FLC & CU Partnership

Visiting Assistant Professors and CU@FLC Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows

This collaborative program between CU Boulder and Fort Lewis College looks to improve teaching across the state by offering postdoctoral teaching fellowships and visiting assistant professorships to recognized newly graduated PhD students.

2022-23

Shannon McKnight

Psychology and Neuroscience

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McKnight completed her Ph.D. in 2022 under the supervision of Albert Kim. Her research is centered on the intersection between the cognitive neuroscience of reading and individual differences in cognitive skills. Currently, this research involves the analysis of over 400 sets of electroencephalographic (EEG) data alongside a battery of behavioral assessments to identify neural markers associated with reading comprehension, working memory, executive function and other language related skills. In addition, she is interested in research that models naturalistic reading environments, combining self-paced reading with online neural measurements.

McKnight, S.M., Bell-Souder, D., Gilley, P., Miyake, A., & Kim, A. (2021, March 4-6). Oscillatory dynamics of complex dependency processing reveal unique roles for attention and working memory mechanisms [Online Poster Talk]. 34th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Hosted by University of Pennsylvania, Online due to COVID-19 https://tinyurl.com/CUNY2021abstract

McKnight, S.M., Kim, A. (2019, March 29-31). Capturing continuous effects of context during naturalistic text reading [Conference presentation]. 32nd CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Boulder, CO. https://tinyurl.com/cuny2019abstract

McKnight, S.M., Bell-Souder, D., Miyake, A., Kim, A. (2018, March 15-17). Individual differences in language knowledge and the syntactic processing P600 [Conference Presentation]. 31st CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Davis CA. https://tinyurl.com/cuny2018talk

Micah A. Pyles

Sociology

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Micah A. Pyles is an enthusiastic teacher, researcher and mentor passionate about working with students at the collegiate level. His dissertation research examined processes of bodily commodification as natural capital, with a particular focus on life science bioproduction and the industry’s increasing use of structurally disadvantaged human bodies as sources of commodifiable value.

His teaching and research meet at the intersection of environmental sociology, political economy, international development and race-ethnicity. He has taught a broad range of courses, each designed to illuminate the multitude of ways in which systems of structural privilege, disadvantage and oppression operate in students’ everyday lives.

Erich Riesen

Philosophy

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I recently received my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. My work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, specifically on whether or not the military ought to continue developing autonomous weapons. I enjoy teaching courses on controversial topics and new technologies. I am excited to teach a course in Fort Lewis' philosophy department next spring titled "Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness, and Language."

2021-22

Michael Drake

Environmental Studies

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I am a Korean-American ecologist that grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I have a lifelong love of wildlife which has guided my career and research towards investigating pressing issues in contemporary conservation. I view wildlife conservation as a holistic issue, involving governance and social understanding just as much as biological insight. As such, I strive to merge socio-economic and ecological frameworks into my teaching and research.

Previously, I completed my PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021, where my dissertation work focused on community-based conservation in Southern Africa, and my MS at North Carolina State University in 2016, where I studied human perceptions of coyotes in urban areas. Before entering graduate school, I spent time working in Yosemite National Park, completed my BA at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent time as a Fulbright research fellow in Namibia. Outside of the classroom, I enjoy rock climbing, birding and wildlife photography, all of which afford me more time to think about the connections between humans and wildlife.

Yisrael Lattke

Chemistry

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Chemistry is a wonderful sandbox for developing intuition for scientific investigation. As an instructor I especially like to create opportunities for my students to model systems, create hypotheses, and come to conclusions on their own. I find that using multiple representations to describe or introduce a topic can be effective for engaging different types of learners, and tend to steer away from strictly equation-based teaching. It is my objective to assist students in becoming participatory learners, and part of that means that my own classroom needs to be a comfortable place to ask questions when confusion arises. I have struggled a fair amount in my own chemical education and appreciate that it can mean a lot of work for a student, and so I strive to make that work rewarding.

Something that is very important to me is increasing the participation and retention of students from historically underrepresented groups in STEM. At CU Boulder I have acted as a mentor for the SMART program and the graduate-student-led group STEM Routes, which are both initiatives aimed at achieving this goal.

Outside of science and teaching I like cooking, watching movies, and playing all sorts of video games.

Mark Boespflug

Philosophy

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Mark completed his Ph.D. in philosophy under the supervision of Robert Pasnau. Mark's work focuses on the history of epistemology and its intersection with philosophy of religion. His interests in epistemology regard belief control, epistemic or doxastic obligations, rationality, testimony, the social epistemology of science, and the nature and status of faith. I also have interests in philosophy of science, medieval philosophy and logic. He is currently working on two major projects. The first is a treatment of John Locke's theory of rational probable belief. The second concerns the role of faith in the social epistemology of science.

2020-21

Rebecca Schneider

Saeed Khalili