News

Microtalk Title: "Crisis, Culture, and Commodification: Popular Culture and the Making of Modern Asia"

Microtalk Title: "Encountering the Archive: Student Experiential Learning in the BU Archives"

Deborah (Deb) Breen has taught in the CAS Writing Program at several different times since 2006. She has a long-standing interest in material culture, representations of history through cultural institutions and digital platforms, and in community-based memory projects. She has also taught American History, Global History, and Digital Humanities classes at other institutions in Massachusetts and North Carolina.

Deb loves to create experiential, collaborative, and reflective learning experiences for students. She also enjoys developing learning experiences that integrate interpretations of place, whether through archival research, connecting to the campus and outdoors, or in local communities.

Deb has also worked in supporting faculty in their teaching in Australia and at Boston University and looks forward to supporting students in their learning journeys at BU.

Microtalk Title: Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl

Dan DiPiero is a musician, writer, and Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University. His research focuses on the affective connections between aesthetics and politics, with a particular emphasis in U.S. improvised and popular music.

Dan is the author of Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl, forthcoming with the Tracking Pop series at University of Michigan Press. The first academic monograph to seriously consider feminist indie rock from beyond the 1990s, Big Feelings discusses bands like Soccer Mommy, Indigo De Souza, Vagabon, The Ophelias, SASAMI, and other young artists who are remaking what rock music means in the present moment. It also situates these musicians in essential socio-cultural contexts, helping readers understand how the music matters, and looping in the voices of fans along the way.

Dan’s first book, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (University of Michigan Press, 2022), is an interdisciplinary exploration of improvisation as it appears across contexts. Through a series of nested comparisons, it aims to explicate a nuanced understanding of what improvisation is, how it appears, and what it helps us to think about, socially, musically, and politically. Contingent Encounters was a finalist for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Book Prize in 2023.

Microtalk Title: "Practicing Linguistic Justice through the Framework of Ubuntu"

Born and raised in Tamale, Ghana, Dr. Issah considers himself a global citizen. Apart from his native country of Ghana, he has taught English language and literature in Togo and Burkina Faso. Prior to coming to the United States, he was a high school teacher and a university lecturer in Ghana for a combined total of sixteen years. Dr. Issah comes to BU from Wayne State University, where he taught introductory college composition, intermediate writing, technical communication, and rhetorical theory. He is currently working with two other colleagues on an edited collection titled Globalizing Ubuntu in Rhetorical Discourse and Pedagogy: Theory, Methods, and Practice. This book project will be published by the University of South Carolina Press. Dr. Issah is married to Gifty, and together they have three adorable children: Abigail, Zipporah, and Caleb. He likes to spend a lot of time with his family as well as travel and cook.

Microtalk Title: "From space to the deep sea: Remote sensing of surface ocean phytoplankton and the biological carbon pump."

My research aims on characterize surface ocean phytoplankton communities using a combination of in-water samples and remote sensing data on local to regional to global scales. From these surface ocean measurements, I then consider the implications of changing phytoplankton community composition (PCC) for broader biogeochemical cycles (e.g., the biological carbon pump and ocean carbon export) and in response to extreme events like coastal wildfires. My work is highly interdisciplinary and combines oceanographic fieldwork, ocean color remote sensing, and lab work using optical and molecular tools.

Microtalk Title: "Quantum Interconnects: Bringing Quantum Technologies Together".

David Lake is an Assistant Professor in the ECE department at BU, where his research focuses on quantum hardware using photonics and superconducting devices. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Calgary and later held positions as a Postdoctoral Scholar and Research Scientist in the Applied Physics Department at Caltech.

Microtalk Title: Rewriting the story of Alzheimer’s in multicultural populations

Dr. Quiroz is Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Boston University, where she leads the Multicultural Alzheimer’s Prevention & Protection (MAPP) Lab. She previously served as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and spent over a decade at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) directing innovative clinical and research initiatives. Dr. Quiroz earned her MA in cognitive neuroscience and PhD in clinical psychology from Boston University and completed specialized postdoctoral training in neuropsychology and neuroimaging at MGH/Harvard Medical School.

Her research focuses on identifying early cognitive and biological markers of Alzheimer’s disease and uncovering mechanisms that support cognitive resilience and delay dementia onset. For over 20 years, she has studied Colombian families with early-onset autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s disease (ADAD) caused by mutations in the Presenilin-1(PSEN1) gene. With near-complete penetrance and symptom onset in the forties, these families offer a rare opportunity to track the biological trajectory of AD from preclinical to clinical stages—and to investigate protective mechanisms in individuals who remain cognitively resilient despite carrying the mutation.

Dr. Quiroz leads multiple NIH-funded studies, including the Colombia-Boston (COLBOS) biomarker study of autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s disease, the Boston Latino Aging Study (BLAST), and the Healthy Aging and Resilient Brain Study on genetic modifiers of cognitive resilience. She is also a Co-Investigator on the Harvard Aging Brain Study (HABS) and the Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium (ACTC).

Dr. Quiroz’s work has earned national and international recognition, including the NIH Director’s Pioneer Early Independence Award, the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) Early Career Award, and the Alzheimer’s Association’s Inge Grundke-Iqbal Award for most impactful research.

Microtalk Title: "Community as Classroom: The Benefits of Sending Students Into the Field."

Lifestyle journalist Megan Stoessell joined the College of Communication in 2025 after a decade at Johnson & Wales University, most recently in the Media & Communication program. Stoessell spent the first half of her career as a reporter and an editor. She left her role running The Improper Bostonian, a city magazine, to live in France for four years with her family. While overseas, she began contributing food and travel articles to The Boston Globe. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Newsday and National Geographic, among other publications. Stoessell earned a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School and a bachelor’s from the University of Virginia.