Dr. Danica C. Tisdale Fisher
Danica C. Tisdale Fisher is a 2012 Ph.D. graduate of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies' program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Danica is a 2001 cum laude graduate of Spelman College and a 2003 graduate of Temple University with B.A. and M.A. degrees, respectively, in English. Danica's dissertation, titled "The Pageant Politic: Race and Representation in American Beauty Contests and Culture," was inspired by her academic interests in feminist theories of beauty, the body, and popular culture, and by her experience as the first African American woman to represent the state of Georgia in the 2004 Miss America Pageant. In June 2012, Danica was appointed as the Fellowships Coordinator in the Center for Global Education at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) in Claremont, California. Prior to her work at CMC, Danica served as a Program Associate for the California office of the Children's Defense Fund.
Dr. Gabriel Williams
Gabriel Williams was born in Brooklyn, NY and raised in Atlanta, GA. After developing an interest in Mathematics and Physics while in high school, he enrolled at Morehouse College in 2002. Because he expressed interest in a career in academia, he became a UNCF/Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow in 2004. Upon graduating with a BS magna cum laude in Mathematics and Physics, he enrolled at the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2006 to pursue graduate studies in Gravitational Wave Astronomy. After graduating with a MS in Physics in 2008, he enrolled at Colorado State University, from which he received his PhD in Atmospheric Science in 2012. His dissertation was entitled The Effect of Environmental Flow on the Internal Dynamics of Tropical Cyclones. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Louisiana at Monroe with research interests in tropical cyclone dynamics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and vortex dynamics.
Dr. Micheal Hicks
Micheal Hicks, an UNCF Mellon-Mays fellow, received his Ph.D. from Howard University Program of Atmospheric Science (HUPAS) in May 2012. There he conducted research utilizing LIDAR, radiosonde, and anemometer technologies to improve understanding of the impact of urbanization on atmospheric boundary layer processes. His dissertation is titled “The Characterization of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Depth and Turbulence in a Mixed Rural and Urban Convective Environment.” As an undergraduate mathematician at Paine College, Micheal was inducted into the UNCF Mellon-Mays fellowship in 2004, where he was inspired to attain a PhD degree and diversify the academy. In addition, as an undergraduate mathematician, Micheal completed two summer interns with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he developed his sustaining interest in the Atmospheric Sciences. He now works for NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) under the Department of Commerce (DOC) as a Physical Scientist in Sterling, VA, and even though he is grateful for his current employment, he still desires to one day conduct research and teach Atmospheric Science at an academic professorial level.
Dr. Marcus Harvey
Currently a visiting scholar on faculty in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, Dr. Harvey obtained his Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in August of 2012. Dr. Harvey’s teaching interests focus primarily on African and African Atlantic religious cultures. His research interests are fundamentally oriented toward the problem of African American religious interpretation. In the main, African American religious scholarship finds itself especially beleaguered by widely shared assumptions about the superiority of Christian intellectual paradigms as conceptual and theoretical models for the interpretation of African American religion. In an effort to highlight new theoretical trajectories for the study of African American religion that are not limited by coercive Christianizing logics, Dr. Harvey’s research aims to set the stage for the development of a phenomenology of African American religious consciousness grounded in African religious epistemologies and in cognate religious epistemologies poetically articulated in African American fictional literature. His dissertation, entitled “’Life is War:’ African Grammars of Knowing and the Interpretation of Black Religious Experience,” explores the religious epistemologies of the Yorùbá of Nigeria and the Akan of Ghana in conjunction with Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.