Dr. Candi Cann, associate professor of religion, teaches at Baylor University in both the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core and the religion department. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative religion from Harvard University, an M.A. in Asian religions from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, and a B.A. in Asian studies and English from St. Andrews in North Carolina. In 2023, she held a Fulbright at Han Nam University, in Daejeon, South Korea.

Dr. Cann's research focuses on death and dying, and the impact of remembering (and forgetting) in shaping how lives are recalled, remembered, and celebrated. She has published five books and numerous articles and book chapters. Her first book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), centers on grief and memorialization in the contemporary world. Dying to Eat: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death and the Afterlife (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is an edited collection on the intersection of food in death and grief. The Routledge Handbook of Death and Afterlife (Routledge, 2018) is an edited collection containing thirty chapters examining death and afterlife from around the world. Her most recent book, Death and Religion: The Basics (Routledge, 2023), examined the role of religion in death, dying and grief around the world, and argues that medical culture may be nearly as important as religious worldviews in determining how one views death and the afterlife. Finally, she has a forthcoming book with MIT press titled Augmented, which discusses the intersection of death, disability, and technology, and will be published in 2025. In addition to her writing, Dr. Cann’s work has been featured in podcasts, films, and interviews with the BBC, NPR, C-SPAN’s Book TV, Milk Street, Financial Times, Washington Post, and many others. You can find her online at www.deathscholar.com.

At Baylor, she teaches world cultures, social world, world religions, Buddhism, Christian heritage, and death and dying, and she is an advisor to Baylor’s Hawai’i Club.

When she isn’t writing or in the classroom, she can be found hanging out with her family, creating pottery, or drinking coffee and reading books. 

Dr. William E. Cullinan, PT ’81, received his bachelor’s degree in physical therapy from Marquette in 1981 and earned his Doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Virginia in 1991. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute (1991–1995) before joining the Marquette faculty in the Department of Biomedical Sciences in 1995. His research laboratory, which has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, focuses on brain circuits that regulate neuroendocrine responses to stress, and whose dysfunction leads to neuropsychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and others. He has authored numerous research articles and book chapters on functional neuroanatomy, stress neurobiology, neuroendocrinology, and neurophysiology in journals including Trends in Neurosciences, Brain Structure and Function, and the Journal of Neuroscience. He founded the Integrative Neuroscience Research Center at Marquette, which brings together campus neuroscientists around a biweekly seminar series and promotes collaboration across neuroscience research laboratories at Marquette.

Cullinan teaches courses in anatomy, neuroanatomy, and neuroscience to undergraduate students, to students in professional programs within the College of Health Sciences, and to dental students. He also presents a biweekly neuroscience lecture series to neurosurgical residents at the Medical College of Wisconsin where he is adjunct professor of neurosurgery and directs a unique human brain dissection and course that draws a large national audience to Marquette University each year. He was named to the International Advisory Board of Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy in 2018 and was listed by Stanford University as among the top 2% of cited scientists in the world in 2023.

Cullinan received the university’s John P. Raynor, S.J., Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence in 2002 and the John P. Raynor, S.J., Professorship in 2006. He was also instrumental in the development of Marquette’s biomedical sciences undergraduate major, which was established in 1997 and quickly grew to become the university’s largest undergraduate program. Today the program serves as academic home to over 750 students. He has served as dean of the College of Health Sciences since 2007. During his tenure as dean, the college has seen growth in undergraduate enrollment, expansion of clinical professional programs and research expenditures, the development and launching of new master’s and professional programs, the addition of new clinics, and elevated program national rankings.

Dr. Edward Blumenthal joined the Marquette University Department of Biological Sciences in 2003 after receiving his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Yale University and conducting postdoctoral research at the University of California San Diego and the University of Virginia. He is currently an associate professor of biological sciences. Blumenthal is a geneticist who uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to understand neurodegenerative disease. Blumenthal served as chair of the Department of Biological Sciences from 2015-2018, as co-director of the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute from 2019-2021, and since 2018 has been an associate dean of the Klingler College of Arts & Sciences. 

Dr. Chelsea Cook is currently an assistant professor in the Biological Sciences department at Marquette University and the chief science officer at HiveTech Solutions, a company that creates environmentally controlled storage for small farmers. Previously, she was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University, where she studied how individual learning behavior scales to shape collective behavior. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, she studied the social, physiological, and ecological mechanisms of collective thermoregulatory behavior in honey bees. A major part of her mission as a researcher is to make science more accessible, so she has developed courses in beekeeping and environmental biology that she teaches in prisons and addiction recovery facilities.

The Cook lab takes a holistic approach to understand social behavior. It aims to explain why and how collective behavior occurs at every level; from the collective, to individual behavior, to the physiology and genetics of the individual. Ecological context is critical for understanding social behaviors, so we also explore the environmental conditions that elicit many social behaviors, such as the need for food or a change in temperature.

Dr. Nathan Lemoine is a New Orleans native who grew up playing soccer before it was cool. Lemoine received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from the University of Richmond in 2006. From there, he moved to Pensacola, Fla., and worked as an hourly contractor for the EPA Office of Research and Development. In 2007, he moved to Alabama to study coral reef ecology at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. He received his Masters of Marine Science in 2010. He then moved to Miami, Fla., to begin his Ph.D. in coral reef ecology at Florida International University with Dr. Deron Burkepile (now at UCSB). Lemoine switched to terrestrial plant-insect ecology and was co-advised by Dr. John Parker of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Station in Edgewater, Md. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. and moved to Colorado State University for a USDA NIFA AFRI post-doctoral fellowship studying the impacts of drought on insect control of grassland nutrient cycling. In 2019, he began as an assistant professor at Marquette University, where he enjoys studying Wisconsin prairies, watching Tottenham Hotspur, and once a year poking dead elephants with a soil corer. Nate's research primarily focus on soil-plant-insect feedback loops and he is particularly interested in how various aspects of global change will fundamentally alter this feedback loop. Beginning in Miami, Nate has been accompanied at every stop by his loyal companion and office mate: English cocker spaniel Sasha. Her research interests include aquatic fitness, snow physics, and rodent and avian behavior.

Dr. Paul Gasser is associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology and physiology from the University of Wyoming and his Ph.D. in biology from Arizona State University. From 2005 to 2007 he was a National Science Foundation International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience and Endocrinology at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom). He joined the Marquette faculty in 2007. His research, which has been funded by NSF and the National Institutes of Health, focuses on the mechanisms by which stress hormones alter cellular function in the brain, with the goal of understanding how chronic stress contributes to the pathology of neuropsychiatric disorders, neurodegenerative disease and cancer. This work is carried out in collaboration with undergraduate and Ph.D. students and is published in journals including the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Comparative Neurology and Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he was awarded Marquette’s Way Klingler Research Fellowship. In addition to research, Dr. Gasser teaches courses in biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience and the neurobiology of depressive illness to undergraduate and Ph.D. students. In 2011, he received the College of Health Sciences Edward W. Carroll Award for Teaching Excellence, and in 2016 he was awarded Marquette’s Rev. John P. Raynor, S.J., Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.