Karabi Bezboruah, Ph.D., is the Associate Dean of Faculty Success and Research in the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs (CAPPA) at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is a Professor in the Department of Public Affairs and Planning and the Director of Ph.D. programs (Public Administration and Urban Planning) at CAPPA. Dr. Bezboruah teaches courses in public administration, nonprofit management, organizational behavior, and public policy. She applies service-learning pedagogy in her courses and has worked with community organizations, nonprofits, and local government agencies. She has won multiple teaching awards and was inducted as a member of the UTA Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2022. Her research is on organizational behavior, which includes cross-sector collaboration, strategic management, community development, organizational effectiveness, and gender and leadership in nonprofit management. Her work is at the intersection of public policies and organizational behavior, and she received over $2.8 million in grants (from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Transportation, and philanthropic foundation grants) to pursue research in these areas.

Dr. Bezboruah studies organization and community sustainability through policy analysis, participatory research, advocacy, capacity building, collaborations, and networks. Her work has been published in Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Cities, Administration & Society, Environmental Science & Policy, Public Works Management & Policy, Journal of Philanthropy & Marketing, Development in Practice, Journal of Community Practice, Health Informatics, and the Journal of Health Organization and Management, among others. Her work involves interdisciplinary collaborations in the areas of public health, water, transportation, and community revitalization. Dr. Bezboruah has facilitated the creation of strategic and community redevelopment plans through citizen engagement for local governments, community organizations, and nonprofit arts organizations in Texas.

Dr. Bezboruah is active in service to the department, college, and university, as well as serves on the boards of multiple professional associations within the disciplines of public administration and nonprofit management. She also advises the CAPPA doctoral student organization and mentors several tenure-track faculty members.

Todd Castoe has over 20 years of experience in the field of genomics, with over 150 publications. His work has been cited over 12,000 times and he has an h-index of 53, an i10 index of 110, and 30 papers cited 100 times or more. He has given over 70 invited seminars and coauthored over 200 scientific talks and presentations worldwide. He has been awarded over $7,900,000 in funding, including funding from the NIH, NSF, and multiple corporate sponsors. He has mentored 18 graduate students and four postdoctoral fellows, and hosted 44 short-term visiting scientists, two long-term visiting scientists and a Fulbright Scholar. He has held the Dye Endowed Professorship for Innovative Biosciences at UTA since 2017. In the past, he has served as Associate Director for two genome centers, first at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and later at UTA’s North Texas Genome Center (NTGC). He is currently serving as the Associate Dean for Research and Development for the College of Science.

The Castoe laboratory studies genome biology and evolutionary genomics using integrative approaches and vertebrates and invertebrate parasites as model systems. Research in the laboratory addresses fundamental questions in genome biology and evolution including how novel gene regulatory networks arise and co-opt existing signaling pathways, how single-cell heterogeneity manifests in organism-level phenotypes, how vertebrates control regenerative growth, how multiple synergistic processes shape genome structure and function, and how synergistic evolutionary processes operating on the genome result in speciation. These basic questions typically leverage snakes as model systems because they possess many extreme and unique phenotypic and genomic characteristics that make them powerful models for such comparative studies. Additional work in the laboratory on schistosome parasites addresses more applied questions about how control efforts may drive distinct patterns of parasite transmission and natural selection (including drug resistance). The lab also works collaboratively on a diversity of other topics, including COVID evolution, optimization of antibiotic compounds, cell signaling pathways, and epigenomics of plasticity. Thus, work in the laboratory addresses a diversity of questions, some of which have strong relevance to human biology and human health, while other questions target broader biological understanding of how genomes function, how genomes evolve, and how modifications to regulatory networks manifest in phenotypic variation. Research in the lab involves both the generation and integrated computational analysis of diverse ‘omic’-scale datasets (including large population genomic datasets, functional genomics datasets, and single-cell omic datasets), development of new statistical approaches to interpret ‘omic’ data, and often lead to the development of new theory and new computational approaches that have broad relevance beyond our own research.

Dr. Rebecca E. Deen is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington. She has published many articles on women in the political process, the U.S. presidency, and effective pedagogy in journals such as Women & Politics, State and Local Government Review, Congress & the Presidency and Judicature. Current research includes an exploration of the relationship among civic engagement, local policy and political recruitment, as well as an examination of the politics of school-related volunteer organizations and their role in educational policy. She is also the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including the UT Board of Regents Outstanding Teaching Award.

Cory Forbes is Chair, Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction, Fenton Wayne Robnett Endowed Professor of Science Education, and Director of the STEM Education Research Collaboratorium and Resource Center in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Arlington. Forbes holds a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and M.S. in Science Education from the University of Kansas and M.S. in Natural Resources and Ph.D. in Science Education from the University of Michigan. His teaching and research efforts focus on STEM education in K-12 and undergraduate STEM contexts. He directs multiple externally-funded projects involving STEM curriculum development, assessment design and testing, professional development for K-12 STEM teachers, and classroom-based research on STEM teaching and learning that are based in regional, national, and international partnerships with education researchers, STEM faculty, K-12 teachers, and stakeholders. Forbes is a NARST Early Career Research Awardee and Fulbright Faculty Scholar.