SLU-Madrid Celebrates Faculty Publications

04/30/2020

The 23 professors who published their research during the 2019-2020 academic year were recognized in a virtual event as part of the Madrid Campus Library’s celebration of World Book Day.

The publications included books and edited volumes, book chapters and contributions, journal articles and online publications in the humanities, social sciences, business and economics, sciences and engineering.

“Madrid Campus faculty are not only dedicated educators but also leading researchers in their respective fields,” commented Madrid Campus Director and Academic Dean, Paul Vita, Ph.D.
 
Library Director Sara Pérez, Ph.D., and Associate Library Director Isabel Hurtado hosted the celebration. After Vita offered words of welcome, three of this year’s published researchers, Mary Prendergast, Ph.D., Anne McCabe, Ph.D., and John Welch, Ph.D., exhibited their works.
 
Much of Prendergast’s research focuses on archeological sites in West Africa. She formed part of the international research team responsible for a widely published study analyzing the history of ancient West African foragers based on full genome data of four children buried in the Shum Laka region on Cameroon. The genome-wide DNA data from the four children—two of whom were buried around 8,000 years ago and the others around 3,000 years—reveal ancestry much more closely related to Central African hunter-gatherers as opposed to Bantu-speakers today.
 
McCabe also spoke about her book publications. In one publication, she assessed the subjectivity of reports in British-Peninsular Spanish newspapers written about the Second Lebanon War. In her research on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), a highly relevant topic as the Spanish educational system develops curriculum for bilingual schools, she analyzed written texts by 16 students learning history in English during their four years of secondary education in a Madrid public school.
 
Welch discussed his latest research, which was published in two journal articles. One article proposed that Jeffrey’s rule be used as an alternative to Bayes’ theorem for estimating the probability of an argument’s conclusion. The other article showed that a novel form of decision theory is actually a special case of a heuristic identified by a well-known research program on bounded rationality.