Lena R. Hann

Associate Professor and Chair of Public Health

• Phone: 309-794-3464
• Email: lenahann@augustana.edu
• Office: Lindberg Center 211

Lena R. Hann, PhD, MPH, CHES, is an associate professor of public health and the author of "Patient-Centered Pregnancy Tissue Viewing: Strategies and Best Practices for Independent Abortion Providers," a medical best practices manual used in over 100 health clinics across the U.S.

She spent the formative years of her career working in reproductive health and abortion-providing clinics as a pregnancy options counselor, patient advocate, laboratory technician, and health educator. 

Before joining Augustana College, Dr. Hann coordinated the master of public health program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2009-2016, and taught a variety of courses, including human sexuality, global health and diversity study abroad in Australia, professionalism in public health, and the MPH practicum and capstone. 

She also worked as education programs coordinator for Planned Parenthood of Illinois in Champaign from 2008-2011, where she directed a teen pregnancy prevention peer education program called the Teen Awareness Group (TAG). TAG employed and trained local teens to teach evidence-based sexual health education to area middle and high school students. 

As an MPH student at the University of Iowa College of Public Health from 2006-2008, Dr. Hann helped open the University's first LGBT Resource Center and served as its first manager.

Since joining Augustana in 2016, Dr. Hann teaches practice-based core and elective courses for the Public Health and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs. Students in these courses can expect immersive, rigorous, hands-on experiences that blend the science and practice of public health. 

Many students have gone on to pursue campus and community-level projects they began in one of Dr. Hann's courses, such as the Augustana Student Flu Shot Clinic, Campus Smoke Free Initiative, the annual Sexual Health Education Fair, community blood drives, and the new Augustana Convenient Care Clinic. These projects highlight the impact a liberal arts education can have on students' personal and professional interests. Graduates from the PUBH major are now in careers all over the country and the globe, continuing their passions for lifelong learning and helping others.

Dr. Hann has two ongoing research projects. The first examines independent providers' unique experiences in abortion care and she has presented this work in Australia, Canada, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and across the United States. Her other project explores Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS), an under-studied auto-inflammatory disorder, and how people who live with HS navigate their personal and medical experiences. Dr. Hann employs student research assistants who have co-presented at conferences in Atlanta, Seattle, Chicago, and South Africa and co-authored scholarly articles. 

Dr. Hann's other public health and scholarly interests include stigma in health, community harm reduction practices, gender identity and trans health in patient-centered care, and vocational reflection in public health education. She is also a trained and registered yoga and meditation teacher who specializes in mindful movement, breathwork, and stress reduction.

Take a class with Dr. Hann:

PUBH 100: Introduction to Public Health
PUBH 247: Whole Person Health Study Abroad in Scandinavia
PUBH 273: Reproductive Justice: Perspectives on Policies, Practice, and Public Health 
PUBH 306: Sexuality and Health Education
PUBH 350: Health Behavior and Health Promotion
PUBH 365: Professionalism in Public Health Practice
PUBH 399: Directed Study
PUBH 400: Independent Study
PUBH 450: Senior Inquiry Practice Experience (Internship)
PUBH 460: Senior Inquiry Research and Reflection (Capstone)

J Austin Williamson

Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-7367
• Email: jaustinwilliamson@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald 007

I teach and conduct research in the clinical area of psychology. Many students who take my classes are interested in careers as mental health professionals. We learn about topics such as personality testing, psychological disorders, and mental health treatment using a hands-on approach. Students gain exposure to psychological tests and evidence-based treatments used by practitioners in the field, often in the context of working with case reports of actual patients.

I lead teams of student researchers who study the social experiences that influence a person’s risk for depression and other psychological disorder. We examine both supportive interactions that can protect people from psychological symptoms and stressful interactions that can lead to a psychological disorder.

I am also a licensed clinical psychologist with an active practice. My continuing experience in the field greatly informs the teaching I do with my students, the questions I pursue with my co-researchers, and the guidance I give to students I advise who are interested in mental health careers.
 

Shara D. Stough

Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-3376
• Email: SharaStough@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald 010

After discovering neuroscience through her undergraduate majors in Psychology and Philosophy at Coe College, Dr. Shara Stough earned her Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the University of California-Irvine in 2010. She is thrilled to be back at a liberal arts institution where she is an associate professor in the department of Psychology and Neuroscience. 

Dr. Stough’s doctoral research explored neural mechanisms underlying a simple form of fear memory in giant sea slugs. Her current research focuses on associative fear memory in young chickens as a potential animal model of post-traumatic stress disorder. 

She enjoys involving students in all aspects of the research process, which contributes to students’ progress on a wide range of Augustana’s college-wide learning outcomes. Student interests have led to recent investigations of the social transmission of fear between chickens and the impact of olfactory cues on fear memory.

Stough teaches courses in Research Methods, Learning, Addiction, and Physiological Psychology, and supervises students’ Senior Inquiry research projects.  

She also enjoys exposing students to neuroscience outside the traditional classroom by taking students to neuroscience conferences where they have the opportunity to present their research, and by co-organizing NeurdFest, an annual brain fair for second graders from Longfellow Elementary. 
    
The individualized support and guidance from faculty in her undergraduate education was essential in helping Stough develop and pursue her passion for science and education. She now seeks to provide that same quality mentorship to her own students. 

V Phipps

Associate Professor of Art and Graphic Design, Chair of Art

• Phone: 563-203-1231
• Email: vickiephipps@augustana.edu
• Office: Old Main 207

I am in love with graphic design and if that sounds personal, it is because it is. Through my design experiences inside and outside the classroom, I have came to an understanding of visual literacy as a vital skillset which can foster self–determination and autonomous participation in the cultural sphere.

I see art and design as not only a desirable mode of community engagement but a human propensity that when cultivated results in a dynamic engagement with our environment.

Instantaneous communication and real-time processing of data have altered concepts of sharing and authorship, creating fundamental shifts in how we experience time, space and relationships. How will the academy develop cannons of knowledge that are relevant in a decentralized world of complex generative systems?

More importantly, how do we understand the impact of our lives and actions in the context of this world? What do we teach when the rate of technological advancements make it abundantly clear that no one knows what tools will exist in five years?

As an educator, I work alongside student designers to explore our environment through a graphic design lens. An introduction to graphic design cultivates active looking. By learning to unpack information and engage with unfamiliar content, graphic designers develop skills of interpretation.

As student designers develop their individual processes of working, they become more comfortable with their own ability to leverage basic design principles as well as generate original concepts.

I feel that it is imperative that graphic design studies not be confined to the vacuum of a studio but include engagement with the larger community. Design research conducted within robust settings enable individuals to discover self at the same time they explore design theory.

My work and teaching philosophy are informed by an openness which places an emphasis on questions as content. I am more interested in what you are curious about and hungry for than in what you have memorized or hold as fixed belief systems. I see questions not as a means to an answer but an inherent source of inspiration for mark making and living. 

I am not an instructor who seeks to instill knowledge of good and bad design in students. After demonstrating basic proficient with traditional concepts, I invite student designers into a direct investigation of the assumptions those principles stand upon. 

What does it mean to practice graphic design? I believe that all humans are designers and the concerns and ideas shaping the field of design in this contemporary moment are related to all fields of human research and activity. 

In my design classroom, I challenge students to know history and technique while questioning the kind of designer/ person they are now and want to become.

Specializations: Art, Graphic design, Video production, Typography, Digital media, Social media, Center for Visual Culture

Ian Harrington

Professor and Chair of Psychology and Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-7243
• Email: IanHarrington@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald 9

I am interested the neural bases of behavior. In my teaching and in my research I am interested in exploring the relationship between brain and behavior.

As an undergraduate I was introduced to the field of neuroscience through my psychology major. As a graduate student I studied the effects of brain damage on perceptual experience. As a post-doctoral fellow I studied the ways in which individual brain cells and groups of such cells represented information about features of our perceptual surroundings.

Recently, motivated by teaching I have been doing with a colleague in philosophy, I have begun to study behavioral and physiological responses of participants as they consider courses of action in moral dilemmas. This work is motivated by an interest in understanding how unconscious brain responses influence the decisions we make. 

Specializations: Neuroscience

Rupa G. Gordon

Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Chair of Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-7360
• Email: rupagordon@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald Hall 014

Dr. Rupa Gupta Gordon received her B.S. in neurobiology from Purdue University and Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Iowa.  

Her work at Iowa focused on understanding the effects of focal brain injury on social behavior, decision-making, and memory.  

At Augustana, her research focuses on behavioral and physiological synchrony in conversation, or our ability to easily pick up on the behaviors and physiological responses of our conversational partners.  

Dr. Gordon regularly teaches Introduction to Neuroscience, Advanced Seminar in Neuroscience, Statistics, Research Methods, and Senior Inquiry.

Daniel P. Corts

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-7646
• Email: DanielCorts@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald Hall 8

Dr. Daniel Corts received his B.S. in Psychology from Belmont University and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at the University of Tennessee in 1999. He completed a post-doctoral position at Furman University for one year where he focused on the teaching of psychology.

Corts is now Professor of Psychology at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois where he has been for over 10 years.

While in graduate school, he focused on language and gesture production. He has since branched out to explore intentional forgetting, and has also published in the area of student development.

Corts also likes to conduct research in just about any topics his students wish to explore.

In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his two children, traveling, camping, and cooking.

Specializations: Memory, Problem solving, Decision making, Language comprehension, Cognitive science, Statistics, Program evaluation

Xiaowen Zhang

Professor of Political Science, Division Dean of Social Sciences

• Phone: 309-794-8954
• Email: XiaowenZhang@augustana.edu
• Office: Old Main 313

Xiaowen was born and raised in Beijing, China and came to the United States in 2001. She graduated from University of Southern California in 2007 with a Ph.D. in International Relations. Before joining Augustana, she was a lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of Southern California. Xiaowen's field of interests is International Relations, with an emphasis on international political economy. Her dissertation work is about how the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism impacts member countries' dispute settlement strategies.

As a faculty member of the political science department, Xiaowen teaches an intro level course on international relations and several upper-division courses in the area of international relations, such as Contemporary World Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Xiaowen is also a member of Augustana's Asian Studies Program and teaches Politics of East Asia on a regular basis.

Specializations: International Relations