Patricia Oliver

Biography

Professor Oliver teaches courses in Public Speaking, the Rhetoric of Women and Interpersonal, Intercultural and Gender Communication. She has taught Communication Behavior in Childhood, Rhetorical Discourse, Rhetoric of Popular Culture, Health and Disability Communication and Communication Practicum (internships).

Previously she was an evaluator of the communication skills of student teachers and taught Intercultural Communication at an urban community college and mini-courses for public school teachers on mainstreaming children with disabilities into regular classrooms.

At LMU she was the first female chair of the Communication Arts Department (now School of Film and Television), and chair of the Communication Studies Department. She’s the former president and program director of the LMU chapter of California Women in Higher Education, which once named her woman of the year.

She has been vice president of the LMU Faculty Senate, first vice chair of the Academic Assembly, college facilitator for multicultural affairs and a member of LMU's Racial Discrimination Mediation Panel, Intercultural Advisory Committee, and the Committee on Faculty Committees. She was LMU's first sexual harassment mediator. Students once voted her LMU’s teacher of the year.

Professor Oliver's research focuses on developing peer mentoring to facilitate learning and build communities, particularly among underprivileged and underrepresented students and their communities. She has conducted research in an inner-city college, a Northern California convent and villages in rural Namibia. Throughout her career, Professor Oliver has mentored countless students, organizations, and faculty.

Education (2)

California State University at Los Angeles : M.A.

California State University at Los Angeles: B.A.

Areas of Expertise (4)

Communication Studies

Public Speaking

Gender Communication

Rhetoric of Women

Industry Expertise (3)

Research

Training and Development

Education/Learning

Affiliations (3)

• West Los Angeles College
• Pierce College
• California State University Northridge

Articles (2)

Rating Scales, Scales of Measurement, Issues of Reliability: Resolving Some Critical Issues for Clinicians and Researchers

Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease:

2006-08-01

We focus upon several broad issues that are of concern to clinicians and clinical researchers in the areas of biobehavioral and biomedical research, including, but not limited to, the fields of psychiatry, psychology, neuropsychology, and neurology. These issues are the critical reassessment of S. S. Stevens’ quadripartite conceptualization of scales of measurement; the application of criteria to determine the clinical significance of reliability estimates; the detection of subsets of reliable and unreliable raters, when the overall level is of little clinical import; and finally, the application of Kappa statistics when multiple raters evaluate a single case.

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Evolutionary and structural diversity of fungal laccases

Springer

2003-11-01

Fungal laccases have been extensively exploited for industrial purposes and there is a wealth of information available regarding their reaction mechanism, biological role and several molecular aspects, including cloning, heterologous expression and transcriptional analyses. Here we present the reconstruction of the fungal laccase loci evolution inferred from the comparative analysis of 48 different sequences. The topology of the phylogenetic trees indicate that a single monophyletic branch exists for fungal laccases and that laccase isozyme genes may have evolved independently, possibly through duplication-divergence events. Laccases are copper-containing enzymes generally identified by the utilization of substituted p-diphenol substrates. Interestingly, our approach permitted the assignment of two copper-containing oxidases, preliminarily catalogued as laccases, to a different evolutionary group, distantly related to the main branch of bona fide laccases.

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