the author of 10 books, including "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." A leading figure in the field of neurological science, his work was chronicled in the acclaimed film "Awakenings" starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.- Dominican University
Dominican University of California is an independent university of Catholic heritage located 12 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, California. Founded in 1890 by the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, Dominican enjoys a century-long reputation for excellence in scholarship, research, and community outreach. The University offers more than 60 programs of study that reflect the diversity and creativity of the faculty and students. With almost 2,000 graduate and undergraduate students and a student to faculty ratio of 11:1, Dominican is able to successfully blend personal direction associated with smaller schools with the academic resources of a larger university.
