2018 FL-DSSG Summer Internship

Emma Apatu is an assistant professor of public health in the Brooks College of Health. She teaches Public Health Research, Health Program Evaluation, and Fitness for Health and also participates in study abroad programs. Her most recent research centers on community-engagement, health disparities, community health services and health program evaluation.

Beyza Aslan is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the Math Center at the University of North Florida. She received her Ph. D in Applied Mathematics from University of Florida. Dr. Aslan’s research focuses on lightning modeling, lightning data analysis, and data analysis and pattern recognition for mitochondrial disorders to improve the diagnostic process.

Dr. Georgette Dumont is an Associate Professor in UNF’s Department of Political Science and Public Administration. Some of the journals Dr. Dumont has published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership, and the American Review of Public Administration. She has also published various book chapters, and currently has a contract with Oxford University Press for a book on nonprofit accountability. She continues to present nationally on her research. Dr. Dumont is active in her community and analyzes how local nonprofits are utilizing new technologies, which has resulted in reports to inform nonprofits in Northeast Florida about how the local sector is using online technologies, specifically social media. Dr. Dumont consults with nonprofits on strategy, technology, leadership, and strategic planning. She served on local nonprofit boards of directors, Jacksonville’s Public Service Grants Council, and is a Community Coach for the Nonprofit Center of Northeast Florida.

Lakshmi Goel is currently working as a Professor of Information Systems and holds the Coggin Endowed Strategic Professorship at the Coggin College of Business, University of North Florida (UNF). Lakshmi received her PhD in Decision and Information Sciences from the University of Houston. Her research interests lie at the intersection of strategic use of technologies by small and medium enterprises in areas such as social media, business analytics, and innovation networks. Her work within the Jacksonville community has earned her recognition as a Community Scholar, and a High Impact Researcher by UNF, and an Innovator in Education by the Jacksonville Business Journal. Her research works are published in various national and interactional conferences such as International Conference on Information Systems, Americas Conference on Information Systems, Academy of Management, and European Conference on Information Systems; and in top-ranked journals such as Management Information Systems Quarterly, Journal of the Association of Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Information and Management, Information and Organization, and Information Systems Journal.

Julie Merten is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and directs the Public Health Internship. Her research involves behavioral cancer prevention, specifically in the areas of skin cancer (the most common cancer in the US) and tobacco control (the leading cause of preventable deaths in the US). She has evaluated the effectiveness of school-based sun safety education, analyzed how people utilize the Internet and social media for cancer information, surveyed children, adolescents and young adults on their skin cancer prevention behaviors, and assessed cancer prevention programs among special populations. She oversees the Our Campus, Our Health student health behavior survey at UNF, chairs the Northeast Florida Cancer Control Collaborative Sun Safety workgroup, and is involved with the strategic planning of the Florida State Cancer Plan. Currently, she is working on a funded project with Baptist Healthy Living Centers to pilot test a brief skin cancer risk assessment and referral intervention.

Dr. Amanda Blakewood Pascale is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education Administration within the College of Education and Human Services at the University of North Florida. Dr. Pascale holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration as well as a graduate certificate in Quantitative Methods in Education from the University of Tennessee. Her research examines cultures conducive to success in higher education milieus and the praxis of ideas that promote university community success particularly for those who are underrepresented or in transition. Dr. Pascale routinely teaches graduate level courses in quantitative and qualitative methods as well as assessment in higher education. She is an advocate of the use of data and assessment to inform decisions, practice, and policy in educational settings.

Gordon F.M. Rakita is a bioarchaeologist and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, & Social Work. He also serves as Director of Academic Technology at UNF. Prior to joining the faculty at UNF he was Principal Investigator and Analytical Director for SWCA Environmental Consultants of Flagstaff, Arizona. He is Associate Editor for the journal Bioarchaeology International. He earned his B.A. in Anthropology from University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico. In 2016 he was named the junior laureate of the Lloyd Cotsen Prize for Lifetime Achievement in World Archaeology. His areas of expertise include bioarchaeology, anthropological approaches to mortuary and other ritual behavior, analytical data management and statistical analyses, emergent social inequality and complexity, and evolutionary theory.

Sandeep Reddivari is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of North Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Mississippi State University. Dr. Reddivari's research interests include software engineering, visual analytics, information retrieval, data mining, text mining, healthcare data analytics, and visualization and virtual reality in healthcare. Dr. Reddivari’s expertise is in data pre-processing, clustering, summarization, visualization, and outlier detection.