Professor Friend is the inaugural director of the Incubator, a professor of English, and Director of Innovative Teaching and Experiential Learning Initiatives for College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. She previously served as director of the university’s Center for Teaching Excellence (2013-2017) and as director of the Writing Center and First-Year English program (2008-2012). Her research interests include writing instruction, higher education pedagogy, and faculty development. Dr. Friend is a past recipient of the university’s Mungo Award for Graduate Teaching, the Carolina Hero Award, the English Department Teaching Award, and the Outstanding Faculty Service-Learning Award. In 2015, she was one of four USC faculty members selected to participate in the Academic Leadership Development Program (ALDP) sponsored by the Southeastern Conference (SEC).

Nina Moreno, Senior Assistant Director of the Incubator for Innovative Teaching, is an associate professor of Spanish and Second Language Acquisition in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and core faculty of the Linguistics Program. Her research interests include the impact of different types of feedback in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), attention and awareness, depth of processing of second language input, and pre-service teacher training. Nina was the recipient of the Garnet Apple Teaching Award in 2017, the Sigma Delta Pi Hispanic Honor Society Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012 and 2013, and the Mortar Board Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2010.

Mary Fratini, Communications and Programming Coordinator for the Incubator for Innovation, is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina. Her research examines the history of general education reforms, interdisciplinarity, and pedagogy in American post-secondary institutions.

Professor Andersen is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Her research involves examining how gender, race, and structural inequalities influence justice system involvement. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses related to juvenile delinquency and justice and developed the USC Adolescent Mentoring Program. Taught as a class for university students, this intensive school-based mentoring program matches trained university students to youth attending a local disciplinary alternative school. 

The Adolescent Mentoring Program course fosters an intensive helping relationship between university students and youth. For university students, the course provides a working knowledge of theory and research on mentoring and delinquency prevention and valuable ‘real world’ experience working one-on-one with at-risk youth, including developing and instituting plans and changes, goal setting, and case management. The course was featured in both The Yield, a publication of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, and Breakthrough research magazine, a publication of the Office of Research.

Additionally, Professor Andersen was a recipient of the 2018-2020 Provost Internal Grant for Pedagogy.

Dr. Ballard received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Washington. Before joining the University of South Carolina, he held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Vienna. He has been a member for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and received a USC Breakthrough prize in 2017.

All of these experiences afforded him facetime with a multitude of students—from those who want to pursue math as a career to those who just want to get past this one last math course. Too often success with math is attributed to innate skill rather than hard work and persistence. In his experience, Dr. Ballard has found the opposite—those students committed to and truly supported in learning become the ones good at math regardless of where they start from. He strives to impart this growth mindset to each student he sees. 

Professor Burgess holds a joint appointment between the McKissick Museum and the School of Visual Art and Design, teaching art history and museum studies. A proponent for giving students the professional skills they need to succeed, she has employed active-learning pedagogical models since coming to USC in 2008. Believing strongly in interdisciplinary collaboration, she co-authored “Sharing Credit: Public Historians and Scientists Reflecting on Collaboration,” with Soumitra Ghoshroy, Allison Marsh, and Sarah Scripps in The Public Historian,  35No. 2, May 2013. She was a fellow in the inaugural class of Association of Academic Museums and Galleries’ sponsored Kellogg School of Management's Center for Nonprofit Management in 2012. She was a recipient of 2014-2015 Teaching Excellence Grant in Integrative Learning from USC’s Center for Teaching Excellence and the 2016 SCOER! Faculty Award from Thomas Cooper Library. She is a field reviewer for the Institute of Museum and Library Services and sits on the board of the Committee on Museum Professional Training, a professional network of American Alliance of Museums. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.

Professor Floyd’s current research focuses on the continent of Africa, examining stereotypes and misconceptions. She is interested in curriculum taught by art educators and am currently meeting with and surveying focus groups across the state. In addition, she is conducting research on ethnographic methods and photography to document African-American camp meeting traditions in both North and South Carolina. She has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, South Carolina Arts Commission and the South Carolina Humanities Council, and the University of South Carolina’s Associate Professor Development Grant and Research and Productive Scholarship. Her photographs of African-American camp meetings have been displayed at the Charlotte Museum of History (NC), the Methodist Center, St Simons Island, Georgia, and the McKissick Museum at USC. Professor Floyd has also mentored a group of students at Hand Middle School as they learned how to use photography to document important events in their lives, their photographs were ultimately displayed at the Wachovia Gallery located in the Richland County Public Library. She is developing curricular materials to help teachers incorporate contemporary African art and artists, camp meeting traditions and self-taught artists.

Professor Hiscox’s research focus is in microclimatology and micrometeorology, with a specific emphasis on dispersion turbulence, and vegetative canopy interactions. This work aims to understand the atmosphere at small scales in time and space and apply that information to relevant societal problems. She is currently the lead PI of SAVANT: Stable Atmospheric Variability And Transport, an NSF/NCAR field campaign to examine the stable boundary layer in shallow topography. Her teaching tries to incorporate hands on learning through experimentation and student-led measurements.

Professor Hiscox is from an interdisciplinary background and believes strongly in teaching from a holistic perspective. She was a participant in the inaugural year of UofSC Innovations Corps, and is former chair of the American Meteorological Society STAC on Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. Recently she has established a collaboration with a local elementary school to help fifth graders launch and recover high-altitude balloons.

Professor Kalb currently directs the Russian Program at USC.  Her research focuses on the connections between Russian culture and the Greco-Roman classical tradition.  Her book Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890-1930, examines the image of ancient Rome in the writings of Russian modernists, and her current book project focuses on the role the poet Homer, fabled author of the Odyssey and the Iliad, has played in Russian culture.  Kalb’s articles have appeared in journals in the Slavic field and in works dedicated to classical reception studies, such as the recent Wiley Blackwell volume Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, for which she edited the Russia section.   The recipient of a Michael J. Mungo Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an Ada B. Thomas Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award, and, most recently, a Garnet Apple Award for Teaching Innovation, Kalb is particularly excited at present about the possibilities of using online courses to promote interdisciplinary work in the humanities. She is looking forward to the explorations the Incubator will make possible.

Professor Mills is an associate professor in Geography and teaches courses about human geography, globalization, cultural geography, and the Middle East. She is a recipient of UofSC's Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award and has served as an undergraduate advisor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Geography Department. Her research brings theories from interdisciplinary urban and Middle Eastern studies to questions about spatial processes of belonging and exclusion. Her award-winning first book, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul, was an ethnography of the contemporary nostalgia for Istanbul’s non-Muslim minority pasts. Dr. Mills’s current book project explores Turkish urbanism in Istanbul after the First World War.

Her work has been published in diverse venues including Comparative Studies of South Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; Annals of the Association of American Geographers; the International Journal of Middle East Studies; and Gender, Place and Culture. Dr. Mills serves on the international advisory boards of fe dergisi/fe journal, the Turkish Journal of Human Geography, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, the Institute of Turkish Studies, and the American Research Institute in Turkey.

Professor Richardson is currently involved in revising the Marine Science undergraduate degree curriculum, which includes creating new laboratory exercises for an upper level majors course (MSCI 311; Biology of Marine Organisms). A big believer in “teaching through research”, she has hosted more than 60 undergraduate students in her laboratory in a variety of capacities, including six Magellan Scholars and four SC Honors College Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows. Dr. Richardson also obtained funding for a site grant from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in 2012, and subsequently brought 30 undergraduate students from across the country to USC to do research in marine science in the summers of 2013 to 2015 (10 per year). Dr. Richardson is a former winner of a Breakthrough Rising Star of Research Award (2011), a Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award (2015), and a two-time winner of a “Thumbs Up” award (2010, 2015) from the USC Office of Student Disability Services.

Professor Rodney is an assistant professor in Physics and Astronomy. He earned his PhD in Astronomy at the University of Hawaii (between surf breaks), and was a Hubble Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. His research is aimed at measuring vast distances across the universe using stellar explosions, or supernovae. He is working now on supernovae that are being amplified by gravitational lensing, a warping of spacetime that allows galaxies to act as cosmic magnifying glasses. In recent years at UofSC, Steve has led a course transformation project for introductory astronomy, organized a campus-wide outreach program for the 2017 total solar eclipse, and developed a partnership to train graduate students in inquiry-based teaching. In 2018 he received the Garnet Apple Award for teaching excellence and was awarded a McCausland Faculty Fellowship in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Smith is presently involved in research examining self-injurious behaviors that occur within correctional settings, and other areas where the public health and criminal justice system intersect. He teaches courses on Corrections, Criminological Theory, Research Methods, Victimization, Social Justice & Ethics, & Sex Crimes.

Professor November teaches courses on the history of science and medicine, history of technology, modern American history, and on the ways history is presented in games.  He is particularly interested in how developments in information technology and the life sciences have shaped one another. His recent book, Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), explores the intellectual and institutional dimensions of the computerization of biology and medicine; the book was awarded the top book prize in the field of history of computing, the Computer History Museum Prize. He is presently preparing manuscripts for two books – a biography of medical computing pioneer Robert Ledley and a history of distributed/volunteer computing in scientific research, tentatively titled Revolutions@home. In 2013, November was selected as an inaugural McCausland Fellow by the College of Arts and Sciences for his dedication to pursuing meaningful research while offering high-quality teaching.  He has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Association for Computing Machinery.  He has served on numerous departmental, university, and professional committees. His current teaching interests include incorporating video games into course curricula.

Professor White is a professor in the School of the Earth, Ocean, & Environment who studies the geology and tectonics of the oceans and coasts to understand the Earth processes that form and shape the seafloor. After more than two decades in marine geological research, Scott remains convinced that understanding the marine realm and its geology is key to a thriving future for humanity. Scott has worked on projects ranging from seafloor rifts in the Pacific to tidal creeks on the South Carolina coast, and participated in nearly 20 oceanographic cruises. Scott teaches at UofSC in both Geology and Marine Science and advised 10 graduate students. Inspired by his studies into the dark and hidden realm of the deep seafloor, Scott is developing geovisualization lessons for Geology and Marine Science classes for the CAS Incubator of Teaching Innovation. When he is not busy researching and teaching geology, he enjoys photography and cooking. Scott holds a PhD in Geological Sciences from University of California at Santa Barbara. He joined the faculty at USC in 2003.

 Professor Yee has a joint position in the mathematics department in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the instruction and teacher education department in the College of Education. He teaches undergraduate mathematics course, graduate mathematics courses on pedagogy, and doctoral classes in teacher education. Professor Yee’s scholarship synergizes the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics. His primary focus is providing seminars and courses on teaching for mathematics graduate students who are teaching assistants or full instructors of record for undergraduate mathematics courses. Professor Yee’s research has resulted in multiple National Science Foundation grants revolving around peer-mentorship models for graduate student instructors. With these grants, Professor Yee has created and implemented professional development for experienced graduate students to mentor novice graduate students in teaching, thus generating a community of practice around teaching. Prior to coming to USC, Professor Yee taught secondary mathematics for six years in Ohio and was an assistant professor of mathematics education at California State University, Fullerton. His scholarship has also included book chapters and journal publications focusing on mathematical proof education, educational discourse theory, conceptual metaphor theory as a means to improve teacher listening, secondary methods courses, and mathematical problem solving. 

Trenton Agrelius is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biological Sciences pursing a degree in Evolutionary Genetics, having previously received his MS from the Marine Science Program at the University of South Carolina (UofSC). His work focuses on exploring molecular mechanisms that influence gene expression in offspring via maternal and transgenerational effects using the crustacean Daphnia as a model system. He was a 2019 recipient of the SPARC grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research, UofSC.

He currently serves as Chair of the Student Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement subcommittee on the CAS Diversity committee. Outside of his passion for science, he is an avid reader of European history and a devoted dog dad to the insanely endearing chocolate lab, Sadie.

Georgina Anderson is a graduate research and teaching assistant in the Department of Biological Sciences. She conducts research on hematopoiesis in the Kathrein Lab, using mice and zebra fish to model the differentiation of blood cells from stem cells.

Georgina has taught the Principles of Biology lab and Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy at UofSC, and is part of UofSC’s Institute for Science and Engineer Educators team. Georgina is also active in the Graduate Associates of Biological Science, Women’s Mentor Network, Foster Care 2 Success and Buddies Without Borders programs.

Sam Hackworth is a second-year PhD student, studying linguistics at UofSC. Currently, he is an ESL instructor at the International Accelerator Program. Sam has experience teaching English in both American and foreign classrooms, having served as a teacher trainer and EFL instructor with the United States Peace Corps.

As an instructor, he has focused on the teaching of writing and use of literature for communicative and activity-based language lessons.

Kristin Harrell is presently entering her fifth year of work toward a PhD in medieval English literature. While her dissertation work has been literary in nature, she has also done Masters work in pop culture studies, art education, the history of medicine, manuscript studies, and she has a Bachelors of Fine Arts in ceramic sculpture. Kristin is also active in visual studies, the digital humanities, and interested in creative ways to approach both research and pedagogy. She has taught for the English department as well as through the SAEL program. In the Fall she will be teaching a Capstone English course on sex and power in Pre-Modern literature through the lenses of popular television shows, video games, and cultural phenomenon.

Mackenzie Hart is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina. She is originally from Pennsylvania and graduated from Boston College in 2017, holding a B.S. in psychology. Throughout her undergraduate tenure, she amassed research experience at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Harvard University’s Lab for Youth Mental Health.

Her current research interests center on intervention and implementation practices to bolster outcomes for at-risk youth and adolescents, with a particular focus on program accessibility and usability in low-resource environments, as well as mentoring. She is also involved in the Presidential Fellows program on campus.

Outside of research, Mackenzie has gained clinical experience in a number of settings in the local community. Her main hobby is exploring the outdoors and craft breweries throughout Columbia and the greater Southeast with her pup.

Julia Luján is a Comparative Literature PhD candidate in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Her current research focuses on issues of identity and gender roles in U.S. Afro-Latino cultural productions, part of a larger project that aims at expanding/complicating the notions of blackness and Latinidad in the Americas. Other research interests include African Diaspora studies, Hispanic Transatlantic studies, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), and Global Contemporary Literatures, while exploring topics such as identity construction, nation building, and boundary crossings.

At UofSC, Julia has taught extensively for the Spanish and Comparative Literature programs. She has also developed and led a Spanish Summer Intensive Program and has coordinated the Advanced Spanish courses. She has received the LLC Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award in 2014 and 2018. Julia was elected as the founding President of the first DLLC Graduate Student Association, an organization that focuses on the professional and academic development of the Department’s graduate students.

After a two-year tenure as President, today she serves in its Executive Board as Consultant/Advisor.