Courses

Nathaniel Stern

Professor, Creative Technologies / Mechanical Engineering | Director, UWM Startup Challenge

Nathaniel Stern is an artist and writer, Fulbright and NSF grantee and professor, interventionist and public citizen. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from ecological, participatory, and online interventions, interactive, immersive, and mixed reality environments, to prints, sculptures, videos, performances. and hybrid forms. His first book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Gylphi 2013), takes a close look at the stakes for interactive and digital art, and Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (Dartmouth 2018) is a creative and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, which argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently interconnected, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. Stern’s ongoing work with startups and industry, on the other hand, has helped launch dozens of new businesses, products, and ideas. He has been featured in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Daily News, BBC’s Today show, WIRED, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, PetaPixel, M Magazine, Time, Forbes, Fast Company, Scientific American, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology, Rhizome, Furtherfield, Turbulence, and more. According to Chicago’s widely popular Bad at Sports art podcast, Stern has “the most varied and strange bio of maybe anyone ever on the show,” and South Africa’s Live Out Loud magazine calls him a “prolific scholar” as well as artist, whose work is “quite possibly some of the most relevant around.” “Technological, thought-provoking and unexpected” (NPR) he’s been dubbed one of Milwaukee’s “avant-garde” (Journal Sentinel), called ”an interesting and prolific fixture” (Artthrob.co.za) behind many “multimedia experiments” (Time.com), “accessible and abstract simultaneously” (Art and Electronic Media web site), someone “with starry, starry eyes” (Wired.com) who “makes an obscene amount of work in an obscene amount of ways” (Bad at Sports) – both “bizarre and beautiful” (Gizmodo). According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, Stern makes “beautiful, glitched out art-images,” and Caleb A. Scharf at Scientific American says Stern’s art is “tremendous fun,” and “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.”

Xin Huang

Associate Professor, Department Chair

Born in Mao era China, Xin writes on the transformation of ideas about gender and sexuality in the Mao and post-Mao eras through archiving and analyzing oral and photo life narratives. Xin's book (SUNY Press 2018) The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era traces the various ways the gender legacy of the Mao era manifests itself in women’s lives in contemporary China. Currently Xin is working on a book manuscript Picturing Self: Gender and Photo-based Life Narrative. It examines the relationship between the visual/bodily construction of gendered self and photo-based life narratives (PBLN). It explores what it means to construct a life photographically, and in what ways PBLN opened opportunities for contesting and transforming master scripts of gender, and for narrating her-story.

Joan Shapiro Beigh

Teaching Professor, Organizations & Strategic Management

Dr. Shapiro Beigh is an academic and a practitioner/consultant. Her consulting spans organizational communication, change, and stakeholder feedback. Her academic interests include work styles, procrastination, creativity, and teams. Her current research examines reactions to deadlines as antecedent reactions to work style behaviors. She is also active in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) community, examining opportunities to improve student team projects testing early interventions. Mostly recently, Dr. Shapiro Beigh was president of the Operations Management and Entrepreneurship Association, planning OMEA’s annual conference for the past two years. She comes to UWM from Loyola University Chicago and before that, DePaul University; at both schools, she received awards for teaching innovations in offering students choice-based assignments, projects requiring creative problem-solving, and having a teaching style that is inclusive, respectful, and sensitive to students’ needs for psychological safety. At Loyola, she was allocated funding as a SoTL scholar, a “Rising Star,” and a runner-up to the prestigious St. Ignatius of Loyola Teaching Excellence Award. At DePaul University, she received a teaching innovation award from the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University, as well as funding for SoTL research that was later delivered at the Academy of Management’s Teaching and Learning Conference. She also has been named a 2023-2024 fellow to the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center. Dr. Shapiro Beigh has published papers in Personality and Individual Differences and the Journal of Business Management & Change. She has presented her research and delivered professional development workshops (PDWs) at the Academy of Management Annual Conference, the Academy of Management Teaching and Learning Conference, the Midwest Academy of Management, the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, the Western Business & Management Association International Research conference, and two MBAA International divisions. Joan’s qualitative dissertation examined heterogeneity within work styles, and she has incorporated this research into her teaching. Prior to her teaching and academic research, Joan had a successful consulting practice in organizational communication and stakeholder feedback research, catering to clients that ranged from mid-sized divisions of Fortune 50 corporations and mid-sized private companies to national non-profit organizations and boutique professional service firms. She is a 2024-2025 Wisconsin UW System Teaching Fellow.

Joan Shapiro Beigh

Teaching Professor, Organizations & Strategic Management

Dr. Shapiro Beigh is an academic and a practitioner/consultant. Her consulting spans organizational communication, change, and stakeholder feedback. Her academic interests include work styles, procrastination, creativity, and teams. Her current research examines reactions to deadlines as antecedent reactions to work style behaviors. She is also active in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) community, examining opportunities to improve student team projects testing early interventions. Mostly recently, Dr. Shapiro Beigh was president of the Operations Management and Entrepreneurship Association, planning OMEA’s annual conference for the past two years. She comes to UWM from Loyola University Chicago and before that, DePaul University; at both schools, she received awards for teaching innovations in offering students choice-based assignments, projects requiring creative problem-solving, and having a teaching style that is inclusive, respectful, and sensitive to students’ needs for psychological safety. At Loyola, she was allocated funding as a SoTL scholar, a “Rising Star,” and a runner-up to the prestigious St. Ignatius of Loyola Teaching Excellence Award. At DePaul University, she received a teaching innovation award from the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University, as well as funding for SoTL research that was later delivered at the Academy of Management’s Teaching and Learning Conference. She also has been named a 2023-2024 fellow to the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center. Dr. Shapiro Beigh has published papers in Personality and Individual Differences and the Journal of Business Management & Change. She has presented her research and delivered professional development workshops (PDWs) at the Academy of Management Annual Conference, the Academy of Management Teaching and Learning Conference, the Midwest Academy of Management, the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, the Western Business & Management Association International Research conference, and two MBAA International divisions. Joan’s qualitative dissertation examined heterogeneity within work styles, and she has incorporated this research into her teaching. Prior to her teaching and academic research, Joan had a successful consulting practice in organizational communication and stakeholder feedback research, catering to clients that ranged from mid-sized divisions of Fortune 50 corporations and mid-sized private companies to national non-profit organizations and boutique professional service firms. She is a 2024-2025 Wisconsin UW System Teaching Fellow.

Lisa Moline

Professor, Design & Visual Communication

Lisa Moline is an artist and designer living and working in Milwaukee. She and her partner Lane Hall have been working collaboratively for over 20 years. Their research presents an associative reinterpretation of natural sciences, exploring the boundaries between the natural and the technological. Their major projects include installations for the California Academy of Sciences, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Science Gallery at Trinity College, Dublin, the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Their videos have been shown in the UN Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in China, and in Berlin, Germany, at the Kolbe Museum and the Neuen Gesellschaft for Bildende Kunst.

Coe Douglas

Lecturer, Design & Visual Communication

Coe Douglas is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and storyteller. He teaches design and story at UW—Milwaukee in the Peck School of the Arts. In the past, Coe has worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director, edited fiction for Revelore Press, was the founding managing editor of Bridge Eight Magazine and co-founded the Abridged Reading Series in Jacksonville, FL. He’s participated in the Tin House Writer’s Workshop and The Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa. He recently worked with UWM Professor Kim Beckmann on Design Thinking and Storytelling Workshops for Islands of Brilliance and the Urban Manufacturing Alliance and he gives regular talks on the topic. Coe’s writing has been published in Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Burrow Press Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Heavy Feather Review, The EAT series, Perversion Magazine and elsewhere. Coe recently participated in the On The Wing Sketchbook Show at Portrait Society Gallery and has a visual story project in the works.

Ian Elfe

CFA, Senior VP & Senior Investment Analyst, Baird Funds

Kyle Ebersole

Professor, Athletic Training, Physical Therapy

Kyle Ebersole conducts research pertinent to expanding the scientific knowledge base that informs the physiological basis for injury prevention, re-conditioning, strength training, and physiological performance across a continuum of sport and occupational athletes. Ebersole is a Licensed Athletic Trainer and has earned certifications from the National Academy in Sports Medicine as a Performance Enhancement Specialist (PES) and a Corrective Exercise Specialist (CES).

Barbara Meyer

Professor, Athletic Training & Sports Psychology | Laboratory Director, Laboratory for Sport Psychology& Performance Excellence

Dr. Meyer’s research projects are borne out of the need to identify solutions to the real life concerns of elite performers. Ongoing research examines: (a) rest and recovery in athletes, coaches, the team around the team, and tactical populations; and; (b) integrated teamwork in human performance. In her sport and performance psychology practice, Dr. Meyer uses a systems approach to enhance the performance of athletes, teams, and sport organizations as well as tactical and corporate populations. She has worked with professional and world-class athletes, teams, and sport organizations in freestyle skiing, ice hockey, speed skating, football, basketball, soccer, tennis, golf, equestrian, and many other sports.

Joan Shapiro Beigh

Teaching Professor, Organizations & Strategic Management

Dr. Shapiro Beigh is an academic and a practitioner/consultant. Her consulting spans organizational communication, change, and stakeholder feedback. Her academic interests include work styles, procrastination, creativity, and teams. Her current research examines reactions to deadlines as antecedent reactions to work style behaviors. She is also active in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) community, examining opportunities to improve student team projects testing early interventions. Mostly recently, Dr. Shapiro Beigh was president of the Operations Management and Entrepreneurship Association, planning OMEA’s annual conference for the past two years. She comes to UWM from Loyola University Chicago and before that, DePaul University; at both schools, she received awards for teaching innovations in offering students choice-based assignments, projects requiring creative problem-solving, and having a teaching style that is inclusive, respectful, and sensitive to students’ needs for psychological safety. At Loyola, she was allocated funding as a SoTL scholar, a “Rising Star,” and a runner-up to the prestigious St. Ignatius of Loyola Teaching Excellence Award. At DePaul University, she received a teaching innovation award from the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University, as well as funding for SoTL research that was later delivered at the Academy of Management’s Teaching and Learning Conference. She also has been named a 2023-2024 fellow to the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center. Dr. Shapiro Beigh has published papers in Personality and Individual Differences and the Journal of Business Management & Change. She has presented her research and delivered professional development workshops (PDWs) at the Academy of Management Annual Conference, the Academy of Management Teaching and Learning Conference, the Midwest Academy of Management, the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, the Western Business & Management Association International Research conference, and two MBAA International divisions. Joan’s qualitative dissertation examined heterogeneity within work styles, and she has incorporated this research into her teaching. Prior to her teaching and academic research, Joan had a successful consulting practice in organizational communication and stakeholder feedback research, catering to clients that ranged from mid-sized divisions of Fortune 50 corporations and mid-sized private companies to national non-profit organizations and boutique professional service firms. She is a 2024-2025 Wisconsin UW System Teaching Fellow.

Ilya Avdeev

Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering | Director, Lubar Entrepreneurship Center (LEC) | Co-Founder and Executive Director, UWM Student Startup Challenge | Director (PI), Milwaukee Regional Energy Education Initiative

Founder and Director, Advanced Manufacturing and Design Laboratory. RESEARCH FOCUS: Real-time and reduced-order modeling (Digital Twin) Design of energy storage systems Design thinking in engineering education

Nathan Salowitz

Richard and Joanne Grigg Faculty Fellowship | Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering | Founder, Advanced Structures Laboratory

After earning his B.S. degree at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Dr. Salowitz worked as a Structural Analyst with Boeing for several years before pursuing graduate studies at Stanford University. His current research is focused on creating new mechanical sensors and actuators intended for water systems and intelligent/multifunctional materials that can detect, report, and respond to their state. His past research has addressed failure mechanisms, damage detection, and structural health monitoring in advanced materials.

Kyle Ebersole

Professor, Athletic Training, Physical Therapy

Kyle Ebersole conducts research pertinent to expanding the scientific knowledge base that informs the physiological basis for injury prevention, re-conditioning, strength training, and physiological performance across a continuum of sport and occupational athletes. Ebersole is a Licensed Athletic Trainer and has earned certifications from the National Academy in Sports Medicine as a Performance Enhancement Specialist (PES) and a Corrective Exercise Specialist (CES).

Barbara Meyer

Professor, Athletic Training & Sports Psychology | Laboratory Director, Laboratory for Sport Psychology& Performance Excellence

Dr. Meyer’s research projects are borne out of the need to identify solutions to the real life concerns of elite performers. Ongoing research examines: (a) rest and recovery in athletes, coaches, the team around the team, and tactical populations; and; (b) integrated teamwork in human performance. In her sport and performance psychology practice, Dr. Meyer uses a systems approach to enhance the performance of athletes, teams, and sport organizations as well as tactical and corporate populations. She has worked with professional and world-class athletes, teams, and sport organizations in freestyle skiing, ice hockey, speed skating, football, basketball, soccer, tennis, golf, equestrian, and many other sports.

Nathaniel Stern

Professor, Creative Technologies / Mechanical Engineering | Director, UWM Startup Challenge

Nathaniel Stern is an artist and writer, Fulbright and NSF grantee and professor, interventionist and public citizen. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from ecological, participatory, and online interventions, interactive, immersive, and mixed reality environments, to prints, sculptures, videos, performances. and hybrid forms. His first book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Gylphi 2013), takes a close look at the stakes for interactive and digital art, and Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (Dartmouth 2018) is a creative and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, which argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently interconnected, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. Stern’s ongoing work with startups and industry, on the other hand, has helped launch dozens of new businesses, products, and ideas. He has been featured in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Daily News, BBC’s Today show, WIRED, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, PetaPixel, M Magazine, Time, Forbes, Fast Company, Scientific American, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology, Rhizome, Furtherfield, Turbulence, and more. According to Chicago’s widely popular Bad at Sports art podcast, Stern has “the most varied and strange bio of maybe anyone ever on the show,” and South Africa’s Live Out Loud magazine calls him a “prolific scholar” as well as artist, whose work is “quite possibly some of the most relevant around.” “Technological, thought-provoking and unexpected” (NPR) he’s been dubbed one of Milwaukee’s “avant-garde” (Journal Sentinel), called ”an interesting and prolific fixture” (Artthrob.co.za) behind many “multimedia experiments” (Time.com), “accessible and abstract simultaneously” (Art and Electronic Media web site), someone “with starry, starry eyes” (Wired.com) who “makes an obscene amount of work in an obscene amount of ways” (Bad at Sports) – both “bizarre and beautiful” (Gizmodo). According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, Stern makes “beautiful, glitched out art-images,” and Caleb A. Scharf at Scientific American says Stern’s art is “tremendous fun,” and “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.”

Alex Francis

Senior Engineer, Rexnord | Adjunct Professor

B.E., M.E., Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, UWM '17

J. Dietenberger

Teaching Faculty II, School of Information Studies

J. Dietenberger is an Executive Strategic Consultant, University Lecturer, Administrator, and Engineer in Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Internships, and Technology. He brings ivy league training, extensive sector, and multi-industry expertise. He is a senior-level Information Technology, Project Management, and Organizational Development leader. Mr. Dietenberger has over 25 years experience consulting domestically and internationally with a multitude of clients with diverse backgrounds — including Global 500, AmLaw 200, CxO/Executive Suite, as well as Startups, and Scale-ups. In addition to serving on multiple Corporate, University, and Community boards, he has managed projects valued up to $100 million and advised on projects upwards of $1 billion. Having authored with a member of the STEM Advisory team to a former President at the White House, the focus of this leader is “transformational success in pursuit of the client’s objectives.” He is a frequent industry speaker and utilizes processes that are collaborative, engaging, and transformational.

Melissa Wagner-Lawler

Teaching Faculty II, Printmaking & Book Arts | Teaching Faculty II, First Year Program | First Year Program & Retention Coordinator, Art & Design

Melissa Wagner-Lawler is an artist and Teaching Faculty in the Printmaking & Book Arts and First Year Program departments at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, both with an emphasis in printmaking. For over a decade, Wagner-Lawler’s practice has been dedicated to artist books and exploring the intricacies of the format. Her artist books use letterpress and other printmaking techniques to investigate elements of tension, the breakdown of information and the fragility of circumstance. To date, she has produced 15 editioned book works, all of which are housed within collections around the country. Her work is currently represented by Vamp & Tramp Booksellers. Wagner-Lawler’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in over 40 notable collections, including the Library of Congress Rare Book Collection, Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Washington, Yale University and the Smithsonian American Art & Portraiture Library.

Cynthia Brinich-Langlois

Teaching Faculty II, Printmaking & Book Arts

Through an exploration of the landscape genre, Cynthia Brinich-Langlois’ work emphasizes the effects of human intervention and manipulation in terms of altered topographies, cartographic systems of ordering space, and metaphorical interpretations of ecological systems. After completing a BA in Studio Art with a minor in Environmental Biology at Kenyon College, she pursued an MFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Printmaking from the University of New Mexico. While attending UNM, she participated in Land Arts of the American West and the Tamarind Institute’s Collaborative Lithography program. Brinich-Langlois has worked as an artist-in-residence at Elsewhere Artists Collaborative, Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, Montello Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, among others. She has exhibited her prints, books, and video animations in solo and group shows throughout the United States and abroad, and is included in the Iowa Print Group archive at the University of Iowa, the SGCI Archive at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, as well as the Land Arts of the American West collection at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno.

J. Dietenberger

Teaching Faculty II, School of Information Studies

J. Dietenberger is an Executive Strategic Consultant, University Lecturer, Administrator, and Engineer in Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Internships, and Technology. He brings ivy league training, extensive sector, and multi-industry expertise. He is a senior-level Information Technology, Project Management, and Organizational Development leader. Mr. Dietenberger has over 25 years experience consulting domestically and internationally with a multitude of clients with diverse backgrounds — including Global 500, AmLaw 200, CxO/Executive Suite, as well as Startups, and Scale-ups. In addition to serving on multiple Corporate, University, and Community boards, he has managed projects valued up to $100 million and advised on projects upwards of $1 billion. Having authored with a member of the STEM Advisory team to a former President at the White House, the focus of this leader is “transformational success in pursuit of the client’s objectives.” He is a frequent industry speaker and utilizes processes that are collaborative, engaging, and transformational.

Robin Mello

Professor, Theatre

Dr. Robin Mello (she/her) is a Professor of Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her teaching and research focuses extensively on Innovation and Human-centered teaching practices and communicating science and history through theatre and storytelling. She began her career at UWM by founding and directing the K – 12 Theatre Education Program at UWM. Her recent creative arts projects include being an embedded artist for Welcome Table! with Black Arts, MKE and Story On! For PlayLab at Exeter University, Exeter, UK. Her recent original theatre works include SPINNING TALES, CINDERELLA 30,000, A COSMIC WEB, and ORPHAN TRAIN (a devised piece about the lived experience of the Orphan Train Movement, 1853-1929).