Ezemenari M. Obasi, vice president for research and innovation and professor of family medicine and public health sciences at Wayne State University in Detroit, has been appointed to the National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities, a part of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities. He will serve a four-year term, concluding in February 2030. Dr. Obasi is known for his research on the neurobiology of stress, alcohol and drug abuse, health disparities affecting the African American community, and cultural predictors of health behaviors.
Dr. Obasi is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, where he majored in physics. He holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Ohio State University.
Miriam Johnson has been appointed interim director of the Technology Law and Policy Center at the North Carolina Central University School of Law. Johnson first joined the center in 2023 as a Technology Law Fellow. She currently teaches a course on video game law and conducts research on child and youth privacy, artificial intelligence governance, and emerging technology regulation.
Johnson is an alumna of North Carolina Central University.
Judith Crocker-Billingsley has been appointed chair of the department of social work at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. An associate professor of social work, Dr. Crocker-Billingsley has nearly three deacdes of experience as a social work educator. In addition to teaching, she serves as program director for the university’s bachelor of social work degree.
An alumna of Spelman College in Atlanta, Dr. Crocker-Billingsley holds a master of social work degree and a Ph.D. in policy, planning, administration, and social science from Clark Atlanta University.
Lewis Johnson is the new chief research officer at the University of the District of Columbia. Dr. Johnson was associate provost for strategic initiatives and a professor of physics at Florida A&M University. His current research focuses on Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), specifically investigating fundamental laser-matter interactions and their applications in environmental and hazardous-material detection. Before his tenure at FAMU, Dr. Johnson was a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Dr. Johnson holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from North Carolina State University and a Ph.D. from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Scott Poulson-Bryant has joined the faculty of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts as an assistant professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. Dr. Poulson-Bryant focuses his teaching and research on Hollywood film, Black popular music, twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. drama, genre fiction, gender and sexuality studies, and creative nonfiction. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and Fordham University in New York.
Dr. Poulson-Bryant is a graduate of Brown University, where he majored in American civilization. He holds a master’s degree in English and a Ph.D. in American studies from Harvard University.
