Presenter Bios

Catherine McCune, former visiting professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Smith, is the inaugural director of the Quantitative Learning Center (QLC), http://www.smith.edu/qlc.  McCune received her doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She came to Smith College after post-doctoral positions at the Technische Universitaet in Berlin, Germany and at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.  Her research was in differential geometry, in particular, minimal surfaces and constant mean curvature surfaces. 

Larry Owens earned his BA in Philosophy from Seattle University in 1966; he later earned PhDs in Biochemistry from Rutgers in 1972 and in the History of Science from Princeton in 1987.  Since 1984, he has worked in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  His research and writing range over the last century and a variety of American topics from the history of engineering, the laboratory as a workplace, mathematical machinery, and the history of computers and computing cultures.  As a teacher, he's happiest in his introductory survey of science and technology in the western world and in upper-division and graduate seminars on comparative scientific traditions and on science and culture in the cold war.

Dominique Thiebaut received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the U. of Massachusetts, and teaches in the department of computer science.
His current interests are in cloud computing, managing, mining, and visualizing big data.  He co-authored two patents on high-performance computing circuits and was involved in a Silicon Valley start-up company that developed the new architecture.

Tom Laughner is Director of Educational Technology Services at Smith College. Tom's work involves identifying appropriate technologies to assist in the teaching and learning process.  His current research interests involve making learning spaces more effective and examining learning communities in online courses.  His favorite part of working on his dissertation was the data analysis and visualization chapter.