November People Notes

David Art has been appointed an assistant professor of political science. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 2004. Following graduation, he worked as an assistant professor of political science at the College of the Holy Cross. His research interests include comparative politics, international relations and political economy. In his book, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria, he examines how the different ways Germans and Austrians have confronted the Nazi past have shaped their political cultures. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships that have allowed him to study in many parts of Europe, including Austria, Germany and England. He has taught courses on West European politics, globalization and fascism and the far right in comparative perspective.

Joseph Auner has been appointed a professor of music. He comes to Tufts from SUNY-Stony Brook, where he had been professor of music since 2002 and associate provost since 2004. His scholarly work focuses on 20th- and 21st-century music, with emphases on Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Weimar Berlin and music and technology. His current work includes a project on the use of vocal samples in instrumental hip hop and a music history textbook. He received his bachelor’s degree from Colorado College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in the history and theory of music from the University of Chicago. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and as organizer and chair of conferences on music and digital technology. He has edited several books, including A Schoenberg Companion and A Schoenberg Reader and is the author of numerous articles on Schoenberg.

Kelsey Bell, A10, has been awarded a $1,000 college scholarship from the publisher of Who’s Who among American High School Students. A graduate of Cohasset (Mass.) High School, Bell was selected for her academic achievements, participation in school and community activities and her essay. She was one of 130 students selected from 90,000 applicants to receive financial awards for college expenses this year by the Educational Communications Scholarship Foundation, which is funded by the publishers of Who’s Who.

Joshua Benjamin, a junior majoring in international relations, has been awarded a $2,000 scholarship from MATRIX Resources Inc., in recognition of his dedication to community service and potential for leadership. A Dean’s List student, Benjamin participates in Amnesty International and has done internships with the Physicians for Human Rights and National Coalition of Haitian Rights. He is also a violist and publicist for the Tufts Symphony Orchestra. Atlanta-based MATRIX Resources is a technology staffing business.

Donald C. Bettencourt, E72, E99P, E01P, E07P, chief financial officer for Aquatics For Line Inc. of West Hartford, Conn., and John C. Howe, A80, founder and managing Partner of Old Hill Partners in Westport, Conn., have been appointed to the Board of Overseers for Athletics.

Jose Blanco-Pillado, who earned his Ph.D. in physics at Tufts in 2001, has returned to the university as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He had been a postdoctoral fellow studying cosmology in flux compactifications and brane dynamics at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University. His dissertation is titled Topological Defects and Ultra-high Energy Cosmic Rays, and his research focuses on the application of particle physics theory to cosmology and particle astrophysics. He also was a research associate at Cambridge University, where he studied braneworld cosmological models.

Patricia Bode has joined the university as director of art education and a lecturer in the Department of Education. Bode’s research interests include the arts in urban education; the role of visual culture in art teacher preparation and the intersection of postmodernism and multiculturalism in art education. She received the National Multicultural Educator Award in 2005 from the National Association for Multicultural Education for her efforts in anti-racist curriculum reform in art education and bridging theory and practice in multicultural education. She has published and lectured on critical art pedagogy based in public schools, re-theorizing identity and curriculum and redefining multicultural education. She holds a doctoral degree in multicultural education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Amanda Boer has a new role in the Advancement Division as associate director in the Office of Annual Giving Strategy & Operations. She works with annual giving teams from across the university as well as other Advancement groups to design, execute and analyze direct mail campaigns to maximize annual fund gifts from alumni, parents and friends. Boer has worked for the past three years in the Tufts Fund for Arts, Sciences & Engineering, managing direct mail operations, coordinating reunion class gift campaigns and overseeing alumni volunteer programs. She is an alumna of Bowdoin College and is pursing a master’s in history and museum studies at Tufts.

Benjamin Carp has been appointed an assistant professor of history. He comes to Tufts from the University of Edinburgh, where he had been a lecturer in the School of History and Classics since 2004. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. His research interests encompass the history of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary America. He is currently revising his doctoral thesis for publication as a book titled Cityscapes and Revolution: Political Mobilization and Urban Spaces in Anglo-America, 1740-1783. Supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, he is researching pyromachy (the use of fire in warfare) during the American Revolution.

John Conklin, professor of sociology, received a grant from the Critical Thinking Program to develop a new course, “College Life and Film,” which examines higher education in the United States through the lens of feature films about college life. Students will learn to evaluate film and become more active viewers, while using the films as resources to think about undergraduate life since World War I. The grants are offered as an incentive for faculty to revise courses or develop new ones to improve undergraduates’ reasoning and analytical skills.

Mark Cronin-Golomb, associate professor of biomedical engineering, received a grant from the Critical Thinking Program to revise the course “Design of Medical Instrumentation,” which is a requirement for a major in biomedical engineering. In the course, student teams design a biomedical instrument and offer it for critical analysis by their peers.

Rajeev Dehejia has been appointed an associate professor of economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1997. Before joining Tufts, he was an associate professor in the Department of Economics and at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has held visiting professorships at Harvard, New York University and Princeton. Dehejia’s areas of research are applied econometrics, labor economics, development economics and the economic analysis of microfinance. He has published widely on these topics in several journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Econometrics and the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Kevin Dunn, associate professor of English, and Ioannis D. Evrigenis, assistant professor of political science, have been awarded a Bernstein Faculty Fellowship, a program that relieves junior faculty members of a course assignment for two consecutive spring semesters to provide them with additional time to devote to development of their scholarship. The fellowship program is funded by Dr. Leonard Bernstein, A53, D56, and Dr. Jane Holmes Bernstein. Evrigenis will work on a book project titled States of Nature, a comparative study of the concept of the state of nature in political thought, and he and Dunn will pursue a joint study of the political poems of Fulke Greville.

Joshua B. Fischman has joined Tufts as an assistant professor of economics. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Princeton University. His dissertation, Essays in Law and Economics, examines the intersection of economics, law and politics. As part of his doctoral work, he developed a model to analyze the role of judicial review in promoting uniform interpretation of laws. His teaching experience includes undergraduate and graduate courses in statistics and math for economists.

Patrick Forber has been appointed an assistant professor of philosophy. He comes to Tufts from Stanford University, where he completed his doctorate in philosophy and a master’s in biological sciences, with an emphasis on molecular evolution. His dissertation, The Traces of Change: Evidence in Evolutionary Biology, focuses on systematizing the details on how biologists test evolutionary hypotheses and determining whether formal confirmation theory has the resources to criticize biologists’ testing practices. He is also interested in the philosophy of probability and existentialism. Forber is a recipient of fellowships from Stanford and the Mellon Foundation.

Michael Forgac, professor of physiology, presented a talk on “Structure, Function and Regulation of the Vacuolar ATPases” at the International Symposium on Membrane Proteins and Cellular Dynamics, held from November 2-5 in Osnabruck, Germany. He will be the keynote speaker, along with Nobel laureate John Walker of the MRC, Cambridge, at a symposium on the F and V-ATPases to be held December 14 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

Dr. Lisa M. Freeman, J86, V91, N96, associate professor of clinical sciences at the Cummings School, was chosen as the 2006 recipient of the Outstanding Alumna Award at the Cummings Veterinary Alumni Reunion on September 7. A triple Jumbo, Freeman received her B.S. from Tufts, her D.V.M. from the Cummings School and her Ph.D. in nutrition from the Friedman School. She completed a small animal internship at North Carolina State University before doing a residency in clinical nutrition at Tufts. She was board-certified by the American College of Veterinary Nutrition in 1997 and has been on the faculty at the Cummings School since 1996. Her research focus has been on the nutritional modulation of cardiac disease in dogs and cats.

Juliet Fuhrman, associate professor of biology, and Andrew McClellan, associate professor of art and art history, have been elected to the Arts & Sciences Faculty Tenure and Promotion Committee for terms that run from 2007 to 2010.

Dr. Joseph A. Hanak, assistant clinical professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, has been appointed chief of the Adult Division and residency program director in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Tufts-New England Medical Center. Hanak is a board-certified staff physiatrist who sees pediatric, adolescent and adult patients for spasticity management and treatment, acute and chronic pain, fibromyalgia, musculoskeletal/spine issues, performing arts medicine and myelodysplasia. He is director of rehabilitation on the New England Sinai Unit at Tufts-NEMC and directs the Adult Muscular Dystrophy Program, Stroke Rehabilitation Program and the Spinal Cord Injury Program at Tufts-NEMC. He graduated from the Medical University of Pecs in Hungary in 1991 and completed his residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Tufts-NEMC.

Dr. Ernest Hartmann, professor of psychiatry, has completed a small study on people’s dreams before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He presented the work, “A Systematic Change in Dreams after 9/11/01,” done with T. Brezler, at two international conferences this year. The authors obtained 20 dreams from each of 44 persons living all over the United States who had been recording all their dreams for years. Each person sent in 20 dreams from their records—the last 10 recorded before 9/11 and the first 10 after 9/11. The 880 dreams were examined on a blind basis and scored on a number of reliable rating scales. Their results found that the dreams after 9/11 showed a highly significant increase in the power of the dreams’ central image, although the post-9/11 dreams did not contain more references to airplanes or tall towers. Hartmann said their results are consistent with the authors’ previous studies of dreams after trauma and stress.

Mark Hernandez, assistant professor of Romance languages, received a grant from the Critical Thinking Program to redesign the course “Issues in 20th-Century Mexican Literature and Culture,” which explores key social and cultural issues in Mexico as manifested in literature, film, music and the visual arts. The course looks at the country after the Mexican Revolution, the “Mexican Miracle” and the re-imagining of the nation after 1968.

Jeffrey Hopwood has joined the School of Engineering as a visiting professor of electrical and computer engineering. He comes from Northeastern University, where he was an associate professor. He obtained his doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University in 1990. His research focuses on inventing devices for creating plasma and developing methods of using plasmas that are appropriate for meeting industrial needs. Hopwood has published extensively on plasma engineering in several journals, including the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics and the Journal of Applied Physics. In addition, he holds numerous U.S. and international patents. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Distinguished Research Fellowship from Northeastern.

Virginia Jackson has been appointed an associate professor in the English department. She comes to Tufts from New York University, where she had been an associate professor of English since 2001. Since 2005, she has also served as a visiting associate professor of humanities at the New School University, helping to coordinate an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1995 from Princeton University. Her research centers on 19th-century American poetry and the theoretical paradigms within which we recognize and interpret poetry. In her book, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, she argues that the publication, editing and criticism of Dickinson’s writing as discrete lyric poems impose on them a modern and restrictive understanding of what poetry is. She is now finishing a book on American poetry in the 19th century, focusing on its various genres and its transatlantic negotiation of literary form.

Richard Jankowsky has joined Tufts as an assistant professor of music. He comes to Tufts from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he had been a lecturer in ethnomusicology since earning his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 2004. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on music in religion, music of the Arab world and music and culture, and he has received the prestigious Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the music of the Middle East and North Africa, with a broader interest in issues of music and race, religion, nationalism and globalization. He has received several fellowships, including a Fulbright IIE Fieldwork Fellowship to Tunisia and a Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship that allowed him to undertake intensive ethnographic studies in Tunisia.

Dr. Rajesh K. Kapur, clinical instructor of medicine, has been appointed disaster coordinator at Brockton Hospital.

Jonathan Kenny, professor of chemistry, received a grant from the Critical Thinking Program to expand “Windows on Research” to four semesters so that students have the opportunity to do research in chemistry-related fields. The new course promotes critical thinking skills by asking teams of students to apply their knowledge of chemical principles and concepts to real-world problems.

Gina Kuperberg has been appointed an associate professor of psychology. Previously, she was a clinical assistant in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Kings College at the University of London, an MRCPsych from the Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry in the UK and an MBBS from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School in the UK. Her research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of schizophrenia, specifically how healthy populations compare to patients with schizophrenia in regards to language processing and comprehension, semantic memory and processing and structural neuron-imaging. For the past three years, she has been an adjunct research assistant professor of psychology at Tufts.

Hee-Sun Lee has been appointed an assistant professor of education. She came to Tufts from the University of California at Berkeley, where she had been a postdoctoral researcher in the Technology-Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) Project since 2003. She received her doctoral degree in science education from the University of Michigan, where she developed content-specific scaffolds to help fifth- and sixth-graders formulate scientific explanations from data. She also worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Biological Kids’ Inquiry into Diverse Species (bioKIDS) and Principled Assessment Design for Inquiry (PADI) projects, also at the University of Michigan. She has designed curricula and worked as a teaching consultant for elementary school science teachers in the Detroit Public Schools and Ann Arbor Public Schools. Before coming to the United States, she taught physical and life sciences to seventh- and eighth-graders in Seoul, Korea. Lee’s research interests include the development of inquiry-based science curricula and assessments, the integration of learning technologies and the exploration of educational theories in classroom settings.

Richard Lerner, the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science, gave the keynote address at the 2006 NAE4-HA Conference in Milwaukee on October 25.

Alice H. Lichtenstein, director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts, discussed the “2006 American Heart Association Dietary Guidelines for Adults and Children” at the American Dietetic Association’s 2006 Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo September 17 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Dr. Philip A. March has joined the Cummings School as an associate professor of clinical sciences. A neurologist, March received a B.A. from Amherst College in 1977, an M.S. from Texas A&M University in 1981 and his D.V.M. from Ohio State University in 1985. He has worked in small animal medicine and surgery in New York and completed a three-year residency in small animal internal medicine and neurology at Tufts in 1991. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He became a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine in 1994. He has taught at Purdue University and Ohio State, and from 1997 to 2002, he was a neurology consultant in pharmaceutical research for the Eli Lilly Research Laboratories in Indiana.

Eric Miller has joined the School of Engineering as a visiting professor of electrical and computer engineering. Previously, he was an associate professor at Northeastern University. He received his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1994. His research focuses on physics- and model-based signal and image processing, emphasizing inverse problems arising in such medical and geophysical applications as landmine ordnance remediation and ultrasonic-based image-guided cancer treatment. Miller has published extensively on these topics in journals, book chapters and technical reports. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program grant. He has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

Susan Napier has been appointed a visiting professor in the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature. She comes to Tufts from the University of Texas at Austin, where she has spent most of her career and was the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Professor of Japanese Studies. She obtained her doctorate in Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University in 1984. Her research interests include Japanese animation and comics, modern Japanese literature, popular culture and contemporary constructions of gender and the body. She has published widely on these topics. Napier has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Research Award and a Fulbright Scholarship to Tokyo.

Dr. Mary Rose Paradis, associate professor of clinical sciences at the Cummings School, is the author of a new book about diagnosing and treating disease in newborn foals. The book, Equine Neonatal Medicine: A Case-Based Approach, is written for veterinary students and professionals and takes a case-based approach to the basic pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatment of disease in the newborn foal. Other topics covered include neonatal nutrition, assessment and high-risk pregnancies.

Vincent Pollina, associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages, has been elected to a two-year term as president of the Société Guilhem IX (the North American society for Old Provençal studies). In his previous role as vice president, he organized a session on “The Troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn” and a roundtable on “Emerging Trends in Troubadour Studies” at the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies, held at Western Michigan University in May.

Christiane Romero, a professor in the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature, has been elected to the Arts & Sciences Faculty Committee on Budget and Priorities for a term that ends in 2011.

Dr. Robert Russell, director of the HNRCA, is co-editor of the ninth edition of Present Knowledge in Nutrition (International Life Sciences Institute, 2006), a two-volume key nutrition reference. HNRCA scientists who contributed to the text include Sai Krupa Das and Susan Roberts (Energy Metabolism); Alice Lichtenstein (Lipids: Absorption and Transport); Jeff Blumberg and Paul Milbury (Dietary Flavonoids); Simin Meydani and Sung Nim Han (Nutrient Regulation of the Immune Response: The Case of Vitamin E); Ed Saltzman (Obesity as a Health Issue); and Bess Dawson-Hughes (Osteoporosis).

Deborah Schildkraut, assistant professor of political science, received a grant from the Critical Thinking Program to revise her course, “Political Science Research Methods,” to enhance the critical thinking skills of political science majors by encouraging students to assess research that uses sophisticated methodological tools.

Krzysztof Sliwa, professor of physics, and Loring Tu, associate professor of mathematics, have been elected to the Arts & Sciences Faculty Grievance Panel for terms that end in 2009.

Dr. F. Craig Sylvester, clinical instructor of medicine, has been appointed interim chief of the emergency department at Brockton Hospital.

Allen Taylor, director of the Laboratory for Vision and Nutrition Research at the HNRCA, spoke at the National Eye Institute: Guiding International Collaborations workshop in Washington, D.C., last spring. He discussed “Candy for the Eyes: Protein Damage by Dietary Carbohydrate in the Retina and Lens of Non-Diabetics” at Case Western University and participated in an Association for Research in Visual Ophthalmology workshop on the “Roles of Environment/Nutrition in Eye Disorders in U.S./Indo Experience: Building International Collaborations” in May. He gave the plenary lecture at the University of Missouri’s School of Optometry and gave a presentation on “K6W Ubiquitin: Demonstrates Selectivity of the Ubiquitin Pathway for Oxidized Proteins and Requirement for Survival Upon Stress” at the 13th International Congress of the Society for Free Radical Research in Davos, Switzerland, in August.

Paul Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at the Cummings School, is the lead editor on a new book from Columbia University Press titled A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics. The publication of the book will be recognized at a special event on November 18 during the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Washington, D.C.

Ibrahim Warde is serving as acting director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies for the fall 2006 semester while Director Leila Fawaz is on sabbatical leave at Oxford University. Warde continues as adjunct associate professor of international business at the Fletcher School, where he will be teaching “Islamic Banking and Finance” in the spring.