Conference Convenors

Amy Bix is an Associate Professor in Iowa State's Department of History. Her research and teaching interests include the history of American technology and science, the history of women in science, technology and medicine, the history of science policy, and 20th century American history. Professor Bix's recent book is titled Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?: America's Depression-Era Debate over Technological Unemployment. She is the author of the History of Science Society's annual employment survey report and serves as Secretary/Treasurer for the Midwest Section for the History of Science. She is currently doing research on the history of women's engineering education.

Jill Bystydzienski is Director of the Women's Studies Program and Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University. She is responsible for the academic development of the cross-disciplinary Women's Studies Program that brings together faculty and students from more than twenty departments and five colleges within the university. Her research focuses on women in politics, women's movements, and women and gender in international and cross-cultural perspective. She is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Women in Electoral Politics: Lessons from Norway, Women Transforming Politics: Worldwide Strategies for Empowerment, and Democratization and Women's Grassroots Movements (co-edited with Joti Sekhon).

Eugenia Farrar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Zoology and Genetics at Iowa State. Her research interests are in vertebrate developmental endocrinology, environmental hormone disruption, amphibian decline, the status of mid-western amphibians, and spadefoot toad biology. She has published numerous articles in these areas and her research has been funded by various organizations including NSF and USGS. Her teaching interests include Endocrinology, Women in Science and Engineering, and Human Reproduction. The latter courses are cross-listed with Zoology and Women's Studies. She has served on the Program for Women and Science and Engineering Advisory Board as well as the Women's Studies Program Committee and received Iowa State's Carrie Chapman Catt Sex Equity Award.

Carla Fehr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Iowa State. Her research interests include the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, feminist theory and evolutionary biology. She has published articles on topics such as the different ways of integrating various evolutionary explanations for sexual reproduction, how evolutionary explanations of sex affect our cultural concepts of gender, and how the development of scientific values is influenced by culture. She teaches courses on the philosophy of biology and feminist theory. In addition to a Ph.D. in Philosophy, she has a M.S. in Zoology.

Nora Gresch is a visiting Research Scholar from Germany at the Women's Studies Program and at the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. Trained as a sociologist, her research interests concern the analysis of women and criminology, epistemology of sociological theories and methodologies and how organizational structures affect knowledge production and gender. She wrote the survey New methods to achieve gender equality in the USA and the Federal Republic of Germany for the publication series of the Officer for Women's affairs (University of Bielefeld) and completed the postgraduate research and study courses of the pilot semester of the International Women's University (ifu). She created and maintains together with JoAnn Rogers the webpage for this conference.

Carolyn Heising is a Professor of Industrial, Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State. She is serving her second term as an elected member of the national Board of Directors of the American Nuclear Society. Professor Heising's research areas include: reliability and quality engineering, probabilistic risk analysis (PRA), statistical quality control (SQC), total quality management (TQM), and technology safety assessments. In particular, she is a well-known expert in nuclear power plant safety, condition monitoring, and predictive maintenance. She is spending the 1999-2000 academic year on sabbatical leave with the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy in Washington, D.C.

Barbara Lograsso is Assistant Director of the Program for Women in Science and Engineering at Iowa State University. She also has been an Associate Scientist with the Metallurgy and Ceramics Division of the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory since 1988. She was on the Organizing Committee for the International Powder Metallurgy Meeting held May 30 - June 2, 2000. Lograsso has 20 publications and holds six patents.