Often called “The fun doctor,” Rick Solomon M.D., Medical Director at Ann Arbor Center for Development and Behavioral Pediatrics, will be one of the guests on Conversations! where he will answer questions and discuss the latest advances in autism. Dr. Solomon is a developmental pedriatician. His widely admired PLAY Project Autism Intervention Model helps young children improve their language, development, and autism severity and his book, “Autism: The Potential Within”, details the intervention. He will be joined by Rebecca Newman who will describe her life as someone with autism.

Chuck Newman interviews Award-Winning Psychologist Ethan Kross who released his First Book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It
Ethan Kross, psychologist, professor, and author shares his research on how the conversations people have with themselves impacts their health, performance, decisions and relationships and shape their lives and give them the power to change themselves. He describes groundbreaking behavioral and brain research with colorful real-world examples.

Learn everything you should know about coronaviruses, including vaccinations, mutations, antiviral treatments and what we should be doing to protect ourselves from future pandemics.

Dr. Susan Weiss is considered “The Mother of Coronaviruses” and is co-director of Penn’s new Center of Research for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens.

Dr. Scott Small has dedicated his career to understanding why memory forsakes us. As director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University, he focuses largely on patients who experience pathological forgetting, and it is in contrast to their suffering that normal forgetting, which we experience every day, appears in sharp relief.

Over the course of evolution our brains have become excellent at detecting rewards (e.g. food or a potential mate) in our environment and in turn generating motivation to obtain that reward. While this system was originally necessary for survival, it can easily become maladaptive in a world where access to rewards (such as high-calorie food, drugs and alcohol, gambling) are present in abundance. Unfortunately, this reward detection system can become hypersentitive in some individuals, in turn causing excessive desire and craving each time they come across a reward cue in their world.

Join Assistant Professor Nicole Gardner-Neblett of the University of Michigan for her presentation on the importance of storytelling in the development of literacy skills, and learn some strategies for supporting young children as storytellers.

In Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, local author William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

William Hampton was born in 1948 in Tyler, Texas, and his grandmother was the midwife. He remembers attending church revival picnics, the Texas Rose Festival, and the Juneteenth parade in his hometown. While attending college in Arlington, Texas, he was active in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He went on to launch a Section 8 subsidized housing program in Arlington and in Ann Arbor, where he worked in the community development office. Mr.

Victoria Suane Milton was born in 1933 and grew up in River Rouge, Michigan. Her mother was of French creole background from New Orleans. In 1938 her father, Samuel B. Milton, founded one of Michigan’s first Black-owned hospitals, Sidney A. Sumby Memorial Hospital. He was also the first Black Wayne County coroner. After getting her BA in social work from the University of Michigan in the 1950s, Victoria returned to work at Sumby Memorial Hospital in purchasing and housekeeping.

David Northcross was born in 1937 and grew up in north central Detroit. His grandfather David C. Northcross Sr. established the first Black-owned hospital in Detroit, Mercy General Hospital, in 1917. His grandmother, father, and aunt also worked at the hospital. Interested in pursuing a different path, David Northcross graduated from Michigan State University and joined the Marine Corps. He was one of three or four other Black officers at Camp Pendleton in California.