New Weinberg College Faculty for 2016-17
Xiaomin Bao
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Iowa State University
Previous Title and Institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University
Home Department: Molecular Biosciences
Joint Department or Program: Dermatology
Research Website
My group uses human skin as the main research platform to study adult stem cell maintenance and tissue differentiation. In particular, we strive to understand how genome architecture is dynamically regulated to spatially and temporally control gene expression during tissue regeneration. Our research platform integrates the strength of genetics, tissue engineering, imaging, genomics and proteomics to systematically characterize gene regulation. The long-term goal of my group is to elucidate the fundamental molecular mechanism underlying human tissue regeneration, and to provide new targets for disease therapies.
Asma Ben Romdhane
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of Iowa
Previous Title and Institution: PhD Candidate, University of Iowa
Home Department: MENA
Asma Ben Romdhane, (anticipating to obtain her Ph.D. in Foreign Language and ESL Education from The University of Iowa Spring 2017), is an Arabic Fulbright Teaching Assistant alumna. Her focus is on the teaching and learning of Arabic as a second/ foreign language. Ben Romdhane’s current dissertation is entitled: “Impact of Social Interaction on the Acquisition of Spoken Arabic: Short-Term Study Abroad Context”. Her research interests include language and program assessment, multimedia and SLA, study abroad and intercultural competence, and teaching methods in L2 classroom learning.
In spring 2015, Ben Romdhane received a Stanley Grant for International Research. In the same month, she received a university-wide Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the University of Iowa. Her mission is to engage more people in learning Arabic language and help them develop their Middle Eastern and North African linguistic and cultural awareness.
David Boyk
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of California - Berkeley
Previous Title and Institution: Visiting Lecturer, Department of History, University of California - Berkeley
Home Department: Asian Languages and Cultures
My research interests include South Asian urban and regional history, as well as the history of Hindi and Urdu language and literature. My research has focused on the links between literary culture and urban life in Patna, a city in the north Indian region of Bihar, during the colonial period. I ask how Patna and its people, who spoke and wrote in a variety of languages, navigated the ambiguous relationship between provinciality and urbanity.
Rosemary Bush
Position: Lecturer and Academic Advisor
PhD Institution: Northwestern University
Previous Title and Institution: Research Associate, Northwestern University
Home Department: Earth and Planetary Science
Paul CaraDonna
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of Arizona
Previous Title and Institution: Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen (Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate)
Home Department: Biology
Joint Department or Program: Chicago Botanic Garden
My research aims to understand the structure and function of ecological communities and species interactions. In doing so, I explore the interplay among ecological community context, environmental variation, and biological timing (phenology). I ask how these factors influence plant and animal populations, their interactions, and community-level patterns from a basic ecological perspective and under rapid climate change scenarios.
Jean Clipperton
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of Michigan
Home Department: Political Science
Joint Department or Program: Sociology
My research is broadly on institutional design and adaptation. My most recent research has been on member state noncompliance among European Union member countries. In particular, I focused upon what contributes to unsuccessful implementation by member states and what lessons we might learn from member state noncompliance. I evaluated whether qualities of legislative measures destine themselves for success or failure and consider whether state capacity trumped their particular design elements.
Jennifer Cole
Position: Professor
PhD Institution: M.I.T.
Previous Title and Institution: Professor, Univeristy of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
Home Department: Linguistics
Research Website
Jennifer Cole’s research investigates the sound patterns of human languages and how speech sounds are used to signal meaning about words, sentences and utterances in everyday communication. Her current work focuses on prosody—the intonation and rhythmic patterns of language—and its role in conveying information about linguistic structure, pragmatic meaning, speaker emotion, and the dynamics of social interaction. Dr. Cole has pioneered methods of prosodic annotation for large speech databases using crowd-sourcing. Her work combines experimental methods with large-scale observational analyses of natural interactions, in English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, and many other languages, using computational and statistical modeling with acoustic and behavioral data.
Annette D'Onofrio
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Stanford University
Home Department: Linguistics
As a sociolinguist, I'm broadly interested in how we use language to understand and create the social world around us. My research explores how we link linguistic and social information in the mind, and how these links arise in listener perceptions, social interactions, and in larger macro-social patterns of language use. I am currently focusing on the ways that listeners cognitively associate phonetic forms (like ways of pronouncing a vowel sound) with social types or personae. I am also interested in the ways that geographic patterns of sound change, particularly regional dialect systems in the U.S., are related to individuals’ stylistic practices.
Will Dichtel
Position: Professor
PhD Institution: UC-Berkeley
Previous Title and Institution: Associate Professor at Cornell University
Home Department: Chemistry
Research Website
My research focuses on precisely controlling the structure of organic materials and interfaces. We study the formation and properties of a new class of polymers, known as covalent organic frameworks (COFs), which have periodic two-dimensional or three-dimensional structures. Many of our materials have permanent porosity and high surface areas, giving rise to desirable properties that can be used for water purification, energy storage, ultrasensitive detection, and many others. We collaborate extensively at the interfaces of materials science, biology, physics, and many engineering disciplines and welcome the chance to identify common interests among the Northwestern community.
Loubna El Amine
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Princeton University
Previous Title and Institution: Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University
Home Department: Political Science
Research Website
I am a political theorist interested in early Chinese political thought. My book, Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation, was published with Princeton University Press in 2015. My next book project will focus on the concepts of space and time in early China. I am also interested more generally in what can be described as the question of East and West; I wrote an article on how political theorists should approach the non-Western world recently in Perspectives on Politics. I am a native of Beirut, Lebanon, where I lived until I finished my BA at the American University of Beirut.
Thomas Gaubatz
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Columbia University
Home Department: Asian Languages and Cultures
My research interests are primarily in early modern Japanese literature, media, and society, with a focus on the role played by literature in conceptualizing urban space and the identities that it engenders. Methodologically, I am concerned with the mutual implications of literary history, material histories of the book, textual interpretation, and social history. My current project examines the ways in which different genres of vernacular fiction registered and reflected upon shifts in the discourses and practices structuring urban commoner identity in Japan between the late 17th and 19th centuries. My other primary research focus is media theory and history, especially the history of commercial publishing in Japan and media-theoretic approaches to the woodblock-printed book.
Leslie Harris
Position: Professor
PhD Institution: Stanford University
Previous Title and Institution: Associate Professor, History and African American Studies, Emory University
Home Department: History
Leslie M. Harris is a historian of African-American history whose research areas include slavery and emancipation, urban history, and gender and sexuality. She is the author or co-editor of three award-winning books: In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (University of Chicago, 2003); co-editor with Ira Berlin of Slavery in New York (The New Press, 2005), which accompanied the groundbreaking New-York Historical Society exhibition of the same name; and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (University of Georgia Press, 2014), co-edited with Daina Ramey Berry, in collaboration with Telfair Museums' Owens-Thomas House. From 2004 to 2011, Harris co-founded and co-directed the Transforming Community Project at Emory University, which used history to engage the university community in dialogues on racial and other forms of human diversity. In 2011, Harris co-organized the first academic conference on the history of slavery in higher education, and is completing a co-edited volume of essays, “Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies” (UGA Press 2017). She is also co-editing a volume on sexuality and slavery in the Americas (UGA Press, 2017). A native of New Orleans, her next major project is a book that uses Hurricane Katrina and her family’s history to ask new questions about the role of New Orleans in the nation’s history.
Gaston Illanes
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: MIT
Previous Title and Institution: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Economics, MIT
Home Department: Economics
Research Website
My research focuses on consumer behavior and strategic interactions between firms in markets with imperfect competition. The main focus of my agenda is to study empirically whether markets are functioning properly, and what policy interventions can be undertaken to increase social welfare. In particular, I am interested in markets where governments mandate participation, such as health care and pension markets. Such markets are often significantly regulated, and understanding how the rules of the game affect consumer and firm behavior and whether alternative regulatory schemes would improve outcomes is important, both for regulators of the markets under study as well as for policy makers who are considering reforms to other markets.
Julia Kalow
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Princeton
Previous Title and Institution: NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Home Department: Chemistry
Research Website
Faced with a growing global population, an aging domestic population, and limited natural resources, advanced materials represent a promising solution to challenges in clean energy and human health. The rapid identification and testing of materials with designed performance and properties is essential to technological advancement in a range of fields. Innovations at the interface of synthetic chemistry and materials science are necessary for materials discovery to keep pace with the evolving demands of the modern world. The Kalow group is interested in discovering synthetic transformations that access organic materials, and controlling functional materials by manipulating reactivity. Macromolecules offer unique opportunities to translate molecular design into physical properties and structural features at the nano- to macroscale. By introducing energy in the form of light, we can spatiotemporally control monomer activation and tune materials’ properties and functions. A guiding principle in our research is the detailed understanding of reaction mechanism to drive optimization, discover new opportunities, and uncover general insights.
Doug Kiel
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: University of Wisconsin - Madison
Previous Title and Institution: Assistant Professor at Williams College
Home Department: History
Joint Department or Program: Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
Research Website
Doug Kiel studies Native American history, with particular interests in the Great Lakes region and twentieth century Indigenous nation rebuilding. He is working on a book manuscript entitled Unsettling Territory: Oneida Indian Resurgence and Anti-Sovereignty Backlash. The Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, a community that had been dispossessed of their New York homelands in the early nineteenth century, yet again suffered devastating land losses as a result of the Dawes Act of 1887—a policy that President Theodore Roosevelt once called “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” Kiel’s book examines how the Oneida Nation’s leaders strengthened the community’s capacity to shape their own future by envisioning, deliberating, and enacting a dramatic reversal of fortune during the twentieth century. His book also examines the origins of recent litigation between the Oneida Nation and the Village of Hobart, a mostly non-Native municipality that exists within the boundaries of the Oneida Reservation and seeks to block the tribe from recovering land that was lost a century ago.
Zosia Krusberg
Position: Associate Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of Chicago
Previous Title and Institution: Helmsley Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Yale University
Home Department: Physics and Astronomy
Research Website
My research lies at the intersection of mind, brain, and education and physics education. I am especially interested in the role of knowledge structures, metacognition, and insight in physics problem solving, as well as how to most effectively structure problem-solving instruction in introductory physics courses. I am also interested in the role of contemplative practice in higher education, particularly in physics education.
Daley Kutzman
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Previous Title and Institution: PhD Student at University of California, Berkeley
Home Department: Economics
Daley Kutzman's research interest lies in development and empirical microeconomics. She evaluates the impact of policies in developing countries, particularly how incentive compatibility of the policy and asymmetric information may influence implementation and outcomes. Most recently, she has focused on property rights and land-use in Vietnam and Mexico, two contexts where the incentives of landowners played a prominent role in the impacts of the policy of interest. Her work also explores environmental factors affecting human capital formation in developing contexts, such as pollution, and agricultural technology adoption in African countries.
Gang Liu
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Previous Title and Institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley
Home Department: Mathematics
I work in differential geometry and complex geometry. Currently, I am interested in the uniformization conjecture of Yau and its related problems. One particular interest is the degeneration of the complex structure under Gromov-Hausdorff convergence.
Raffaela Margutti
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Universita' Milano Bicocca
Previous Title and Institution: James Arthur Fellow at New York University
Home Department: Physics and Astronomy
My research focuses on Stellar Eruptions, Disruptions and Explosions in our Universe, including Supernovae, Gamma-Ray Bursts and Tidal Disruption Events by supermassive black holes. These phenomena signal the catastrophic death of stars, sometimes leading to the birth of exotic compact objects like neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes. Investigating the emission from these explosions across the electromagnetic spectrum, my research aims at understanding the physical processes that cause such dramatic energy release on very short time-scales.
Kimberley Marion Suiseeya
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Duke University
Previous Title and Institution: Assistant Professor at Purdue University
Home Department: Political Science
Joint Department or Program: Environmental Policy and Culture
Research Website ; Presence 2 Influence
My research examines the interactions between norms, institutions, and justice in global forest governance. Areas of expertise include: environmental justice, global environmental governance, political ecology, and the politics of biodiversity conservation in Laos and mainland Southeast Asia.
Mary McGrath
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Yale University
Home Department: Political Science
My research investigates processes of political and economic decision-making, opinion formation, and belief. My recent work has focused on how collaboration shapes political behavior. This work builds from evidence in developmental and comparative psychology which suggests that collaboration forms the basis for a deep-rooted sense of distributive justice, present in young children but not our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees. I look at how collaboration affects willing to sacrifice for others and perceptions of group identity. I am also interested in the public's relationship with science, and how scientific information influences public opinion and public policy
Emmy Murphy
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Stanford
Previous Title and Institution: Assistant Professor of Mathematics at MIT
Home Department: Mathematics
Emmy primarily studies symplectic and contact geometry, a mathematical field connected to complex geometry, geometric topology, and mathematical physics. She also focuses on flexibility and h-principles, techniques in geometric topology where the subtleties of geometric differential equations can be reduced to global topological obstructions using local constructions. Much of her work focuses on applications of flexibility and topology to symplectic geometry, particularly in higher dimensions.
Jennifer Nash
Position: Associate Professor
PhD Institution: Harvard
Previous Title and Institution: Assistant Professor, George Washington University
Home Department: African American Studies
Joint Department or Program: Gender and Sexuality Studies
My research focuses on black feminisms; black sexual politics; race, gender, and law; and race and visual culture. My first book explored representations of black women in hard-core pornography, and explored the possibilities for black feminine pleasures on the pornographic screen. My new book project studies the racial politics of the discipline of women's studies, considering how and why black woman has become the field's key sign.
Sylvia Perry
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: University of Illinois at Chicago
Previous Title and Institution: Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont
Home Department: Psychology
Research Website
My research focuses on how people from different social groups interact with and perceive one another. With some of my current (experimental and correlations) lines of research I am investigating: (1) whether there are individual differences in people’s awareness of their racially biased tendencies and the consequences of this “awareness”; (2) the situational and individual difference factors that influence parents’ willingness to have, and physiological responses to, race discussions with their children; (3) the impact of medical school racial climate on medical student and patient outcomes.
Aaron Peterson
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of Wisconsin - Madison
Previous Title and Institution: Postdoctoral Lecturer at Northwestern University
Home Department: Mathematics
I study problems from Harmonic Analysis, Partial Differential Equations, and Several Complex Variables. In particular, I am interested in the regularity of the Cauchy-Riemann operator in weakly pseudoconvex domains, and of the boundary Cauchy-Riemann operator on the boundary of such domains. The main thrust of my research is to determine how the regularity properties of these operators depend on the geometry of the boundary of the domain
Beth Redbird
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Stanford University
Previous Title and Institution: Stanford (Graduate Student)
Home Department: Sociology
Joint Department or Program: Institute for Policy Research
Research Website
My primary research interests are: Native American Inequality; Racial Conflict; Occupations and Work; Social Class; and Survey Methodology. In particular, I study labor market rent, with a special focus on the implications of rent and other forms of closure for Native American inequality.
Michael Rodriguez-Muniz
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Brown University
Previous Title and Institution: Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago
Home Department: Sociology
Joint Department or Program: Latina/o Studies Program
My current research concerns the production and politics of racial knowledge, specifically ethnoracial demographic statistics in the contemporary U.S. context. In my book manuscript, I seek to understand how demographic projections shape the ways that national Latino civil rights advocates envision the future and intervene in the present. In addition, I am interested in and have written on: 1) the ontological and epistemic foundations of sociological knowledge; 2) the emergence of panethnic identities and imaginaries; and 3) the intersection of race, materiality, and modern statecraft.
Onnie Rogers
Position: Assistant Professor
Column 4: New York University
Column 5: Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington (Seattle) / Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences
Home Department: Psychology
Joint Department or Program: Institute for Policy Research
Onnie Rogers is a developmental psychologist whose research curiosities converge at the intersection of psychology, human development, and education. She is interested in social and educational inequities and the mechanisms through which macro-level disparities are both perpetuated and disrupted at the micro-level of identities and relationships. Her research investigates identity development among racially diverse children and adolescents in urban contexts. She asks how our social groups—and the cultural stereotypes that accompany them—shape how we see ourselves and interact with others.
Lauren Stokes
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: University of Chicago
Previous Title and Institution: PhD Candidate, University of Chicago
Home Department: History
Research Website
I am a historian of modern Germany, with a particular focus on migration and race since 1945. I am currently working on a book manuscript about "family migration" for guest workers in West Germany. I argue that the state initially supported family migration in order to access female labor and create a stable workforce. Over the course of the 1970s foreign families began to be seen as obstacles to the goal of "integration," which was increasingly defined as an individual project that required a decisive break with the family of origin. I also maintain an active interest in the history of capitalism, the history of sexuality and gender identity, and public history.
Reza Vafabakhsh
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Univeristy of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
Previous Title and Institution: PhD Candidate, University of California - Berkeley
Home Department: Molecular Bioscience
Dr. Vafabakhsh’s research is toward developing single molecule fluorescent based assays to study membrane proteins and signaling complexes. He uses his background in physics to study G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) at the single receptor and signalosome level. He conceived and designed a new project on the conformational dynamics of metabotropic glutamate receptors, which involved visualizing activation of the full-length receptor at the single molecule level. These studies revealed the existence of a long-lived conformational intermediate, the mechanism of partial agonism, and the presence of activity in the absence of glutamate. The work was published in 2015 in Nature, with Dr. Vafabakhsh as the first author. Since then, he has expanded his studies to study the role of the different subunits and understand the role of dimer cooperativity in activation. The technology that Dr. Vafabakhsh developed for these studies is impressive, and is expected to be applicable to study the dynamics of many other membrane signaling proteins.
Michael Wairungu
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD Institution: University of Virginia
Previous Title and Institution: Sewaee: The University of the South
Home Department: Program of African Studies
My doctoral research investigated the uses and perceptions of Sheng among teachers and students in urban high schools in Kenya. Sheng is a mixed language variety that is not authorized for use in school settings, but young people prefer ito speak it more than the officially-sanctioned Standard Swahili and English. I established that Sheng is both a tool of identity and for non-violent protest against authorities. My current research project seeks to establish how young Christians embrace of Sheng has impacted on Christianity as practiced in Kenya.
Emrah Yıldız
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Harvard
Previous Title and Institution: Visiting Researcher, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University
Home Department: Anthropology
Joint Department or Program: Middle East and North Africa Studies
Emrah Yıldız's work is a historical anthropology of routes of mobility in the tri-border area among Iran, Turkey and Syria. His research lies at the intersection of historiography and ethnography of borders and their states; ritual practice, visitation and pilgrimage in Islam as well as smuggling and contraband commerce in global political economy. Emrah’s dissertation project, The Ways of Zainab: Visitations and Valuations between Iran and Syria via Turkey, brings these areas of scholarship into conversation as it follows the historically sedimented pathways of a ziyarat (visitation) route, often referred to as Hajj-e Fuqara’ (pilgrimage of the poor) from bus stations in Iran, through informal bazaars in Turkey, to shrines in Syria. He is also interested in studies of gender and sexuality in the MENA region.
Sera Young
Position: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Cornell University
Previous Title and Institution: Assistant Professor of Global Health and Nutrition at Cornell University
Home Department: Anthropology
Joint Department or Program: Institute for Policy Research
Research Website
Anthropologist Sera Young focuses on reducing maternal and child undernutrition in areas with low-resource settings, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Methodologically, she draws on her training in medical anthropology, international nutrition, and HIV infection to take a biocultural approach to understanding how mothers cope to preserve their health and that of their families. She has ongoing research in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the United States, investigating the causes and physical, psychological, and social consequences of food and water insecurity among vulnerable women and children. For her efforts, she has received a number of awards and honors, including the Margaret Mead Award for her book, Craving Earth.
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