Faculty at Home
Join some of Middlebury’s expert and engaging faculty members for interactive talks—from home.
Faculty at Home extends Middlebury’s academic reach to our community around the world. This webinar series invites you to engage in the digital space, to stay connected with faculty members, with big ideas, and with each other.
Moderated by Caitlin Knowles Myers, John G. McCullough Professor of Economics, Sarah Stroup, professor of political science, and Bert Johnson, professor of political science, this series stimulates thought-provoking online conversations for the benefit of the Middlebury community far and wide. Faculty at Home is supported by numerous offices at Middlebury including the Office of the Provost, Advancement, Media Services, and Communications.
Generally, we open up the webinar 5 – 10 minutes ahead of the start time. This offers attendees the chance to let everyone know (via Zoom chat) that they are present and where they are joining from. Zoom settings only allow attendees to see the chat activity from the time they log in, so if you’d like to say hello, consider logging in early.
Recordings are posted about two weeks after the live event.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Beacons in the Sky: X-ray bright neutron stars as extreme physics laboratories
Mckinley Brumback
Studying space with high energies, such as X-rays, allows astronomers to test our understanding of the laws of physics in the most extreme environments in the universe. One such extreme environment is found around neutron stars—the ultra-dense cores of massive stars left behind after a supernova explosion. Neutron stars host the universe’s most powerful magnetic fields, which can be trillions of times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field and are impossible to recreate in Earth-based laboratories. In this talk, I will discuss ways in which studying X-rays over a range of energies allows us to disentangle signals from different structures around the neutron star and begin mapping these unique environments.
McKinley Brumback is an assistant professor of physics at Middlebury College. She completed her PhD in physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College and then traveled the United States for postdoctoral research positions at Caltech and the University of Michigan. She uses observations from NASA and ESA X-ray observatories to investigate how matter behaves close to neutron stars, and in particular her research focuses on reverberation mapping of neutron star X-ray binaries and the effect of super-Eddington accretion on pulse profiles.
Becky Tang
When people think of statistics, their minds probably turn toward histograms, sample means, and t-tests. In this talk, I will discuss another side of statistics: modeling. What is statistical modeling, why is it fun, and is it even useful? I will then share my work in developing a spatiotemporal model for the abundances of a community of fish species in the Gulf of Maine.
Becky Tang is an assistant professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Middlebury College. Her research focuses on developing Bayesian hierarchical models for ecological applications, with a particular focus on zero-inflated data. From a pedagogical perspective, she enjoys developing statistics courses that help students build intuition for and confidence in grappling with difficult quantitative concepts
Sarah Stroup
The Trump administration has worked to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. As a scholar of humanitarian relief and NGOs, Stroup puts this political moment in historical and comparative perspective. Foreign aid has long been contested in the United States. Meanwhile, other Western states are cutting their aid budgets as a group of global aid donors emerge. These shifting dynamics may impede short-term humanitarian relief as well as long-term efforts to address poverty and global inequality.
Sarah Stroup is professor of political science at Middlebury and director of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. Her current research projects explore inequality in the humanitarian sector and the intersection of international and domestic peacebuilding efforts. As a practitioner, Stroup is trained in reflective structured dialogue, basic mediation, and basic restorative practices. She is author of Borders Among Activists (Cornell, 2012) and coauthor of The Authority Trap (Cornell, 2017), winner of the 2019 ARNOVA Outstanding Book Award.