Conference Hosts and Honorable Guests

Moderator | Régine M. Jean-Charles

Dean’s Professor of Culture & Social Justice; Professor, Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies; Director, Africana Studies, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University

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Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic who works at the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her scholarship and teaching in Africana Studies include expertise on Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean literature, Black girlhood, Haiti, and the diaspora. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014), The Trumpet of Conscience Today (Orbis Press, 2021), and Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2022). She is currently working on two book projects–one explores representations of Haitian girlhood, and the other is a co-authored interdisciplinary study of sexual violence entitled The Rape Culture Syllabus. Dr. Jean-Charles is a regular contributor to media outlets like The Boston Globe, Ms. Magazine, WGBH, America Magazine, and Cognoscenti, where she has weighed in on topics including #metoo, higher education, and issues affecting the Haitian diaspora.

Mary Jo Ondrechen

Conference Co-Chair | Professor, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, College of Science, Northeastern University

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Prof. Ondrechen’s research group specializes in theoretical and computational chemistry and computational biology. Areas of interest include: 1) Understanding the fundamental basis for enzyme catalysis; 2) Functional genomics – prediction of the functional roles of gene products (proteins); 3) Modeling of enzyme-substrate interactions; 4) Drug discovery; and 5) Bioinformatics.

Prof. Ondrechen’s group is developing methods to predict protein function from structure and is helping to design drugs to treat infections by “brain-eating” amoebas. Another current project deals with missense mutations and why they cause disease. She is also active in promoting STEM careers to students from underserved groups.

Toyoko Orimoto

Conference Co-Chair | Professor of Physics, College of Science, Northeastern University

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Prof. Toyoko Orimoto is an Professor of Physics at Northeastern University. She is an experimental particle physicist who studies the smallest constituents of nature using one of the world’s largest science experiments–the CMS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. As part of the CMS Collaboration, Prof. Orimoto is interested in using the recently discovered Higgs boson particle as a probe for new beyond-the-Standard-Model physics, such as supersymmetry and extra dimensions. Moreover, she works on the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter and the new CMS MIP timing detector.

Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty, Prof. Orimoto was a fellow at CERN (2009-2012) and the Robert A. Millikan fellow at the California Institute of Technology (2006-2009). For her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, she studied charge-parity asymmetry with the Babar Experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

In addition to her passion for elementary particles, Prof. Orimoto advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion in all spheres–in her collaborations, in physics, at the University, and in society at large.

Corliss Thompson

Associate Dean, Graduate School of Education; Teaching Professor, Education, College of Professional Studies, Northeastern University

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Corliss Thompson, Ph.D. is a Teaching Professor who serves as the Associate Dean of Graduate School of Education in the College of Professional Studies at Northeastern University. Dr. Thompson previously served as the Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs in the GSE and Special Assistant to the Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Prior to working in higher education, Dr. Thompson was a program evaluator and elementary school teacher. Her scholarly expertise is within the field of teacher education and social and cultural foundations of learning.