Chris Carr Biography

Dr. Carr has been the Director of Performance Psychology and Team Behavioral Health Clinician for the Green Bay Packers  football team since 2018. He is responsible for performance psychology and mental health services for the players, staff, and organization. Prior to this role, Dr. Carr was the Counseling Sport Psychologist and Coordinator of Sport & Performance Psychology Services at Ascension St Vincent Sports Performance in Indianapolis, Indiana from 2006 to 2020. He is a licensed psychologist in the states of Wisconsin, and Indiana. He was the Team Performance Psychologist for Indiana Pacers professional basketball and was the consulting sport psychologist for the Oklahoma City Thunder professional basketball team. 
 
Other career highlights include coordinating and directing the Big Sky Sport Psychology Conference, serving as  Consulting Sport Psychologist for the Butler University Athletics Department, Ball State University Athletics Department, The Ohio State University Athletics Department, Purdue University Athletics Department, and Indiana University Athletics.
 
Dr. Carr is the Past-President of Division 47 (Exercise and Sport Psychology) of the American Psychological Association and served on the Executive Committee. He was on the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USPOC) Registry of Sport Psychology Providers based at the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was the USA Diving National Team Sport Psychologist, and was in Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games as the USA Olympic Diving Team Sport Psychologist. He spent 6 years as the Sport Psychologist for the Kansas City Royal Baseball Club. Dr. Carr also served for ten years as the Sport Psychologist for the United States Men’s Alpine Ski Team based in Park City, Utah and was the team psychologist for the US Men's Alpine Olympic Ski Team during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. 
 
Dr. Carr was awarded the Bruce Ogilvie Award for Professional Practice through APA (American Psychological Association) Division 47 (Society for Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology) and was honored at the 2020 APA Convention. He was the Coleman Griffith Keynote Lecturer at the 2015 Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) National Conference in Indianapolis, IN and he was an Ad Hoc Member and first psychologist on the NCAA Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sport Committee, and served on the first NCAA Student-Athlete Mental Health Task Force Meeting..
 
Dr. Carr has a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology with a minor in Exercise Science/Sport Psychology from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He spent one year as a Clinical Research Assistant in Sport Psychology at the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he worked with elite-level athletes and coaches prior to the 1992 Olympic Games.
                
A native of Muncie, Indiana, he received his B.A. in Psychology from Wabash College, where he was a 4-year member and 2-year starting offensive lineman for the Little Giant football team; he completed his M.A. in Counseling Psychology from Ball State University, where he was a graduate assistant football coach (offensive line/special teams). He also studied off-campus at Oxford University in Oxford, England, and played club rugby during his stay. Dr. Carr now lives in Suamico, WI with his wife Kelli.

Russ Castronovo Biography

Russ Castronovo, PhD, is the Director of the Center for the Humanities and Hilldale Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
 
He is an and editor of 11 books, writing broadly about literature, aesthetics, and political theory.  A leading figure in the fields of American literature and American Studies, he has written about print culture, novels, poetry, film, and other media forms across four centuries from the 18th through the 21st century, publishing with distinguished university presses and top-flight peer-reviewed journals across multiple disciplines.
 
His book, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability (2023), has been the subject of podcasts, seminars and colloquies, and public presentations at book festivals.  Other monographs include Propaganda 1776:  Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (2014); Beautiful Democracy:  Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Global Culture (2007); Necro Citizenship:  Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century-United States (2001); Fathering the Nation:  American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995).  Castronovo is much sought after as a keynote and plenary speaker, having delivered nearly 100 invited lectures in universities and colleges in the United States and in Germany, Italy, Sweden, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Britain, and Canada.  His idea of “printscapes,” his revaluation of propaganda, his concept of “necro citizenship,” his critique of security culture, and other scholarly interventions have influenced and shaped conversations in literary studies and other humanities fields.  He has served on multiple editorial boards, and in 2023 he was named the co-editor of American Literary History, the top journal in American literary studies.  His next book (co-authored with Anna Brickhouse) is simply titled Vulnerability and is forthcoming from the Literature and Politics series published by Oxford University Press.
 
Castronovo also writes regularly for public audiences in newspapers such as the Wisconsin State Journal, the Denver Sun, and the Seattle Times, in online media sites such as Public Seminar and Public Books, and in higher education forums such as Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education.  This outreach is matched by the work he does in the classroom, which was recognized with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2016) and the Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award (2017), a University of Wisconsin System-wide award given to only four recipients each year from among twenty-six campuses in the system.   He is especially gratified that he has been able to use his experience in publishing, editing, and research to promote the work of more than a dozen colleagues and graduate students at UW-Madison by either co-authoring or including their work in both scholarly and public venues.

Mahua Dey Biography

Mahua Dey, MD is a University of Wisconsin Health neurosurgeon specializing in the surgical management of brain and spinal cord tumors. Dr. Dey has a special interest in malignant brain tumors involving eloquent areas of the brain which require awake and function mapping, radiosurgery and minimally invasive brain surgery.
 
Dr. Dey uses imaging tools to work around and minimize impacts on areas of the brain that are critical for key body functions. Connecting with others is what drew Dr. Dey to a career in medicine. She enjoys getting to know people at a personal level and takes pride in treating patients as she would her own family. 
 
Dr. Dey also serves as an associate professor of neurological surgery and director of the surgical neuro-oncology program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She leads an active research program and is funded by the National Institutes of Health to develop specialized treatments, including vaccine-based therapies for malignant brain tumors.

Katherine Fredrickson Biography

As a teaching professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Kathy Fredrickson has helped over 1,200 college students develop digital skills while encouraging them to build daily analog activities to fuel creative growth.
 
She established two student-powered marketing agencies on campus to provide hands-on learning: the Digital Marketing Clinic for small businesses and the Titan Connect Agency for University marketing at the UW-Oshkosh. 
 
Her professional background includes agency leadership roles and ownership of a consulting firm. She co-founded Women in Technology-Wisconsin, a statewide non-profit that with over 1,000 members. Kathy earned her Bachelors of Business Administration degree in marketing (with a minor in theatre!) from UW-Whitewater and her MBA from UW-Oshkosh.

Richard Kyte Biography

Richard Kyte directs the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he also serves as Professor of Ethics. For the past 25 years, he has taught in the nation's first master's degree program in Servant Leadership.

His weekly column reaches readers in more than 70 newspapers across the country, and he co-hosts "The Ethical Life" podcast with Scott Rada. A dedicated community member, Kyte has long been active in the Rotary Club of La Crosse and currently serves on the boards of Coulee Region Trout Unlimited and LeaderEthics. His most recent book, Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way), was published in 2024.

Ashley Lemke Biography

Ashley Lemke, PhD is an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who works on land and underwater to explore the past. She is an Associate Professor, former Chair of the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology, a member of the Society of Woman Geographers, and Explorers Club Fellow.
 
An expert on submerged sites, she has directed research projects in North America and below its waters, including in the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean. She has also conducted archaeological research in Europe in Germany, Spain, Romania, and Serbia.
 
One of the few archaeologists researching ancient sites underwater, Dr. Lemke is a remotely operated vehicle pilot, scuba diver, sonar technician, and uses robots to find and map archaeological sites underwater. She works with computer scientists to create virtual worlds of past environments, using artificial intelligence, and virtual reality for archaeological research and discovery.

Sharon McNeil Biography

Sharon McNeil has been drawing for as long as she can remember. After earning her degree in Art and Theatre from Lewis & Clark College, she began her career as a scenic artist for the theatre industry in Seattle — work that demanded a sharp, practiced eye long before she understood why some drawings succeeded and others didn't.
 
It was during a portrait workshop years later, while she was already working professionally as an artist, that everything shifted. An instructor told her, plainly, that drawing isn't about talent — it's about learning how to see. That single idea reframed her entire relationship to her craft, and it eventually carried her to a Master of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach.
 
For the past 25 years, Sharon has taught drawing and painting to students at every stage of life, including a decade on the faculty of the Savannah College of Art and Design. She currently teaches at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, and privately teaches adult students online, where she continues to watch students — many returning to art after decades away — move from fear and self-judgment into genuine confidence.
 
Out of that classroom experience, Sharon developed the Five Lenses for Drawing What You See, a framework that breaks the act of seeing into five learnable stages: gesture, sighting and measuring, form and structure, light and shadow, and color. It has helped thousands of adult learners discover that the ability to draw was never a fixed talent they missed out on, but a skill available to them all along.
 
Sharon believes drawing connects with something much deeper than learning a skill. It touches on the human capacity for learning, and the courage it takes to be a beginner again. Her work sits at the intersection of art, education, and human development, exploring how learning to see differently can reopen a sense of possibility at any age.
 
She lives in Salem, Oregon, where she continues to draw, teach, and study the surprising ways a pencil can change how a person sees themselves

Marijuana Vandyck Biography

Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, PhD knows what it's like to have people judge you before they ever meet you. Rather than allowing the negative judgments surrounding her unforgettable name to define her, she transformed them into the foundation of a life and business dedicated to shattering expectations and helping others do the same. Today, she inspires groups to rewrite limiting narratives, create opportunities where none seem to exist, and turn the very characteristics they've been judged for into their greatest assets. 
 
Dr. Vandyck is a longtime educator, auctioneer, real estate business owner, and founder and executive director of the Action as Empowerment Center for Change, an educational initiative teaching entrepreneurship & financial literacy education.
 
Her groundbreaking dissertation, “Black Names in White Classrooms: Teacher Behaviors and Student Perceptions,” sparked global conversations and public debates about identity, bias, and equity in education.
 
A firm believer in giving back and uplifting others, Marijuana endowed the Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Scholarship for African American first-generation students enrolled in education majors at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, one of her alma maters. She has received numerous honors and accolades for her work and outstanding leadership in education and in her communities. 
 
In her spare time, Marijuana loves ignoring housework to travel, take long walks, read historical romance novels, and camp, fish, snorkel, kayak, and golf.