Twice a year, the Office of the Provost hosts Mic/Nite, a “Pecha-Kucha Powered” social gathering designed to enhance the intellectual, interdisciplinary, and cultural life of the faculty and staff at UT Knoxville.
One of the challenges in a large university community is working across the silos that often separate disciplines. Mic/Nite offers an opportunity to build bridges and foster a deeper appreciation of the many facets of a large, comprehensive university. Presentations offer a cross section of the intellectual life of UT Knoxville and provide an opportunity for social interaction among faculty and staff who may not otherwise have the opportunity to interact with each other.
See Spring 2026 presenters and topics
Who Can Attend
UT Mic/Nite is an event for UT faculty and staff (and their guests) and is not open to students or the general public.
What is Pecha-Kucha?
Pecha-Kucha is a simple presentation format that features twenty images displayed for twenty seconds each. The images automatically forward as the presenter talks. To learn more, visit the Pecha-Kucha FAQ. Samples are posted on the Pecha-Kucha Presentations page.
The format originated in Tokyo, Japan. It was first introduced in 2003 and has spread to more than 400 cities around the world. The format allows presenters to depict and describe everything from urban design or economic theory to a series of photographs. Mic/Nite is held in cooperation with PechaKucha Night Knoxville, which was started in 2011 to encourage intellectual and cultural dialogue. Mic/Nites are special interdisciplinary events that facilitate dialogue between university faculty and staff by showcasing the academic pursuits of the campus.
Explore Pecha Kucha events from around the world: PechaKucha 20×20 – Official Site | PechaKucha 20×20 – Knoxville | PechaKucha 20×20 – FAQ
Fall 2026 Presenters and Topics
The Double-Edged Sword of English Language Support
Caroline Bartlett, Assistant Professor, Education, Health, and Human Sciences
English learners (ELs) bring linguistic and cultural assets to their classrooms. Federal law guarantees language support that enables them to access rigorous academic content while developing English proficiency. But EL classification can be a double-edged sword. Often, language development classes reduce time spent in core courses. English proficiency requirements keep students out of Advanced Placement, career and technical education, and dual enrollment. For some students, the EL label might cost more than it provides.
Reclassification, the formal process of exiting EL status, should resolve this problem. However, timing is important. Early reclassification is associated with students losing supports they still need, while late reclassification restricts access to rigorous coursework for prepared students. Further complicating the problem, many prepared students are never reclassified.
I examine how reclassification shapes EL students’ opportunities and how to ensure that prepared EL students can excel once the EL label is removed.
How Do I Age More Successfully? That Is the Question
Quinten Bernhold, Associate Professor, Communication and Information
Successful aging can be defined in numerous ways, including a person’s (a) overall satisfaction and contentment with their life, (b) mental health, (c) physical health, and (d) engagement in healthy behaviors and avoidance of unhealthy behaviors. In this presentation, I explain my research on how the communication that people observe from their social environments and people’s own age-related communication might be associated with their successful aging. For example, when people have a romantic partner who tends to not discuss various age-related issues or when people themselves do not discuss various age-related issues, people feel less confident in their ability to handle changes and challenges that might arise as they age. This reduced confidence, in turn, has predicted (a) less satisfaction and contentment with the state of their lives, (b) more depressive symptoms, and (c) more alcohol use disorder symptoms. The presentation ends with practical tips on how to age successfully.
The Mystery of the Three-Legged God
Megan Bryson, Associate Professor, Arts and Sciences
Museums throughout the world display statues of a ferocious Buddhist deity with nine heads, eighteen arms, and three legs, but they don’t agree on who he is. While it is actually quite normal for tantric deities to sport nine heads and eighteen arms, the three legs are very unusual and frustrate attempts at identification. I draw on manuscripts from the 12th to 15th centuries to show that this deity was primarily worshiped in the Dali kingdom (937-1253) that ruled what is now southwest China. Yet his worship did not end when the Dali kingdom fell, but spread to the court of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and beyond. The three-legged god’s example illustrates the creativity of the so-called periphery. Rather than being passive recipients of influence from geopolitical centers, peripheries such as Dali developed their own innovations that influenced the center.
Blazing the Trail: Libraries as Guides for the Research Lifecycle
Melissa Cantrell, Associate Professor, Libraries
Olivia Chin, Assistant Professor, Libraries
Brianne Dosch, Associate Professor, Libraries
The research journey doesn’t end when the data is collected, and it doesn’t begin when the writing starts. Long before a paper is submitted and long after it’s published, UT Libraries is at work helping researchers manage and preserve their data, navigate open publishing options, and ensure their work remains discoverable and accessible for years to come. This presentation follows a single research project through the full arc from structuring and depositing data using tools like Dryad, to publishing decisions and open access pathways, to long-term preservation through TRACE. Along the way, it reframes the Libraries not as a stop researchers make along the way, but as a guide present at every stage, one whose support shapes how research is conducted, shared, and remembered.
The Flood Doesn’t End When the Water Goes Down
Emine Fidan, Assistant Professor, Herbert College of Agriculture
When Hurricane Helene reached East Tennessee on September 27, 2024, it was hundreds of miles inland and running out of energy. It met mountains already soaked from days of rain, and the Nolichucky became one of the largest floods ever recorded in the southern Appalachians. The images from that week are familiar. What came after is not. A year later there is sand where there used to be cropland, and questions a farmer cannot answer by looking: what settled into this soil, is the river safe again, will this field grow anything next spring. This presentation follows a flood past the point where it stops being news, through the fieldwork that answers those questions and through insurance records that show who recovers and who does not. Post-disaster science is the difference between a flood that teaches us something and a flood we only survive. We do this so that the next time, “nobody could have known” is not true.
Inside the Mind of a Supply Chain Manager: The Art and Science of Matching Supply and Demand
Tom Goldsby, Professor, Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain Management (SCM) spent years as invisible plumbing, then became front-page news. Blocked canals, anchored ships, vaccine cold chains, and empty shelves revealed how much of daily life depends on getting it right.
Doing it well takes both halves of the brain. The science is the analytical side: forecasting, network modeling, inventory math, AI-driven planning, and the relentless balancing of supply and demand. The art is the human side: reading uncertainty no model captures, anticipating the next viral moment, judging risk in the tiers you can’t see, negotiating with partners, and deciding when the numbers should be overruled.
This session goes inside that mindset — and inside a program built to teach and advance it. The University of Tennessee-Knoxville is home to North America’s top-ranked Supply Chain programs, roughly 2,000 students, and research shaping how the discipline is practiced.
The Muscular Demands of Turning While Walking
Steven Lautzenheiser, Assistant Professor, Arts and Sciences
Turning is a feature of human locomotion, requiring muscular force to propel the body and stabilize it over the supporting limb. To examine these demands, I quantified muscle-force patterns during turning and compared them with straight-path walking. I collected kinematic and kinetic data from 10 adults walking barefoot in four conditions: straight walking, 45-degree and 90-degree sidestep turns, and a 45-degree crossover turn. I used a musculoskeletal model to calculate pelvis and lower-limb muscle forces. Statistical parametric mapping determined whether muscle-force patterns in the turning conditions differed from those during straight-path walking. Overall, hip and ankle muscles that stabilize the body during walking showed differences in the timing and magnitude of force production across all turning conditions. These findings clarify the muscular demands of directional change and may improve rehabilitation, fall prevention, footwear design, and treatment of foot and ankle injuries.
The Supreme Court & The Federalism of Facts
Morgan Marietta, Professor, Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs
The Supreme Court may have “no influence over either the sword or the purse,” but it does hold the power of the dictionary—what Huey Newton called “the ability to define phenomena.” That power is often unrecognized, but should be controversial. This brief talk is about the how the Supreme Court has embraced a new doctrine that could be called “the federalism of facts.” When realities are disputed and uncertain, individual States can define them within their borders, which means that influential facts can shift as citizens travel. The background to the new doctrine is that perceptions of reality in America are increasingly divided (see One Nation, Two Realties, Marietta & Barker 2016). This dictionary power of the Court—especially if it allows States to differ under the federalism of facts—raises more questions than this talk will answer.
dvocacy Coalitions and Policy Change in Africa
Alex Osei-Kojo, Assistant Professor, Arts and Sciences
The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been used widely to study public policy. Yet, insights about the structure of coalitions and the forces that drive policy change in African governance often take the backstage in global policy discussions. This lessens the contribution of African insights into policy process scholarship and hampers the production of generalizable knowledge. We address these issues by answering two interrelated research questions: what are the characteristics of advocacy coalitions, and, if appropriate, what are the explanations of policy change? These questions are explored across eight case studies in different policy domains across the continent’s five regions: North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. Using original data collected from various sources and analyzed with a variety of techniques, this book evaluates the ACF’s theoretical predictions about coalition formation and policy change. It also explores the challenges of applying the ACF in Africa, such as incorporating the role of ethnic, cultural, and tribal identities in coalition formation, taking a broad perspective on political organizations, and improving theories of nascent subsystems. In doing so, Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Change in Africa elucidates the key characteristics of advocacy coalitions and plausible explanations of policy change.
Bioinspired engineering of safer medical devices
Dacheng Ren, Professor, Tickle College of Engineering
Each year, millions of medical devices are implanted in the human body to restore essential functions and improve quality of life. Unfortunately, medical device-associated infections can cause serious complications and may have major impacts on patient health, including death. These infections are often persistent and highly tolerant to antibiotics because bacteria form biofilms, complex protective structures that shield bacteria from antibiotics and the body’s immune system. To address this challenge, new biomaterials are needed to prevent biofilm formation and to remove established biofilms. In this presentation, we will discuss medical device-associated infections and our research on engineering infection-resistant biomaterials using bioinspired design.
Leaky Gut, Big Problems: Protein-Losing Enteropathy in Dogs
Sarah Schmid, Assistant Professor, Veterinary Medicine
Protein-losing enteropathy (PLE) is a life-threatening condition in which dogs lose protein through their intestines. PLE can have several causes, the most common being food allergies and disease of the intestinal vessels that transport dietary fat. Historically, treatment focused on reducing food allergens. More recent research suggests that restricting dietary fat, along with reducing food allergens, can improve survival. Other studies have shown that disease affecting the intestinal vessels that transport fat is underdiagnosed and often occurs alongside food allergies. As a result, dogs with PLE are often fed diets that are both low in fat and contain proteins they have never eaten before. We hypothesize that reducing dietary fat plays a larger role in treatment success and that feeding a new protein source might not be necessary. If confirmed, our findings could make treatment simpler and less expensive, while helping identify the best diet for dogs with PLE.