LOS ANGELES – Experts at Loyola Marymount University are available to add context and commentary to news coverage of two upcoming sporting events: the 2026 Winter Olympics (Friday, Feb. 6 through Sunday, Feb. 22) and Super Bowl LX (Sunday, Feb. 8).
LMU professors can provide insight on an array of issues, including potential impacts from global politics; labor dynamics in professional sports; branding, advertising and sponsorship opportunities; athletes’ fitness regimens; and the selection of Bad Bunny as the first Latin male artist to headline a Super Bowl’s halftime show.
Contact LMU’s Public and Media Relations Team at [email protected] or 310.258.INFO to reach these and other faculty experts:
Vanessa Diaz
Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies
Díaz focuses her research on race, gender, and popular culture in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean.She is the co-author of the book “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance” (Duke 2026), and the co-creator of the Bad Bunny Syllabus Project. She teaches the course “Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico” – which has been featured in news stories and discussed by Bad Bunny on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” She is called upon by top U.S. and global media outlets to comment on Latin music, celebrity, and popular culture, Bad Bunny, and Puerto Rico.
“It’s really important for Latin music that Bad Bunny is the first Latin trap and reggaetón artist to headline the Super Bowl. These are genres that have historically been marginalized within the Latin music industry, so for Bad Bunny to emerge from these genres and take this stage is really important for Latin music as well. The world loves reggaetón and it should be recognized for the cultural force and the art that it is.” -Vanessa Diaz, Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies.
Christopher J. Finlay
Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Finlay specializes in sports communication, digital media, media and masculinities, global media industries, nationalisms, and political communication. He has written extensively on the Olympics, including “The Right to Profitable Speech: Olympians, Sponsorship, and Social Media Discourse,” and “Building a Better Winter Dream: Beijing 2024 and the International Olympic Committee.” He and Lawrence A. Wenner are co-editors of “Communication and the Crises of Masculinity: Beyond Man Shaming and Men Flaming” (Routledge) – work that transcends traditional academic boundaries to examine how masculinity is defined, performed, and challenged in media and other contemporary communicative contexts and practices.
“As a scholar of the Olympics, I am particularly interested in the intersection of sponsorship, marketing, broadcast licenses with national politics and international relations. With a projected global audience in the billions, an international system marked by significant volatility, and rapid technological change reshaping media norms, the 2026 Winter Olympics is poised to become a global stage where these tensions are performed, negotiated and contested.”
Shirin Mollah
Instructor of Economics
Mollah is a sports economist researching labor dynamics in professional sports. Her work focuses on the economic impact of mega-events – the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup – on local labor demand, regional economies, and stadium developments. At LMU, Mollah has accompanied sports economics students on a two-day immersion at SoFi Stadium that covered topics including the impact of supply and demand on the ticket market and prices, and revenue sources such as concessions, merchandise, and corporate sponsors.
“It’s an exciting time for mega-events in California, with the Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium, and Los Angeles hosting the 2026 World Cup, another Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium in 2027, and the 2028 Olympics. These represent natural experiments in sports economics, opportunities to observe how massive influxes of visitors and media attention reshape local labor markets and regional economies in real time. Understanding the economic impact of these events reveals how mega-events function as powerful forces that transform the relationship between sports, cities, and communities.”
Rudy Mondragón
Assistant Professor of Chicaná/o and Latiná/o Studies
Mondragón is an expert on race, labor, and sport, with a focus on athletic identity, the political economy of professional boxing, and use of expressive culture by athletes. He has written extensively about how athletes perform resistance and dignity within exploitative sports systems, and how mega-events reflect and reinforce broader inequalities in representation, compensation, and media coverage.
“Sport has always been a stage for labor struggle, dissent, and self-expression. From the boxing ring to the football field, athletes use their platforms — and their bodies — to demand dignity, equity, and recognition in systems that too often treat them as commodities rather than people.”
Robert Musci
Assistant Professor of Health and Human Sciences
Musci specializes in metabolism, exercise physiology, and stress resistance/resilience. He can offer insights into the physiological/metabolic demands of sports performances. He can also relate how what we learn in elite performance can aid us in improving the health and quality of life in everyone, especially those seeking to improve their own health and those who experience various chronic diseases. He is an exercise physiologist who also studies the mechanisms of aging and how exercise can improve the healthspan.
“The Olympics is the pinnacle of human performance and represents what the human body can accomplish. As an exercise physiologist, it is fascinating to study how these athletes push the limits of human physiology as they train, compete, and recover. Their performances reflect our own improvement in understanding of human physiology and metabolism. While preparing for elite athletic performances might feel distant to us, we can apply much of the science they use to our everyday lives as we seek to improve or maintain our health.”
William Parham
Professor and Director of the LMU School of Education Center for Trauma Informed Education
Parham is widely known for his research on the interplay between sport psychology, diversity, intersectionality, trauma, and health psychology as these life experiences fuel discovery of excellence in human performance. He has worked with athletes across organizations, levels and sports, as well as performance artists in drama, theatre and music. Much of his current work focuses on personal trauma experienced by many athletes and artists. He is a member of the California Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Mental Wellbeing and recognized by the International Society of Sport Psychology Registry as a member of the Practitioner Directory. Parham also served as the inaugural Director of the Mental Health and Wellness Program of the National Basketball Players Association, and is a past member of both the Mental Health and Wellness Task Force of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and of the California Science Foundation Science of Sport Advisory Committee. He is a licensed psychologist, board certified in counseling psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and past president of the Society of Counseling Psychology of the American Psychological Association.
“At least two mantras influence my approach with athletes, especially those who struggle, perhaps silently, with life and athletic demands that weigh heavily on their hearts and minds. The first mantra invites athletes to consider: Whenever and wherever shadows have been cast, it must mean that there is light nearby, because shadows can’t be cast without light! Related, the second mantra invites athletes to consider: ‘There are people in this world who no one ever imagines anything of … who go on to accomplish what none ever imagined.’ Athletes can discover how to turn their pain into power. They will also learn how to acknowledge and appreciate that all life’s challenges represent camouflaged opportunities.”
Andy Rohm
Marketing Professor, M-School Co-Director, Department Chair, Marketing and Business Law
Rohm specializes in new media and branding and marketing strategies and can discuss Olympic sponsorships and advertising. He serves on the leadership team of LMU’s M-School Institute of Marketing, a transformative two-year creative marketing program within LMU College of Business Administration. Rohm as worked previously in leadership roles at Brooks Sports and Reebok.
Lawrence A. Wenner
Von der Ahe Professor of Communication and Ethics, College of Communication and Fine Arts and School of Film and Television
Wenner’s research focuses on critical assessments of media content, ethical dimensions of race and gender portrayals in advertising, audience experiences with television in the family context, and the values and consumption of mediated sports. He served as editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly scholarly journal “Communication & Sport,” and is a former two-term editor-in-chief of the “International Review for the Sociology of Sport” and the “Journal of Sport and Social Issues.” His recent books include the “Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society” and “Sport, Media, and Mega-Events “(with Andrew Billings), He directs LMU’s Forum on Media Ethics and Social Responsibility and teaches media ethics in philosophy and narrative ethics in the University Honors Program.