MEET BERKELEY'S NEW FACULTY 2005-2006

Berkeley welcomes 66 new faculty members this 2005-2006 academic year. Included are brief summaries of their academic expertise, educational backgrounds, and photos when available.

Biology

Acting Associate Professor David Ackerly
Integrative Biology

David Ackerly's research addresses the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape the functional diversity of terrestrial plants, with a particular focus on the California flora. He approachs this broad topic from many perspectives, drawing on ecophysiology, population biology, community ecology and phylogenetics. Lab projects range from in depth physiological research testing the adaptive significance of traits such as stem hydraulics, to broad comparative studies that integrate large-scale ecological databases with recent advances in seed plant phylogeny.

Current research is focused on three areas. i) The study of plant ecological strategies, based on comparative ecophysiological studies in groups of coexisting and/or closely related species. Variation and correlations among functional traits are frequently examined in closely related species, using methods such as phylogenetic independent contrasts, to test for replicated patterns of evolutionary divergence along climatic and edaphic gradients. ii) The processes shaping functional diversity, from local to regional scales. Projects range from analyses of leaf and seed trait variation in local communities, to the functional diversity of the woody plants of California in the context of their diverse biogeographic history. iii) Macro-evolutionary studies of ecological trait diversity, based on the synthesis of ecological data, recent advances in phylogenetics, and the development of comparative phylogenetic methods. For example, a recent comparative study demonstrated that leaf traits of many chaparral shrubs are ancestral traits of the respective lineages, suggesting a strong role for species sorting in the assembly of this community, rather than in situ convergent evolution. Current collaborative projects are aimed at analyzing large global trait databases using phylogenetic comparative methods to obtain insights into the major factors influencing trait evolution during diversification of the seed plants and the assembly of regional floras.

Among his recent publications are: Moles, A.T., D.D. Ackerly, C.O. Webb, J.C. Tweddle, J.B. Dickie, M. Westoby. 2005. A brief history of seed size. Science, in press; Schwilk, D.S. and D.D. Ackerly. 2005. Limiting similarity and functional diversity along environmental gradients. Ecology Letters, in press; and Ackerly, D.D. and R. Nyfeller. 2004. Evolutionary diversification of continuous traits: phylogenetic tests and application to seed size in the California flora. Evolutionary Ecology 18: 249-272.

Assistant Professor Gregory Barton
Molecular and Cell Biology - Immunology

Gregory M. Barton received his B.A. in molecular biology from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Washington. In 2000 - 2004, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Section of Immunobiology, Yale University School of Medicine. Before coming to Berkeley, he was an associate research scientist at Yale University School of Medicine.

Among his recent publications include: Barton GM, Medzhitov R. 2003. Linking Toll-like receptors to IFN-alpha/beta expression. Nat Immunol. 4: 432-3; Barton GM, Medzhitov R. 2003. Toll-like receptor signaling pathways. Science. 300: 1524-5; and Barton GM, Medzhitov R. 2004. Toll signaling: RIPping off the TNF pathway. Nat Immunol. 5:472-4.

Assistant Professor George Bentley
Integrative Biology

George Bentley received his B.Sc. in biology (1993), and his Ph.D. in zoology (1996) at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Following receipt of his doctorate, Dr. Bentley joined the Behavioral Neuroendocrinology Group at Johns Hopkins University, initially as a postdoctoral fellow and later as an associate research scientist. In January, 2000, Dr. Bentley moved to Prof. John Wingfield's laboratory at the University of Washington as a research associate in the Departments of Psychology and Biology.

Dr. Bentley moved to Berkeley in June of 2005, where his lab focuses on how the brain detects environmental cues and turns them into hormonal signals. These signals in turn affect the behavior and physiology of the organism itself, or organisms to which the behavior is directed. For example, a male bird's song can cause a female to solicit copulation and change her hormonal status. Exactly how the brain performs this feat is largely unknown, but birds are an excellent model for this type of research as they have extravagant auditory and visual displays.

The research in Dr. Bentley's lab is mostly performed on birds, but is not limited to this vertebrate class. Current projects in the lab involve sheep, horses, rats, mice, hamsters and humans; many of these projects are in collaboration with other labs around the world (Japan, New Zealand, Germany, United Kingdom). Undergraduates are especially encouraged to get involved in active research projects. Currently, there are five undergraduates working in the Bentley lab on neuroendocrine mechanisms of regulation of reproduction and on the neural basis of song behavior.

Among his most recent publications include: K. Beebe, G.E. Bentley & M. Hau (2005). A tropical rainforest bird lacks photorefractoriness in the wild, despite high photosensitivity. Functional Ecology 19: 505-512; Takayoshi Ubuka, George E. Bentley, Kazuyoshi Ukena, John C. Wingfield and Kazuyoshi Tsutsui (2005). Melatonin induces the expression of gonadotropin-inhibitory hormone in the avian brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienc es 102: 3052-3057; and T. Osugi, K. Ukena, G.E. Bentley, S. O'Brien, I.T. Moore, J.C. Wingfield and K. Tsutsui (2004). G onadotropin-inhibitory hormone in Gambel's white-crowned sparrows: cDNA identification, transcript localization and f unctional effects in laboratory and field experiments. Journal of Endocrinology 182: 33-42.

Assistant Professor Daniela Kaufer
Integrative Biology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute

Daniela Kaufer received her B.S. in biology from the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and her Ph.D. in molecular neuroscience from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Kaufer was a Human Frontiers Science Foundation and Life Science Research Foundation postdoctoral Fellow at the departments of Biological Sciences and Neurosurgery at Stanford University.

Her research interests focus on the molecular basis of neural and hormonal mechanisms of stress responses and new therapies that might prove useful in reducing stress-related damage. Current research in the Kaufer lab focuses on 3 main projects: 1. Hormonal regulation of adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus. 2. Hormonal regulation of alternative splicing in neuronal and organismal stress responses. 3. The molecular mechanisms that underlie the development of epilepsy following compromise in the blood brain barrier.

Among her recent publications are: Kaufer D, Ogle WO, Pincus ZS, Clark KL, Nicholas AC, Dinkel KM, Dumas TC, Ferguson D, Lee AL, Winters MA, Sapolsky RM. (2004 )Restructuring the neuronal stress response with anti-glucocorticoid gene delivery. Nature Neurosci. 7:947-953; Kaufer D, Friedman A, Seidman S. and Soreq H. (1998). Acute stress facilitates long-lasting changes in cholinergic gene expression. Nature, 393:373-376; Friedman A, Kaufer D, Shemer J, Hendler I, Soreq H. and Tur-Kaspa I. (1996). Pyridostigmine brain penetration under stress enhances neuronal excitability and induces early immediate transcriptional response. Nature Med. 2:1382-1385; Tomkins O, Kaufer D, Korn A, Shelef I, Golan H, Reichenthal E, Soreq H, and Friedman A. (2001) Frequent blood-brain barrier disruption in the human cerebral cortex. Cell Mol Neurobiol 21:675-91.

Assistant Professor Arash Komeili
Plant and Microbial Biology

Arash Komeili received his B.S. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 and his Ph.D. in cell biology from UCSF in 2001. From 2001 to 2005 he was in the laboratory of Dianne Newman in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology where he was a Senior Research Fellow of the Beckman Institute.

Dr. Komeili's research is focused on the magnetosomes of magnetotactic bacteria as a model system for understanding the biogenesis and subcellular organization of prokaryotic membranous organelles. Magnetosome chains contain 15-20 approximately 50-nm magnetite crystals that act like the needle of a compass to orient magnetotactic bacteria in geomagnetic fields, thereby simplifying their search for their preferred microaerophilic environments. Each magnetite crystal within a magnetosome is surrounded by a lipid bilayer, and specific soluble and transmembrane proteins are sorted to the magnetosome membrane. Using a combination of genetic, biochemical and cell biological approaches Dr. Komeili's lab hopes to define the precise physical characteristics of the magnetosome and identify key genes involved in its production and function.

Among his recent publications include: Komeili A, Vali H, Beveridge TJ, Newman DK. Magnetosome vesicles are present prior to magnetite formation and are activated by the MamA protein. PNAS . 101:3839-44 (2004). Weiss B.P., Kim S.S., Kirschvink J.L., Sankaran M., Kobayashi A., Komeili A. Magnetic Tests for Magnetosome Chains in Martian Meteorite ALH84001. PNAS. 101:8281-4 (2004). Komeili A, O'Shea EK. 2001. New perspectives on nuclear transport. Annu Rev Genetics. 35:341-64 .

Assistant Professor Han Lim
Integrative Biology

Han Lim received his medical degree and a degree in biomedical research from the University of Queensland, Australia, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Pediatrics, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Dr. Lim undertook postdoctoral research in the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge and in the Department of Physics at MIT.

His research focuses on understanding the complex interplay between genetics, epigenetic mechanisms, environment and stochastic fluctuations in the regulation of biological processes. In particular, his lab is determining how non-genetic variation in phenotype arises in bacterial populations and how this contributes to: 1) cellular decision-making and differentiation; 2) cooperation in bacterial communities; and 3) the regulation of specialized functions required for bacterial pathogenesis. The results of these studies will be used to develop new therapeutic strategies to combat two major problems in modern medicine; bacterial biofilm formation and antibiotic persistence/resistance.

Selected Publications: Ozbudak EM, Thattai M, Lim HN , Shraiman BI, Van Oudenaarden A. Multistability in the lactose utilization network of Escherichia coli. Nature. 2004;427:737-40; Lim HN and Farr CJ. Chromosome based vectors for mammalian cells: An overview. Methods Mol Biol. 2004;240:167-86; and Lim HN, Chen H, McBride S, Dunning AM, Nixon RM, Hughes IA, Hawkins JR. Longer polyglutamine tracts in the androgen receptor are associated with moderate to severe undermasculinized genitalia in XY males. Hum Mol Genet. 2000;9:829-34.

Assistant Professor Chelsea Specht
Plant and Microbial Biology

Chelsea Specht received her B.A. in biology and psychology from the the University of Delaware and her M.S. and Ph.D. in biology from New York University. Before coming to Berkeley she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History in Department of Botany.

Research in the Specht lab centers on the processes and patterns involved in the evolution and diversification of plants, especially the monocots. We use a phylogenetic framework to test hypotheses of morphological evolution and to analyze temporal and spatial patterns of plant speciation. We emphasize use of systematics in comparative biology. We focus on the evolution of development, comparative genomics and the genetics of interspecies interactions.

Among her recent publications include: Specht, C.D. 2006. “Systematics and Evolution of the tropical monocot family Costaceae (Zingiberales): a multiple dataset approach.” Systematic Botany 31(1). Specht, C.D. 2005. “Phylogenetics, Floral Evolution, and Rapid Radiation in the Tropical Monocot Family Costaceae (Zingiberales).” in Sharma and Sharma, eds. Plant Genome: Biodiversity and Evolution. Calcutta, India; Kress, W. J. and C. D. Specht. 2005. “Between Cancer and Capricorn: phylogeny, evolution, and ecology of the tropical Zingiberales.“ In I. Friis and H. Balslev, eds. Proceedings of a symposium on plant diversity and complexity patterns - local, regional and global dimensions. Biologiske Skrifter, The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen; and Davis, J.I., D.W. Stevenson, G. Petersen, O. Seberg, L.M. Campbell, J.V. Freudenstein, D.H. Goldman, C.R. Hardy, F.A. Michelangeli, M.P. Simmons, C.D. Specht, F. Vergara-Silva, and M.A. Gandolfo. 2004. “A phylogeny of the monocots, as inferred from rbcL and atpA sequence variation, and a comparison of methods for calculating jackknife and bootstrap values.” Systematic Botany 29(3): 467-510. More info

Assistant Professor Russell Vance
Molecular and Cell Biology - Immunology

Russell Vance received his B.Sc. in biochemistry and M.A. in philosophy from Queen's University, Canada and his Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the Departments of Genetics, and Micro and Molecular Genetics. In 2000, he was one of sixteen U.S. graduate students to receive the Harold Weintraub Award for an outstanding thesis. He was also the recipient of the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Among his recent publications include: Vance RE, Rietsch A, Mekalanos JJ (submitted, 2004). Role of type III-secreted exoenzymes S, T and Y in systemic spread of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in vivio; Fernandez NC, Treiner E, Vance RE, Jamieson AM, Lemieux S, Raulet DH (submitted, 2004). A subset of NK cells achieve self-tolerance without expressing inhibitory receptors specific for self MHC molecules; and Vance RE, Hong S, Gronert K, Serhan CN, Mekalanos JJ. (2004) The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa carries a secretable arachidonate 15-lipooxygenase. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci 101(7):2135-2139.

Assistant Professor Andrew Wurmser
Molecular and Cell Biology - Cell and Developmental Biology

Andrew Wurmser received his B. A. in economics from Brown University and his Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from University of California, San Diego. He was a post-doctoral fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA.

Among his recent publications include: Wurmser A. E., Sciorra V. A., Deng W., Zhao, C., Sandler V. M., Gage F. H. Intercellular Signaling within the Stem Cell Niche: Endothelial Cells Induce the Differentiation of Neural Stem Cells to Smooth Muscle. Manuscript in preparation; Wurmser A. E., Nakashima K., Summers R. G., Toni N., D'Amour K. A., Lie D. C., Gage F. H. 2004. Cell fusion-Independent Differentiation of Neural Stem Cells to the Endothelial Lineage. Nature 430(6997):350-356; and Wurmser A. E., Palmer T. D., Gage F. H. 2004. Cellular Interactions in the Stem Cell Niche. Science 304(5675):1253-1255.

Business

Assistant Professor Cameron Anderson
Haas School of Business - Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations

Cameron Anderson received his B.S. in psychology from the University of Washington and his Ph.D. in social/personality psychology from UC Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Northwestern University in the Kellogg School of Management. Before coming to Berkeley, he taught at the New York University for the Stern School of Business where he was named Professor of the Year. His research interests include: power and politics; negotiation and conflict resolution; emotion; and groups and teams.

Among his recent publications are: Anderson, C., & Keltner, D. (2004). Emotional Convergence: Implications for Individuals, Relationships, and Cultures. In Leach, C. L. and Tiedens, L. Z. (Eds.), The Social Life of Emotion; Anderson, C., & Thompson, L. L. (2004). Affect from the top down: How powerful individuals’ positive affect shapes negotiations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 95, 125-139; and Friedman, R., Anderson, C., Brett, J., Olekalns, M., Goates, N., Lisco, C. C. (2004). The positive and negative effects of anger on dispute resolution: Evidence from electronically-mediated disputes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 369-376. More info

Assistant Professor Nicole Johnson
Haas School of Business - Accounting

Nicole Johnson received her B.S. and M.Acc. in accounting from Brigham Young University in 1996. Shen then went on to receive her M.S. in statistics and her Ph.D. in accounting from Stanford University.

Johnson's current research interests are: executive compensation, managerial incentives, and transfer pricing. Among her recent working papers include: “Divisional Performance Measurement and Transfer Pricing for Intangible Assets”; “Deferred Taxes in Residual Income Compensation Schemes”; and “Employee Stock Options and Future Firm Performance” (with R. Kasznik and D. Aboody).

Assistant Professor Christine Parlour
Haas School of Business - Finance

Christine Parlour received her B.Soc.Sci. from the University of Ottawa in 1989; and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Queen's University at Kingston in 1991 and 1995. Before coming to Berkeley, she was and associate professor of finance at the Carnegie Mellon University. In 2000, she won the GSIA "Excellence in the Classroom" Teaching Award.

Parlour's research falls into two broad areas. First, an attempt to understand how the rules of a market or the types of trades that agents can undertake affect the outcomes of trade. Specifically, she analyzes limit order markets; many markets including stock exchanges and foreign exchange markets are organized in this form. Second, how competition between markets or institutions can affect the structures of markets. Stock exchanges compete for business by redesigning their market mechanisms. Does this lead to socially desirably outcomes?

While an associate finance professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, she spent a year as the visiting scholar at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. She currently serves as an associate editor at the Review of Financial Studies, The Review of Finance and the Journal of Financial Markets. Her papers have been published in economics and finance journals including the American Economic Review, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies.

Among her recent publications are: "Competition for Listings," with Thierry Foucault, RAND Journal of Eco­nomics, 2004, Vol 35, No 2 p329-355; "Payment for Order Flow," with Uday Rajan, Journal of Financial Eco­nomics, 2003, Vol. 68 No 3, p379-411; and "Liquidity Based Competition for Order Flow,"with Duane J. Seppi, Re-view of Financial Studies, Summer 2003, Vol 16 No 2, p301-343.

Associate Professor Steve Tadelis
Haas School of Business - Business and Public Policy

Steve Tadelis received his B.A. and M.Sc. in economics from the University of Haifa in Haifa, Israel and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Before coming to Berkeley he taught at Stanford University.

His research interests include: Economics of Organization; Procurement Contracting; Theory of the Firm and Industrial Organization; Contract Theory; and Game Theory.

Among his recent publications are: "Profit Sharing and the Role of Professional Partnerships," (2005) Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(1) :131-172 (Joint with Jonathan Levin); "The Market for Reputations as an Incentive Mechanism," (2002) Journal of Political Economy 110(4) :854-882; and "Complexity, Flexibility and the Make-or-Buy Decision," (2002) American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 92(2) :433-437. More info

Assistant Professor Johan Walden
Haas School of Business - Finance Group

Johan Walden received an M.S. in engineering physics and economics and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Uppsala University in Sweden. He then went on to receive an M.A. and Ph.D. in financial economics from Yale University. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Yale University, Department of Mathematics where he developed and implemented fast numerical algorithms for solving partial differential equations, using wavelet methods.

Before coming to Berkeley, Walden was a Management Consultant at McKinsey & Company in Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests include: bubbles and crashes; investor behavior under high uncertainty; nonlinear fund styles; and numerical asset pricing.

Some of his recent publications are: “Situational Awareness in a Spreadsheet: Estimating the Size and Time of a Bioterror Attack”, with Edward Kaplan, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 10(7) 2004; “Fast Slant Stack: A Notion of Radon Transform for Data in a Cartesian Grid which is Rapidly Computable, Algebraically Exact, Geometrically Faithful and Invertible”, with Amir Averbuch, Ronald Coifman, David Donoho, and Moshe Israeli, forthcoming, SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing; and “Analysis of The Direct Fourier Method for Computer Tomography”, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 19(3) 2000, pp. 211-222. More info

Education

Assistant Professor Dor Abrahamson
Graduate School of Education - Cognition and Development

Dor Abrahamson received his B.Mu. in performing arts (cello) from the Jerusalem Academy of Music; his M.A. in cognitive psychology from the Tel Aviv University; and his Ph.D. in learning sciences from Northwestern University. He is a recipient of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship supporting his project Seeing Chance, an investigation of the potential of computational environments in tapping and fostering learners' intuitions of randomness.

Abrahamson's research and teaching interests span a range of theoretical and pragmatic domains relating to the learning and teaching of mathematics with an emphasis on the design and research of mixed-media learning supports. Working primarily within a design-research paradigm, Abrahamson explores the roles technologies play in supporting students' nurturing and development of robust conceptual understanding that is rooted in embodied intuitions of familiar contexts. Insights from these studies inform the development of theoretical models of mathematical cognition and the articulation of principles for effective design and facilitation. For his doctoral dissertation (Karen C. Fuson, advisor), Abrahamson designed and implemented an experimental unit on ratio and proportion for elementary-school students, and during his post-doctoral appointment (Uri Wilensky, supervisor), he created and studied interactive computational environments for middle-school students studying probability and statistics. Dor Abrahamson also played a leading role in ISME, a National Science Foundation funded project studying middle-school students' reasoning about complex phenomena within Integrated Simulation and Modeling Environments.

Abrahamson recently co-authored with Karen C. Fuson a chapter in J. Campbell (Ed.) Handbook of Mathematical Cognition. He is a member of the American Educational Research Association, the International Society of the Learning Sciences, the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Computers for Mathematics Learning. More info

Assistant Professor Cynthia Coburn
Graduate School of Education - Policy, Organization, Measurement, and Evaluation

Cynthia E. Coburn received her B.A. in philosophy from Oberlin College, her M.A. in sociology from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in education from Stanford University. She was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation national dissertation fellowship in 1999 and won the 2002 Dissertation Award from Division L (policy and politics) of the American Educational Research Association. At Berkeley, she teaches Ph.D. students in POME and school and district leaders in the Joint Doctoral Program for Educational Equity and Leadership.

Coburn uses the tools of organizational sociology to understand the relationship between instructional policy and teachers' classroom practices in urban schools. She has studied these issues in the context of state and national reading policy, attempts to scale-up innovative school reform programs, and district-wide professional development initiatives. Current projects include a study of the role of school leaders in mediating between reading policy and teachers' classroom practice. The study brings an analysis of power, authority, and knowledge into scholarship on teachers' interpretation of instructional policy. She also co-directs a cross-case study of innovative efforts to reconfigure the relationship between research and practice for school improvement. As part of that project, she studies an effort to redesign school districts to foster evidence-based practice and decision making.

Among her recent publications are: Coburn, Cynthia E. (2005). The Role of Non-System Actors in the Relationship Between Policy and Practice: The Case of Reading Instruction in California. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , 27(1), 23-52; Coburn, Cynthia E. (2005). Shaping Teacher Sensemaking: School Leaders and the Enactment of Reading Policy. Educational Policy, 19(3), 476-509; and Honig, Meredith I. & Coburn, Cynthia E. (2005). When districts use evidence for instructional improvement: What do we know and where do we go from here? Voices in Urban Education, (6), 22-29. More info

Assistant Professor Randi Engle
Graduate School of Education - Cognition and Development

Randy A. Engle received her A.B. in mathematics and psychology from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. in education from Stanford University.

Engle is a learning sciences researcher who uses tools from discourse analysis and cognitive science in order to understand the principles and practices underlying effective discussion-based learning environments, especially in mathematics and science education. She studies both experienced and beginning discussion facilitators in order to better understand what is involved in facilitating discussions in which participants are both (1) deeply engaged in productive intellectual work and (2) able to generatively use what they've learned in their future endeavors. Her goal is to develop practical, empirically-grounded theories of these processes that will make it possible for almost any teacher to facilitate effective classroom discussions. At the same time, Professor Engle's work develops a situative perspective on learning that believes that learning is always inextricably situated in its social and material contexts, with the development of learners' identities vis-a-vis the academic content being a crucial part of the process. She is looking forward to working with students who share her interest in how discourse and other forms of social interaction influence teaching and learning.

Some of her recent publications include: Engle, R. A. & Conant, F. C. (2002). Guiding principles for fostering productive disciplinary engagement: Explaining an emergent argument in a community of learners classroom. Cognition and Instruction, 20(4), 399-483; and Engle, R. A., Conant, F. C. & Greeno, J. G. (in press). Progressive refinement of hypotheses in video-supported research. In R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron & S. Derry (Eds.), Video research in the learning sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. More info

Assistant Professor Laura Sterponi
Graduate School of Education

Although Laura Sterponi’s area of interest is reading, she came to it after earning two Ph.D.'s in different countries and fields. In her native Italy she completed a dissertation in psychology with a specialization in children’s apprenticeship in moral reasoning. Later she came to the U.S. as a visiting student at UCLA where she ended up doing a second doctorate in applied linguistics. Both her degrees are lenses through which she views and analyzes events in the classroom.

Sterponi believes the historical perspective is also crucial in understanding reading. Reading as practice is historically contingent and culturally organized. Traditionally, and still nowadays in some cultures, reading has not been a solitary practice, partly because of the scarcity of books and literacy, but partly because reading was primarily considered a social practice. Reading was performed aloud—in public spaces as well as in more intimate private gatherings —and nurtured the bonds of community and friendship.

Sterponi is equally fluent in Italian and English and has published journal articles in both languages. She also speaks French and some Spanish. She began teaching a course at Berkeley before she even arrived from Italy, using e-mail and the Internet to hold discussions and give feedback to students. Now that she’s here in Tolman Hall, she’s looking forward to her work teaching graduate classes in the Language and Literacy, Society and Culture area of study.

Engineering

Assistant Professor Maneesh Agrawala
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences

Maneesh Agrawala received a B.S. in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Stanford University. While at Stanford, he worked part-time as a Rendering Software Engineer at Pixar, where he contributed to the feature film, "A Bug's Life". Prior to joining Berkeley, he worked as a Researcher in the Document Processing and Understanding Group at Microsoft Research. Agrawala's primary interests are in visualization, human computer interaction and computer graphics. His focus is on investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of visualizations. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in automated design tools. Recent projects based on this methodology include, an automated route map renderer, a system for designing assembly interactions and interactive tools for manipulating digital photographs.

Among his recent publications include: Digital Photography With Flash and No-Flash Image Pairs by Georg Petschnigg, Maneesh Agrawala, Hugues Hoppe, Rick Szeliski, Michael Cohen and Kentaro Toyama. SIGGRAPH 2004, pp. 664-672; Interactive Digital Photomontage. Aseem Agarwala, Mira Dontcheva, Maneesh Agrawala, Steven Drucker, Alex Colburn, Brian Curless, David Salesin and Michael Cohen. SIGGRAPH 2004, pp. 294-302; and Designing Effective Step-By-Step Assembly Instructions. Maneesh Agrawala, Doantam Phan, Julie Heiser, John Haymaker, Jeff Klingner, Pat Hanrahan and Barbara Tversky. SIGGRAPH 2003, pp. 828-837. More info

Assistant Professor Jose Carmena
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences
Program in Cognitive Science

Jose M. Carmena received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) in 1995 and the University of Valencia (Spain) in 1997. Following those he received the M.S. degree in artificial intelligence and the Ph.D. degree in robotics both from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) in 1998 and 2002 respectively. From 2002 to 2005 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Miguel Nicolelis' Laboratory, Department of Neurobiology, and the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University (Durham, NC). During this period he was the recipient of a Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation research award. In the summer of 2005 he was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He is member of the IEEE (RAS and EMBS societies), Society for Neuroscience, and the Neural Control of Movement Society. His research interests include neural engineering (brain-machine interfaces; neuroprosthetics; biomimetic robotics), and systems and cognitive neuroscience (neural basis of sensorimotor control and learning; neural ensemble computation).

Among his recent publications include: Carmena J.M ., Lebedev M.A., Henriquez C.S., and Nicolelis M.A.L. Stable ensemble performance with single neuron variability during reaching movements in primates (under review in Journal of Neuroscience); Gutierrez R., Carmena J.M. , Nicolelis M.A.L., and Simon S.A. (2005). Temporal specific ensembles of rat orbitofrontal neurons represent the drinking of liquid rewards. Journal of Neurophysiology (in press); and Lebedev M.A., Carmena J.M. , O'Doherty J.E., Zacksenhouse M., Henriquez C.S., Principe J.C., and Nicolelis M.A.L. (2005). Cortical ensemble adaptation to represent velocity of an artificial actuator controlled by a brain-machine interface. Journal of Neuroscience 25(19):4681:4693. More info

Assistant Professor Fotini Katopodes Chow
Civil and Environmental Engineering

Tina Chow received her B.S. in engineering sciences from Harvard University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University.

Chow's current research interests are in performing large-eddy simulations (LES) of the atmospheric boundary layer, with a focus on the development and testing of new turbulence models and improved boundary conditions for flow over complex terrain (such as mountainous and urban areas).

Among her recent publications include: Chow, F.K., Weigel, A.P., Street, R.L., Rotach, M.W., and M. Xue. 2005. High-resolution large-eddy simulations of flow in a steep Alpine valley. Part I: Methodology, verification, and sensitivity experiments. Journal of Applied Meteorology, in press; Weigel, A.P., Chow, F.K., Rotach, M.W., Street, R.L., and M. Xue. 2005. High-resolution large-eddy simulations of flow in a steep Alpine valley. Part II: Flow structure and heat budgets. Journal of Applied Meteorology, in press; and Chow, F.K., Street, R.L., Xue, M., and J.H. Ferziger. 2005. Explicit filtering and reconstruction turbulence modeling for large-eddy simulation of neutral boundary layer flow. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 62 (7), 2058-2077. More info

Assistant Professor Irina Conboy
Bioengineering

Before coming to Berkeley Irina Conboy was an instructor Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. Her areas of expertise and research focus are on the studies of aging and adult tissue repair. Specifically, she is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of stem cell aging that underlie the loss of the tissue regenerative capacity in the old. The main idea behind the work of her laboratory is that the damage to the differentiated tissues always increases, but the loss of organ function occurs only after the regenerative capacity of organ stem cells to repair such damage declines with age.

Her previous research laying foundation to the current projects of her laboratory has demonstrated that molecular regulation of adult tissue repair recapitulates the mechanisms operating in embryonic organogenesis, specifically, that the evolutionary conserved Notch and Wingless (Wnt) molecular pathways regulate the cell-fate determination of the stem and progenitor cells in regenerating adult skeletal muscle. Moreover, she found that Notch is the key molecular determinant of muscle repair that becomes deficient with age.

Among her recent publications include: Wagers AJ, and Conboy I.M. Cellular and molecular signatures of muscle regeneration. Cell , 2005, 122, 1-9; EdeJ. Pardo, M. Hoang and I.M. Conboy. Geometric control of myogenic cell fate. 2005. Invited submission to International Journal of Nanoscience; and I. Conboy, M. J. Conboy, A. Brack, and T.A. Rando. A temporal switch from Notch to Wnt signaling is essential for adult myogenesis. 2005, (in review, in Science). More info

Assistant Professor Sanjay Kumar
Bioengineering

Sanjay Kumar earned a B.S. in chemical engineering (1996) from the University of Minnesota, where he studied lipid self-assembly in the laboratory of Matt Tirrell. He then moved on to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an M.D. (2003) and a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics (2003) as a fellow of the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program. During the graduate portion of his training, he investigated the structure and energetics of neuronal intermediate filaments in the laboratories of Jan Hoh of the School of Medicine and Mike Paulaitis of the Department of Chemical Engineering. Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley (2005), he served as an NIH research fellow with Don Ingber at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, where he examined the nanoscale mechanics and dynamics of cytoskeletal structures in living cells.

The Kumar Laboratory addresses problems in molecular cell dynamics and mechanics, with a focus on understanding how the cellular cytoskeleton governs cell shape and senses and transduces mechanical inputs. We take both "bottom-up" and "top-down" approaches to this important problem, including: (1) Probing reconstituted systems of cytoskeletal filaments to understand how filament biochemistry and biophysics influences network organization; and (2) Observing and manipulating intact, living cells to learn how cytoskeletal properties drive and respond to the behavior of the whole cell. Our work takes advantage of optical and atomic force microscopy, subcellular laser ablation and photobleaching, microfabricated substrates, traditional biochemical and cell biological methods, and computational tools. An increasing number of micro- and nanotechnologies either subject cells to mechanical forces, require cells to be patterned into specific spatial arrangements, or both. These include a wide variety of MEMS and microfluidic devices and tissue engineering systems. Thus, we ultimately envision applying our knowledge to both improve the design of existing cellular biotechnologies and develop entirely novel ones.

Among his recent publications include: A. Heisterkamp, I. Z. Maxwell, E. Mazur, J. M. Underwood, J. A. Nickerson, S. Kumar, and D. E. Ingber (2005). Pulse energy-dependence of subcellular ablation by femtosecond laser pulses. Optics Express 13: 3690-3696; S. Kumar and J. H. Hoh. Modulation of repulsive forces between neurofilaments by sidearm phosphorylation (2004). Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 324: 489-496; and S. Kumar, X. Yin, B. D. Trapp, J. H. Hoh, and M. E. Paulaitis (2002). Relating interactions between neurofilaments to the structure of axonal neurofilament distributions through polymer brush models. Biophysical Journal 82: 2360-2372. More info

Assistant Professor Mohammad Mofrad
Bioengineering

Mohammad Mofrad received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Before coming to Berkeley he served as a principal research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Biological Engineering Division at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His research interests include: Multi-scale Biomechanics/Mechanobiology of Cardiovascular Disease; Cell Mechanics & Mechanotransduction; Molecular Mechanics of Proteins; Bio-Fluid/Solid Mechanics and Transport; Quantitative Aspects of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, Extracorporeal Organ Support Systems.

Some of his recent publications are: Fidkowski C, Kaazempur-Mofrad MR, Borenstein JT, Vacanti JP, Langer R, Wang Y. “Endothelialized Microvasculature Based on a Biodegradable Elastomer”, Tissue Engineering, 11(1-2): 302-309, 2005; Weinberg EJ, Kaazempur-Mofrad MR. “On the Constitutive Models for Heart Valve Leaflet Mechanics”, Cardiovascular Engineering, 5(1): 37-43, 2005; and Khail AS, Chan RC, Chau AH, Bouma BE, Kaazempur-Mofrad MR. “Tissue Elasticity Estimation with Optical Coherence Elastography: Toward Complete Mechanical Characterization of In Vivo Soft Tissue”, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 33(10), 2005. More info

Assistant Professor Sanjit Seshia
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Sanjit A. Seshia received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.Tech. in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research interests are in dependable computing, with a current focus on applying automated formal methods to problems in computer security, electronic design automation, and program analysis. He is a co-winner of the 2005 School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award at Carnegie Mellon University.

Among his recent publications include: Sanjit A. Seshia and Randal E. Bryant, Deciding Quantifer-Free Presburger Formulas Using Parameterized Solution Bounds, Logical Methods in Computer Science journal, 2005, to appear. Earlier version in 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS), pages 100–109, July 2004. Among 10 invited from 40 accepted conference papers and 168 submissions; Mihai Christodorescu, Somesh Jha, Sanjit A. Seshia, Dawn Song, and Randal E. Bryant, Semantics-Aware Malware Detection, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, May 2005, pages 32–46; and Vinod Ganapathy, Sanjit A. Seshia, Somesh Jha, Thomas W. Reps, and Randal E. Bryant, Automatic Discovery of API-Level Exploits, 27th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May 2005, pages 312–321. More info

Associate Professor Claire Tomlin
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences

Claire J. Tomlin received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Berkeley in 1998, joined Stanford in 1998 as a Terman assistant professor, and received tenure at Stanford in 2004. In 2005, she joined Berkeley as an associate professor. She received the M.Sc. from Imperial College, London, in 1993, and the B.A.Sc. from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1992, both in Electrical Engineering. She has held visiting research positions at NASA Ames, Honeywell Labs, and the University of British Columbia. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley, and an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University.

Claire Tomlin's research interests are in control systems, specifically hybrid control theory, and she works on air traffic control automation, flight management system analysis and design, and modeling and analysis of biological cell networks. She is a recipient of the Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council (2003), MIT Technology Review's Top 100 Young Innovators Award (2003), the AIAA Outstanding Teacher Award (2001), an NSF Career Award (1999), and the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics (1998).

Two recent significant publications: K. Amonlirdviman, N. A. Khare, D. R. P. Tree, W.-S. Chen, J. D. Axelrod, and C. J. Tomlin, Mathematical Modeling of Planar Cell Polarity to Understand Domineering Nonautonomy. Science 307 5708:423-426, 21 Jan 2005; and I. M. Mitchell, A. M. Bayen, and C. J. Tomlin, A Time-Dependent Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of Reachable Sets for Continuous Dynamic Games, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 50 7:947-957, July 2005. More info

Humanities

Assistant Professor C. Daniel Blanton
English

Daniel Blanton received his Ph.D. from Duke University and his B.A. from Rice University. Before coming to Berkeley he taught in the Department of English at Princeton University. Dan Blanton specializes in the history of modernism and of modern poetry more generally, with a broad interest in the aesthetic and cultural theory of the last two centuries.

Blanton is currently working on two books. Aftereffects: Late Modernism and the Politics of Form explores modernism's poetic endings, in the wartime works of W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and H.D., the regional epics of Hugh MacDiarmid, David Jones, and Basil Bunting, and the contemporary styles of Geoffrey Hill and J. H. Prynne. Untimely Histories: Fatal Poetics and the Modernist Past examines the consequences of the long poem's emergence as a mode of counter-historiography, from the end of romanticism to the work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. He has written on Robert Browning and forgery, T. E. Hulme and the temporality of original sin, poetic translation and globalization, regionalism in recent British poetry, and the problem of nominalism in modernist philosophical aesthetics; and is writing on T. S. Eliot's relation to Marxian cultural theory and on the cartography of the contemporary London avant-garde. He is co-editor of Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism and is currently editing, with Nigel Alderman, a companion to post-war British and Irish Poetry for Blackwell. More info

Assistant Professor Déborah Blocker
French

Déborah Blocker holds a Ph.D. in French literature and culture from the University of Paris-III, Sorbonne Nouvelle (2001). She specializes in the social history of literary practices in early modern France, with a particular interest in theater. She is currently working on a book entitled Poétiques, politiques, savoir-faire : l'institution d'un “art” théâtral dans la France du premier XVII e siècle, to be published by Honoré Champion in Paris. This project has led her to develop a larger curiosity for the social constitution of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe, with a specific focus on the circulation of texts, references and concepts from university settings to courts and.

She has recently published (with Dinah Ribard), “Du Ryer et l'écriture indirecte”, Littératures classiques, 42 (2001); “Publier la gloire du ‘théâtre françois'”, in GRIHL, De la Publication: entre Renaissance et Lumières, Arthème Fayard, 2002; “Elucider et équivoquer: Francesco Robortello (ré)invente la catharsis”, Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques, 33 (2004); “The Hermeneutics of Transmission: deciphering discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe (1500-1800)”, Intermédialités, 5 (2005).

Senior Lecturer Vikram Chandra
English

Vikram Chandra completed most of his secondary education at Mayo College, a boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan. After a short stay at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, Vikram came to the United States as an undergraduate student. In 1984, he graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) with a B.A. in English, with a concentration in creative writing. He then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York. In the Columbia library, by chance, he happened upon the autobiography of Colonel James “Sikander” Skinner, a legendary nineteenth century soldier, born of an Indian mother and a British father. This book was to become the inspiration for Vikram's novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He left film school halfway to begin work on the novel.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain was written over several years at the writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston. Vikram worked with John Barth at Johns Hopkins and with Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston; he obtained an M.A. at Johns Hopkins and an M.FA at the University of Houston. While writing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram taught literature and writing, and also worked independently as a computer programmer and software and hardware consultant.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published in 1995 and received with outstanding critical acclaim. A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997. Love and Longing in Bombay won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region); was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and was included in “Notable Books of 1997” by the New York Times Book Review, in “Best Books of the Year” by the Independent (London), in “Best Books of the Year” by the Guardian (London), and in “The Ten Best Books of 1997” by Outlook magazine (New Delhi). The story “Dharma” was awarded the Discovery Prize by the Paris Review, and was included in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin's Press, 1998).

Vikram Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.

Assistant Professor Samera Esmeir
Rhetoric

A former human rights lawyer, Samera Esmeir received her Ph.D. in law and society from New York University (September, 2005). Her areas of research include: Colonialism and Modernity, War, Violence, Development, Memory, Sociolegal Studies, Critical Theory, Middle Eastern Studies. She is currently revising her dissertation manuscript into a book. Entitled The Work of Law in the Age of Empire: Production of Humanity in Colonial Egypt, this study explores the role played by the violence of imperial colonialism in the constitution of “universal humanity,” and in inscribing the human as the teleology of modern law. She is also working on two smaller research projects. The first investigates the constitution of life and death in the laws of war and occupation, with a particular focus on Palestinians and Iraqis. The second project examines the colonial genealogy of the field of “comparative law.” Samera Esmeir is also the co-editor and cofounder of Adalah's Review, a sociolegal journal published in Arabic, Hebrew and English that focuses on the Palestinian minority in Israel.

Among her most recent publications include: “Memories of Conquest,” in Touching a Painful Past, Lila Abu-Lughud and Ahmad Sa'di, eds. (Columbia University Press, forthcoming); “In the Name of Security: Introduction,” Adalah's Review, vol. 4, p.1 (2004); and “1948: History, Memory, Law,” Social Text 75, vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer, 2003).

Assistant Professor Munis Faruqui
South and Southeast Asian Studies

Munis D. Faruqui received his Ph.D. in history from Duke University in 2002; his M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge in 1992; and his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1990. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Islam in South Asia.

Professor Faruqui is currently working on a monograph that focuses on the figure of the Mughal Prince to explore questions of state formation, imperial power, and dynastic decline in 16th and 17th Century South Asia. His most recent article on the formation of the Mughal Empire appears in the November 2005 issue of the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO). His other research interests include Islam’s interaction with non-Muslim religious traditions in 17th Century India, the imperial harem in Mughal India, and the African diaspora in pre-modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Assistant Professor Sumi Furiya
Classics

Sumi Furiya received her B.A. from Hunter College in 1989 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004. Before coming to Berkeley she was an assistant professor at Union College. Her areas of interest are: Roman literature and culture, especially Republican and Augustan poetry.

Furiya's course offerings for 2005-2006 are: Republican prose; Horace's "Odes"; Roman didactic poetry; and modern literary theory and classical literature. Papers presented include "Lucretian simulacra and Ennius' dream", "Hymnic ambivalence in Lucretius", and "Building memories: Statius architectural Silvae". Work in progress: Lucretius on Poetry .

Assistant Professor Niko Kolodny
Philosophy

Niko Kolodny received a B.A. from Williams in 1994, M.A. from Oxford in 1996, and Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2003. Before returning to Berkeley as Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 2005, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and Research Associate at the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University.

His main interests lie in moral and political philosophy. He has taught undergraduate courses on moral objectivity, John Rawls, and the social contract and utilitarian traditions in political thought. He is currently writing about partiality, rationality, promises, and Rousseau. His publications include “Why Be Rational?,” Mind 114:455 (2005); and “Love as Valuing a Relationship,” Philosophical Review 112:2 (2003).

Assistant Professor David Landreth
English

David Landreth areas of interest are literature and culture of Renaissance England; the persistence of antiquity; relationships of literature to the visual arts; how possessions interact with their owners. His is currently developing a book on the circulation of coins through both the private purses and the literary texts of Tudor England, using these ubiquitous objects to explore problems of value, material ontology, and subjectivity that emerge from the relations that a coin represents among individuals, the national market, and the state.

Among his recent publications and papers delivered include: “Once More into the Preech: the Merry Wives' English Pedagogy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (Winter 2004): 420-49; “Gold, Domesticity, and Blood in The Jew of Malta,” paper given, Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, November 2004; and “Pictura Epidemica : Visual Politics in Browne's Vulgar Errors,” paper given, Copia Conference for Renaissance Studies, April 2004.

Associate Professor Maura Nolan
English

Maura Nolan received her A.B. from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University. Before coming to Berkeley in 2005, she taught at the University of Notre Dame.

Nolan works on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the vexed relationship between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance.” Her first book, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, argued that during the minority of Henry VI, Lydgate constructed a new kind of “public culture” designed to articulate and explore troubling social and cultural questions of sovereignty, authority and monarchical legitimacy. This “public culture” depended upon a notion of representativeness, in which the king and a tiny elite could stand in for the rest of the realm, making Lydgate's aristocratic and mercantile audiences a narrow but significant “public” with broad authority in both the political and the cultural spheres. This “public culture” had far reaching, if unintended effects; Lydgate deployed old forms in new contexts in order to forge something surprisingly modern out of medieval traditions, a modernity that has been obscured to contemporary readers by the conventionality of his discourse.

In her current project, English Fortune: The Early History of a Literary Idea, she examines the popular medieval figure of Fortune, focusing in particular on the relationship of historical contingency to poetic and social forms, structures and genres—a relationship that late medieval poets like Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Hoccleve tended to articulate using the personification of Fortune and her wheel. She is especially interested in the notion of the “aesthetic” in the later Middle Ages and in contemporary literary criticism and theory, as well as in the relationship between history and the forms through which is is made legible.

Her recent publications include: John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005; The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors and Readers. Edited with Jill Mann. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006; and “Lydgate's Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005).

Assistant Professor Dylan Sailor
Classics

Dylan Sailor received a B.A. in classics and history from the University of Washington in 1995; an M.A. in Greek from UC, Berkeley; and a Ph.D. in classics from Berkeley in 2002. Before coming to Berkeley, he was an assistant professor of classics and comparative literature at UC, San Diego from 2002-2005.

Sailor's research interests are in ancient historiography and in the literature and culture of the early Roman Principate. He has written articles on Aeschylus, Tacitus, and Livy; completing a book manuscript on the ways in which the historiography of Tacitus represents Tacitus before Roman readerships; and continues work on a project concerning autonomy and authority in historical writing of the Principate.

Information Management Systems

Assistant Professor Coye Cheshire
School of Information Management Systems

As a sociological social psychologist, Coye Cheshire's work focuses on how various forms of exchange are produced and maintained on the Internet, and more broadly, in computer-mediated exchange environments. Coye received a BA in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997, followed by a Masters Degree (1998) and PhD in Sociology from Stanford University in 2005. While finishing his PhD at Stanford, he also worked for the Stanford Institute for Social Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) and as an academic research software consultant. His teaching interests include social and organizational issues in information, social structure and social exchange, research methods, and the Internet and society.

Professor Cheshire's current research topics include: the role of information as the object of exchange in social exchange environments, the emergence of exchange systems and networks, the production of collective goods in exchange networks, the development of trust and cooperation in exchange networks, and the role of social psychological incentives in social exchange. Many of his projects are collaborative experiments with researchers at Stanford University and Hokkaido University in Japan.

Recent publications include "Trust Building via Risk Taking: A Cross-Societal Experiment" (Social Psychology Quarterly, June 2005) and "The Emergence of Trust Networks: Implications for Online Interaction" (Analyse and Kritik, December 2004). More info

Law

Acting Professor Kenneth Bamberger
Boalt Hall School of Law

Kenneth Bamberger came to Boalt Hall in 2005 from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in Washington, D.C., where his appellate litigation and counseling practice involved issues arising from the regulation of business. His research focuses on the involvement of a variety of institutions—both public and private—in governance, and at Boalt he will teach Administrative Law, Corporations and Torts, as well as a seminar on Organizations in the Law.

Bamberger is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review . After law school, he clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. Between clerkships, he worked on Supreme Court litigation in the Office of the U.S. Solicitor General.

In practice Bamberger represented clients in a variety of federal courts, at both the trial and appellate levels, and before the Federal Trade Commission. He also advised individual and institutional clients on issues from litigation and negotiation strategy to the structure of internal investigations. Previously, Bamberger served as a management consultant and as policy director for the Senate chair of the Massachusetts Legislature's Committee on Health Care. In 2004 he was also a visiting researcher at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he researched organizational theories of the firm, administrative law and regulatory design.

Bamberger has published in the New York University Law Review, Harvard Law Review , and Business Lawyer . The argument of his 2002 article, “Provisional Precedent: Preserving Flexibility in Administrative Decisionmaking,” was adopted this year by a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X (2005), which reinterpreted established precedent regarding the judicial deference due to agency constructions of administrative statutes. More info

Acting Professor Erin Murphy
Boalt Hall School of Law

After graduating from Harvard Law School, where she served as a notes editor for the Harvard Law Review, Erin Murphy clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She then joined the Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia, where she spent three years in the trial division and two years in the appellate division. While at PDS, Murphy represented clients in felony and misdemeanor cases in jury and bench trials, and argued before the D.C. Court of Appeals. She also led a widely watched constitutional challenge to the District of Columbia's firearms law, and acquired particular expertise in the scientific and legal issues surrounding the admissibility of various types of forensic evidence.

Murphy's research considers procedural and evidentiary questions related to the criminal law. Her current work, an article in progress entitled “Without a Doubt: Appraising the Adversary System in the Age of Scientific Certainty,” focuses on the use of DNA technologies in the criminal justice system. More broadly, Murphy's interests include the application of traditional procedural models to evidence derived from any novel technology, such as thermal imaging or functional MRIs, and the relationship between criminal procedure and substantive criminal law.

Murphy has appeared as a guest lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center and has presented seminars for practitioners on topics ranging from “Unlocking the Power of the Fifth Amendment” to “Beyond the Experts: Witnesses in Sex Abuse Cases” and “DNA Evidence: What Happens Next.” Her prior publications include “Awaiting the Mikado: Limiting Legislative Discretion to Define Criminal Elements and Sentencing Factors” in the Harvard Law Review (1999). More info

Professor David Sklansky
Boalt Hall School of Law

David A. Sklansky joins the law school faculty at U.C. Berkeley following a decade at UCLA School of Law, where he won the campuswide Distinguished Teaching Award and was twice voted the law school's professor of the year. He teaches and writes about criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence.

After receiving an A.B. in biophysics from Cal in 1981 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984, Sklansky clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. He then briefly practiced labor law at the Washington, D.C., firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser and spent several years as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, where he specialized in white-collar fraud prosecutions.

Sklansky is the author of a well-regarded evidence casebook, and he has written extensively about criminal procedure and policing. More info

Acting Professor Molly Van Houweling
Boalt Hall School of Law

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling joined the Boalt faculty in fall 2005 from the University of Michigan Law School, where she had been an assistant professor since 2002. Van Houweling's teaching and research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, property, and constitutional law. She was a visiting professor at Boalt in 2004-05.

Before joining the Michigan faculty, Van Houweling was president of Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that facilitates sharing of intellectual property. Van Houweling has served as senior adviser to the president and board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Internet Domain Name System. She has been a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Van Houweling clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit and Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Van Houweling's recent publications include “Distributive Values in Copyright” in the Texas Law Review (2005); “Enforcement of Foreign Judgments, the First Amendment, and Internet Speech: Notes for the Next Yahoo! v. LICRA (Special Feature: Cyberage Conflicts Law)” in the Michigan Journal of International Law (2003); and “Cultivating Open Information Platforms: A Land Trust Model” in the Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law (2002). More info

Professor Leti Volpp
Boalt Hall School of Law

After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1993, Leti Volpp clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Thelton E. Henderson '62 of the Northern District of California, and then worked as a public interest lawyer for several years. Volpp served as a Skadden Fellow at Equal Rights Advocates and the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, both in San Francisco; as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C.; and as a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project in New York City. She began teaching at the American University, Washington College of Law in 1998 and visited at UCLA School of Law in 2004-05. She joined the Boalt faculty in 2005.

Volpp's research centers on legal understandings of the relationship between culture, migration and identity, and on theories of citizenship. She is in particular interested in Asian American racialization and in the culturalization of racism, especially as it is expressed through concern about cultural forms of gendered subordination.

Volpp's numerous honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, and the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award. She has delivered many public lectures, including the James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School, the Korematsu Lecture at New York University Law School, and the Barbara Aronstein Black Lecture at Columbia Law School.

She writes about citizenship, migration, culture and identity. Her most recent publications include a co-edited special issue of American Quarterly titled “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders” (with Mary Dudziak) (2005); “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship Through Marriage" in the UCLA Law Review (2005), and “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and Alien Citizens” in the Michigan Law Review (2005). She is also the author of the well known articles “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in the UCLA Law Review (2002), “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review (2001), and "(Mis)Identifying Culture: Asian Women and the "Cultural Defense" in the Harvard Women's Law Journal (1994). More info

Natural Resources & Environmental Studies

Assistant Professor Perry de Valpine
Environmental Science, Policy & Management - Insect Biology

Perry de Valpine's current projects include development of Monte Carlo statistical methods for maximum likelihood analysis of stage-structured population (time-series) models incorporating measurement error and environmental stochasticity; application of new analysis methods to insect population studies from agricultural systems to address questions about stage-structured demography, predator-prey interactions, biological control and insect outbreaks; and evaluation of population time-series analysis methods for fisheries systems to address questions about stock-assessment and nonlinear dynamics.

Professor de Valpine's research group develops, evaluates, and applies quantitative analysis methods for complex ecological data, with a primary focus on population dynamics. Field experiments to study factors that affect demographic processes -- such as growth, survival, reproduction, species interactions, movement, and behavior -- often produce noisy estimates of the state of highly variable nonlinear processes. They use applied math and statistics to study methods to fit stochastic nonlinear models to such data and to test hypotheses from ecological field experiments. A major avenue for investigation is adaptation of Monte Carlo statistical methods to biologically-structured population models. They also collaborate on field experiments to answer basic ecological questions about population dynamics, primarily of insects in agricultural systems. Other areas of interest include life-history evolution, species interactions, fishery dynamics, phenotypic plasticity, and statistical theory and computational methods.

Among his recent publications include: de Valpine, P. and R. Hilborn. In press. State-space likelihoods for nonlinear fisheries time-series. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences; de Valpine, P. 2004. Monte Carlo state-space likelihoods by weighted posterior kernel density estimation. Journal of the American Statistical Association 99:523-535; and de Valpine, P. 2003. Better inferences from population-dynamics.

Assistant Professor Claire Kremen
Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Claire Kremen's primary interest is to use biological, social and economic data to develop conservation plans that benefit both the environment and people. Within conservation biology, she has studied a wide array of topics, including the economics and ecology of ecosystem services, sustainable forestry, ecology and biogeography of tropical butterflies, population biology of lemurs, and ecological monitoring. Her work reaches from theory to practice and includes hands-on conservation action. From 1993 –1997, she designed and helped to establish Madagascar 's largest National Park on the Masoala Peninsula. Her current research examines the functional links between the spatial distribution of wildlands, the composition of wild bee communities, farm management practices, and the delivery of pollination services to agriculture in California and New Jersey. She is leading an National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis working group that is using models and meta-analysis to predict how to restore pollination services in degraded landscapes, and is a member of a National Academy of Sciences study on the statue of pollinators in North America. She is also working with a variety of organizations in Madagascar to establish a national conservation-planning tool by accumulating data on species occurrences, developing predictive models of species distributions, and conducting conservation analyses. She taught Conservation Biology as an Assistant Professor at Princeton University from 2001-2005, and will continue to teach related topics at Berkeley.

She received her Ph.D. in Zoology from Duke University in 1987 as an NSF and James B. Duke Fellow, and her B.Sc. in Biology from Stanford University in 1982. She is a scientific advisor for several conservation organizations and sits on the Editorial Board of Conservation Biology. She is also an associate conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. She is a 2001 recipient of the McDonnell 21 st Century Research Award.

Among her recent publications include: Kremen, C. 2005. Managing for ecosystem services: what do we need to know about their ecology? Ecology Letters, 8 :468-479; Larsen, T. H., N. M. Williams and C. Kremen. 2005. Extinction order and altered community structure rapidly disrupt ecosystem functioning. Ecology Letters, 8 :538-547; and Balvanera, P., C. Kremen and M. Martinez. 2005. Applying community structure analysis to ecosystem function: examples from pollination and carbon storage. Ecological Applications, 15:360-375. More info

Assistant Professor Patrick O'Grady
Environmental Science, Policy & Management - Insect Biology

Patrick O'Grady received his B.S. in biology from Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York in 1993 and his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Arizona in 1998. Before coming to Berkeley he was an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, and Curator of the Zaddock Thompson Invertebrate Collection at the University of Vermont.

O'Grady is actively curating a research large collection (15,000 specimens from about 600 species) of endemic Hawaiian Diptera, particularly the family Drosophilidae. This group has been the focus of his collecting efforts over the past six years and continues to drive many of his research questions. He has spent time examining Diptera at the following institutions: American Museum of Natural History, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, National Drosophila Species Stock Center, National Museum of Natural History, and University of Hawaii Entomology Collection. He is a past curator of the Zaddock Thompson Invertebrate Zoology Collection at the University of Vermont. He has taught classes in evolutionary biology, research apprenticeship, field zoology, introductory phylogenetics, and phylogenetic methods.

Optometry

Associate Professor Bruno Olshausen
School of Optometry and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute

Each waking moment, our brain is bombarded by sensory information, estimated to be in the range of hundreds of megabits/sec. Somehow, we make sense of this data stream by extracting the forms of spatiotemporal structure embedded in it, and from this we build meaningful representations of objects, sounds, surface textures and so forth in the environment. The overarching goal of research in Bruno Olshausen's laboratory is to understand how this process occurs in the brain, focusing especially on the thalamo-cortical system.

Their work is based upon the hypothesis that the cortex essentially contains a probabilistic, causal model of the environment, and that sensory information is interpreted and represented in terms of this model. Thus, one major line of work is to develop probabilistic models of natural images, and to construct neural circuits capable of representing images in terms of these models. For example, they have developed a model of natural images based on the principle of sparse coding - in which the retinal image is explained in terms of a small number of events at any given point in time - and they have shown that the receptive field properties that emerge in such a system match those found in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mammals. The suggestion then is that V1 may be operating, at least in part, according to a similar principle. They are currently working on extending this model to learn invariances from natural image sequences, in addition to building models composed of multiple layers to capture the hierarchical structure of visual cortex.

Recent publications include: Olshausen BA, Field DJ (2005). How close are we to understanding V1?. Neural Computation 17: 1665-1699; Olshausen BA, Field DJ (2004). Sparse coding of sensory inputs. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14: 481-487; and Johnson JS, Olshausen BA (2003). Timecourse of neural signatures of object recognition. Journal of Vision 3: 499-512. More info

Assistant Professor Michael Silver
School of Optometry and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute

Michael Silver received his B.S. in chemistry and biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany; Stanford University; and UC Berkeley.

Silver uses a combination of behavioral, neuroimaging, modeling, and pharmacological techniques to characterize the neural pathways involved in the control of visual attention in humans and the effects of selective attention on processing of visual stimuli.

Among his recent publications include: Silver MA, Fagiolini M, Gillespie DC, Howe CL, Frank MG, Issa NP, Antonini A, Stryker MP (2001) Infusion of nerve growth factor (NGF) into kitten visual cortex increases immunoreactivity for NGF, NGF receptors, and choline acetyltransferase in basal forebrain without affecting ocular dominance plasticity or column development. Neurosci 108:569-585; Silver MA, Logothetis NK (2004) Grouping and segmentation in binocular rivalry. Vision Res 44:1675-1692; and Silver MA, Ress D, Heeger DJ (2005) Topographic maps of visual spatial attention in human parietal cortex. J Neurophysiol 94:1358-1371. More info

Physical Sciences

Assistant Professor Richard Allen
Earth and Planetary Science

As a seismologist interested in natural disasters Richard Allen's research includes the determination and interpretation of earth structure using synthesized seismological techniques, the development of an earthquake alarm system (ElarmS), and assessment of natural hazard mitigation strategies in the US. He has also conducted research into verification of the comprehensive test ban treaty.

This year Alen will be teaching earthquakes in your backyard, Californian geology and environment, research in Earth sciences, and the great 1906 earthquake: a turning point for science, a lesson for society.

Among his recent publications include: Xue, M. and R.M. Allen (2005) Asthenospheric channeling of the Iceland upwelling: Evidence from seismic anisotropy Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 235, 167-182 doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2005.03.017; Allen, R.M., and J. Tromp (2005) Resolution of regional seismic models: Squeezing the Iceland anomaly. Geophys. J. Int. 161, 373-386 doi: 10.1111/j.1365-246X.2005 .02600.x; and Allen, R.M. Rapid magnitude determination for earthquake early warning, (2004) in "The many facets of seismic risk" edited by G. Manfredi, M.R. Pecce, and A. Zollo, Napoli, Universita degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II", Napoli, Italy, p15-24. Proceedings of the "Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approach to Seismic Risk Problems," Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, September 22, 2003. More info

Assistant Professor Joshua Bloom
Astronomy

Joshua S. Bloom's primary interest is in gamma-ray bursts, extraordinary and rare explosions that occasionally swamp the night's sky in gamma- and X-rays. In recent years, we've learned a great deal about the physics of the explosions and the processes that produce long-lived afterglow emission. Now we're starting to turn our attention to using GRBs as probes to study the universe, gaining unique insights into everything from the details of winds around massive stars to the nature of mysterious damped-lyman systems to the redshift of reionization. With the Swift satellite, expected to localize GRBs at a rate more an order of magnitude than before, the future looks extraordinarily bright for the field.

In 2005, Bloom's instrumentation projects involve further automation tasks for PAIRITEL and supervising student Onsi Fakhouri on the construction of the Berkeley Cloud Locating Camera (CLIC), a 10 micron cloud monitor for robotic systems integration. He is also building a prototype camera for a new transient telescope system. When not working on GRBs and related projects, Bloom has been devoting spare CPU cycles to thought experiments involving the detection of dark, massive stuff in the Solar neighborhood. More info

Assistant Professor Noureddine El Karoui
Statistics

Noureddine El Karoui did his undergraduate studies at Ecole Polytechnique, in France, majoring in applied mathematics. He then studied at Stanford, where he received an M.S. in financial mathematics and a Ph.D. in statistics.

Currently, El Karoui's main research interest is in high-dimensional statistics, i.e in developing rigorous methods for statistical analysis when each observed data point consists of very many measurements. Random matrices play a key role in some of these problems; his latest theoretical results concern the convergence in distribution of the largest eigenvalue of certain sample covariance matrices, in the "large n, large p" setting.

Assistant Professor Jon Wilkening
Mathematics

Jon Wilkening grew up in Phoenix and attended the University of Arizona, where he was a Flinn Scholar and graduated Summa Cum Laude with Honors in 1996 with a B.S. in engineering physics. He then changed fields and enrolled in graduate school at U.C. Berkeley to study mathematics. In 1997 he received a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship; since he could not accept both awards, he had to decline the latter. His background in physics proved very useful in writing his dissertation entitled Mathematical Analysis and Numerical Simulation of Electromigration, which he completed in 2002 under the supervision of James Sethian. He then moved to Manhattan, where he was a Research Postdoc/Courant Instructor at the Courant Institute at NYU, where he worked with Robert Kohn, Michael Shelley, Leslie Greengard and others on various projects such as snail locomotion, shape optimization, fluid-solid interactions, quasicontinuum methods (which are mixed atomistic/finite element methods for studying defects in solids), numerical quadrature, singular asymptotics near corners and interface junctions for elliptic systems (a simple example being the stress distribution near a crack tip), and electromigration (which causes failure in microchips).

Broadly, his research interests include Numerical Analysis, Computational Physics, Partial Differential Equations, and Scientific Computing. In 2003, he was named a Frederick Howes Scholar in Computational Science. He is currently teaching a topics course on finite element and boundary integral methods.

Among his recent publications are: J. Wilkening, L. Borucki, J. A. Sethian, Analysis of stress-driven grain boundary diffusion, part I, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 64/6 (2004), pp. 1839--1863; J. Wilkening, L. Borucki, J. A. Sethian, Analysis of stress-driven grain boundary diffusion, part II: degeneracy, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 64/6 (2004), pp. 1864--1886; and J. A. Sethian, J. Wilkening, A numerical model of stress driven grain boundary diffusion, J. Comput. Phys., 193/1 (2003), pp. 275-305. More info

Public Health

Professor Lia Fernald
School of Public Health

Lia Fernald did her undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, where she majored in biological anthropology with a concentration in food policy. She was then a Fulbright Scholar in Kingston, Jamaica, after which she received a Ph.D. in clinical medicine, with a focus on international nutrition, at the University of London. Lia then received an M.BA. at Berkeley, with a focus on health management. Before coming to UC Berkeley, she was on the faculty in the Department of Medicine (Center for Health and Community) at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Fernald's research program has been driven by the primary question of how inequalities and variations in socio-economic status contribute to adverse nutritional outcomes in children and adults. She has approached this question by looking both at conditions of over- and under-nutrition and the influence of individual, family and contextual characteristics on these factors, and how interventions addressing socio-economic status contribute to negative nutritional outcomes. Specifically, Dr. Fernald's research focuses on 1) the impact of economic and health interventions on nutritional status, nutrition-related health outcomes, lifestyle and behavior, and mental health; 2) links between nutritional status and factors contributing to vulnerability (such as immigrant status); 3) development of effective interventions using information about contextual, family and individual variability. She has published several articles and book chapters relating to nutritional deficits and child development, in addition to papers about obesity, adolescent risk behavior and stress physiology.

Dr. Fernald has previously worked in Jamaica, Kenya, Nepal, Zimbabwe, India, and Mexico, and currently has projects in Mexico, Ecuador, South Africa, Columbia and India. For the past four years, she has focused primarily on the evaluation of Oportunidades, a large-scale poverty alleviation program in Mexico, with an emphasis on physical and mental health in over 12,000 rural and urban Mexican families. She continues to be involved in the evaluation of this program and is currently preparing for follow-up assessments that will occur over the next decade. Dr. Fernald is also developing a program of US-based research that explores the links between socio-economic status and nutritional outcomes in immigrants from Latin America.

Among her recent publications include: Fernald, L.C., Neufeld, L., Barton, L., Schnaas, L., Rivera, J. and Gertler, P.J. Parallel deficits in linear growth and cognitive development in low-income Mexican infants in the second year of life. Public Health Nutrition. (2005); and Burke, H., Fernald, L.C., Gertler, P.J., and Adler, N.E. Depressive symptoms are associated with blunted salivary cortisol in very low income women. Psychosomatic Medicine. Mar-Apr;67(2):211-6 (2005). More info

Assistant Professor Amani Nuru-Jeter
School of Public Health

Dr. Nuru-Jeter received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Management, Division of Health and Social Policy in May 2003. She also holds an M.P.H. (Maternal and Child Health) from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. Dr. Nuru-Jeter's previous roles include Health Policy Coordinator for DC Action for Children, a non-profit children's advocacy organization in Washington, DC; and Manager of the State Primary Care Office at the Department of Health in Washington, D.C. As a Health Policy Research Fellow, Dr. Nuru-Jeter worked at the Ministry of Health in Jerusalem, Israel, investigating ethnic disparities in maternal and infant health, iron deficiency anemia and health care delivery services. Dr. Nuru-Jeter currently serves on the CDC Measures of Racism Working Group, the Study Assembly for the National Children's Study, and the Board of the Society for the Analysis of African-American Public Health Issues.

Dr. Nuru-Jeter's teaching interests include: social epidemiology; population health and health policy; minority health and health disparities; research methods for social and behavioral sciences. Her research interests include: race and socioeconomic inequalities in health; socio-environmental context (e.g., place effects) and cross level interactions; race and stress (biology/context interactions); racial disparities in birth outcomes and cardiovascular risk; measurement of racism.

The primary aims of Dr. Nuru-Jeter's research program are: 1) to support the integration of social, demographic, and epidemiologic methods to examine racial inequalities in health using a biopsychosocial framework, and 2) to examine how health and social policies either exacerbate or mitigate race and socioeconomic health inequalities. Dr. Nuru-Jeter is currently a Co-Investigator on the “Measures of Racism and Social Status” project with the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California, San Francisco. She is also Principal Investigator of “Race, Stress, and Health: A lifecourse perspective”, a project examining the influence of psychosocial and contextual factors on racial differences in allostatic load; and is an active member of the Berkeley Consortium on Population Health and Human Development.

Her recent publications are: LaVeist TA, Nuru-Jeter A, Jones K. "The Association of Doctor-Patient Race Concordance with Health Services Utilization". Journal of Public Health Policy. 2004; 24(3,4): 312-323; LaVeist TA and Nuru-Jeter A. "Is Doctor-Patient Race Concordance Associated with Greater Satisfaction with Care?" Journal of Health and Social Behavior. 2002; 43(3): 296-306; and Camper E, Nuru-Jeter A. "Impact of Technology on Health Education" In Allied Health Education: Practice Issues and Trends into the 21st Millennium, Eds. Lecca PJ, Valentine P, and Lyons K. Binghamton, NY; The Haworth Press, Inc. 2003. More info

Social Sciences

Professor Charles Briggs
Anthropology

Charles L. Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in folklore. He has studied jokes, proverbs, ritual, folk art, and several narrative genres. In anthropology, he focuses on linguistic and medical anthropology, social theory, modernity, citizenship and the state, race, and violence. He has conducted research with Latino/a populations in the Southwestern US and in Latin America; he is currently working in California, Cuba, and Venezuela.

Briggs received his M.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1978 and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1981. Before coming to Berkeley he was a professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego.

Among his recent publications include: 2004. Malthus' Anti-rhetorical Rhetoric, or, on the Magical Conversion of the Imaginary into the Real. In Categories and Contexts: Critical Studies in Qualitative Demography, ed. Simon Szreter, Hania Sholkamy, and A. Dharmaligam, pp. 57-76. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2004 Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, Scale, and the Political Economy of Public Discourse in Explanations of a Cholera Epidemic. American Ethnologist 31(2):163-186; and 2005. Genealogies of Race and Culture and the Failure of Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms: Rereading Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois. Public Culture 17(1):75-100. More info

Assistant Professor Jose Carmena
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences
Program in Cognitive Science

Jose M. Carmena received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) in 1995 and the University of Valencia (Spain) in 1997. Following those he received the M.S. degree in artificial intelligence and the Ph.D. degree in robotics both from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) in 1998 and 2002 respectively. From 2002 to 2005 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Miguel Nicolelis' Laboratory, Department of Neurobiology, and the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University (Durham, NC). During this period he was the recipient of a Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation research award. In the summer of 2005 he was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He is member of the IEEE (RAS and EMBS societies), Society for Neuroscience, and the Neural Control of Movement Society. His research interests include neural engineering (brain-machine interfaces; neuroprosthetics; biomimetic robotics), and systems and cognitive neuroscience (neural basis of sensorimotor control and learning; neural ensemble computation).

Among his recent publications include: Carmena J.M ., Lebedev M.A., Henriquez C.S., and Nicolelis M.A.L. Stable ensemble performance with single neuron variability during reaching movements in primates (under review in Journal of Neuroscience); Gutierrez R., Carmena J.M. , Nicolelis M.A.L., and Simon S.A. (2005). Temporal specific ensembles of rat orbitofrontal neurons represent the drinking of liquid rewards. Journal of Neurophysiology (in press); and Lebedev M.A., Carmena J.M. , O'Doherty J.E., Zacksenhouse M., Henriquez C.S., Principe J.C., and Nicolelis M.A.L. (2005). Cortical ensemble adaptation to represent velocity of an artificial actuator controlled by a brain-machine interface. Journal of Neuroscience 25(19):4681:4693. More info

Assistant Professor Giacomo Chiozza
Political Science

Giacomo Chiozza received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University, where he defended his dissertation in August 2004. He holds degrees from the Università di Milano and the Centro Studi Politeia in Italy, and an M.A. from Duke University. During the 2004-05 academic year, he was a post-doctoral fellow in national security an the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. In his dissertation, “Love and Hate: Anti-Americanism and the American World Order,” he investigates how cultural and ideational dynamics inform international politics by analyzing foreign publics' attitudes towards the United States.

He has published, and coauthored, articles on international conflict in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Journal of Peace Research.

Assistant Professor Victoria Frede
History

Victoria Frede specializes in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Russian history. Russian intellectual history is her main area of interest. Her doctoral dissertation, which she wrote at Berkeley, was on unbelief among educated Russians.

At the moment she is revising it for publication. She has studied at Cambridge University (Trinity Hall), the University of Hamburg, and the University of London (School of Slavonic and East European Studies) as well as Berkeley. Before joining the Berkeley History Department, she held a one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University and taught for two years at the History Department of East Carolina University in North Carolina.

Frede's recent publications include: "A radical circle confronts a radical woman: M.L. Ogareva, the Westernizers, and the problem of individualism in the 1830s-1840s," accepted for publication by Jahrbuecher für Geschichte Osteuropas; "Lovers of Wisdom, The" Encyclopedia of Russian History, ed. James Millar, 4 vols., (Macmillan, 2004), volume 2, pp. 875-876; and "Istoriia kollektivnogo razocharovaniia: druzhba, nravstvennost' i religioznost' v druzheskom krugu A. I. Gertsena - N. P. Ogareva 1830-1840-kh gg.," tr. S. Silakova, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, vol. 49 (3, 2001), pp. 159-90. ("A story of collective disillusionment: friendship, morality and religiosity in the friendship circle of A. I. Herzen and N. P. Ogareva in the 1830s - 1840s"). More info

Assistant Professor Bryan Graham
Economics

Bryan Graham's research focuses on the measurement and characterization of “social externalities.” Does a student learn more when she is surrounded by high ability classmates? How salient are peer influences for explaining deviant behaviors such as crime or drug use? How important are networks for employment outcomes? The answers to these questions have implications for a wide range of public policies including school choice, school busing programs, ability tracking and the structure of public housing.

Bryan completed his B.A. in economics at Tufts University. After graduation he spent a year at the Australian National University as a Fulbright Scholar and a further two years at St. Antony's College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Bryan completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in June of 2005. More info

Assistant Professor Emily Mackil
History

Emily Mackil has a B.A. in ancient history and philosophy from the University of Oxford (1997) and a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University (2003).

Her research is in ancient Greek history in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. She is currently working on a book on the Greek koinon, a regional political structure encompassing multiple small city-states in a form of confederation. This project is founded in an abiding interest in the problem of state formation, and rests upon a varied array of historical sources, including epigraphy, numismatics, and archaeology in addition to traditional literary sources. She is also working on a smaller project on a third-century BC author of a "Guide to the City-States in Greece," which is part travel guide, part mordant social commentary. She is particularly interested in the intersection of economic, religious and political behavior, and is an avid reader in geography, social and political theory.

Mackil's teaching interests are broader, covering the whole of the ancient Mediterranean but with most offerings in the social, political, economic, and religious history of the ancient Greek world. She recently published an article entitled, "Wandering Cities: Alternatives to Catastrophe in the Greek Polis," American Journal of Archaeology 100.4 (2004). More info

Associate Professor Enrico Moretti
Economics

Enrico Moretti received his Lauria in economics from the Bocconi University, Milano, Italy in 1993 and his Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 2000. He currently teaches a graduate class in Labor Economics and an undergraduate class in Econometrics. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge), a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn). His research interests include labor economics and applied econometrics. He has previously taught at UCLA.

Among his recent publications include: Workers' Education, Spillovers and Productivity: Evidence from Plant-Level Production Functions, American Economic Review, 94(3), 2004; The Effect of Education on Criminal Activity: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests and Self-Reports (with L. Lochner), American Economic Review, 94(1), 2004; and Estimating the Social Return to Higher Education: Evidence From Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Data, Journal of Econometrics, 121(1-2), 2004. More info

Assistant Professor Abena Osseo-Asare
History

Abena Osseo-Asare received a A.B and Ph.D. in history of science from Harvard. Her dissertation was on the transformation of plant medicine in West Tropical Africa. She is on research leave this year at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies).

Her research interests include: folk medicine, history of medical education, maternal healthcare, nationalism, bioprospecting, intellectual property rights & documentary film.

Among her recent publications include: "A Mine of Health": Rationality, Secularism and the Society of African Herbalists in the Gold Coast, 1921-1940," paper to be presented at 2005 meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine; “From Poisoned Arrows to Impure Drugs: Representations of Toxicity in Ghanaian Traditional Medicine Discourse” paper to be presented at a Conference on African Medicine, Bryn Mawr College, April 2005; and “Poisoned Arrows and the Legacy of Colonial Botany on the Gold Coast,” paper presented for the panel, Colonial Rule: Concepts, Confusions, Corruption, 2004 African Studies Association Conference, New Orleans. More info

Associate Professor Jasjeet Singh Sehkon
Political Science

Jasjeet Sehkon received his B.A. in political science form the University of British Columbia, Canada, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from Cornell University. Before coming to Berkeley he was an associate professor at Harvard.

Sehkon's research interests include: causal inference in observational and experimental studies, applied statistics, elections, voting behavior, public opinion especially in the United States and Canada, biostatistics and the philosophy and history of science. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Cornell University and was a professor at Harvard University in the Department of Government from 1999 to 2005.

Some of his recent publications include: "Genetic Matching for Estimating Causal Effects: A General Multivariate Matching Method for Achieving Balance in Observational Studies. " With Alexis Diamond. Winner of the 2005 Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology. Also see my Multivariate and Propensity Score Matching Software Page on which is located my software package "Matching" which implements a large number of matching and genetic matching algorithms along with balance tests and other specification diagnostics; "The Varying Role of Voter Information Across Democratic Societies." Working Paper. A previous version of this paper was entitled "Updating Voters: How voters act as if they are informed". Winner of the Robert H. Durr Award for "the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem" presented at the 2004 MPSA conference; and "Making Inferences from 2x2 Tables: The Inadequacy of the Fisher Exact Test for Observational Data and a Bayesian Alternative." Working Paper. More info

Assistant Professor Cihan Tugal
Sociology

Cihan Tugal (Ph.D. Michigan, 2003) studies the relationship between religion, mobilization, and the construction of political alternatives. The apparent shift of oppositional politics from the secular Left to Islamism in his native Turkey got him interested in issues pertaining to the worldwide augmentation in the impact of religion. He seeks to understand the implications of the reintegration of religious symbols and rituals into political and social life for projects of control, regulation and liberation.

Tugal is now working on a manuscript titled “A Call for Salvation and Justice” in which he studies the interactions between Islamism and various popular sectors in Turkey, primarily the urban poor. The manuscript situates an ethnographic study of a predominantly Islamist poor district in Istanbul in the historical making of secularism, urbanization, and capitalism in Turkey. It seeks to demonstrate the contingency of popular support for Islamism on the strategies of various parties as well as on class dynamics, the transformation of the state, and global forces. Tugal's earlier work regarding poverty, social justice, and capitalism in Islamist discourse was published in Economy and Society .

Among his recent publications include: “State and Society in the Study of Islam: Discontents of a Dichotomy,” New Perspectives on Turkey 31. (Review Essay 2005); “Islamism in Turkey: Beyond Instrument and Meaning,” Economy and Society 31(1): 85-111 (2002); and Conditional Acceptance, The Sociological Quarterly , “The Appeal of Islamic Politics: Ritual and Dialogue in a Poor District of Turkey”. More info

Assistant Professor Robert Van Houweling
Political Science

Robert Van Houweling received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993 and his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in 2003. He was a visiting instructor at Stanford University and before coming to Berkeley an assistant professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan. He is a Robert Wood Scholar in Health Policy Research in the School of Public Health at Berkeley (2004-2006).

He specializes in American politics, presidency, public opinion, methodology, and formal theory. Among his recent publications include: How Does Voting Affect the Racial Gap in Voided Ballots? American Journal of Political Science 47 (January 2003): 46-60. (with Michael Tomz, Stanford University) and Avarice and Ambition in Congress: Representatives' Decisions to Run or Retire from the U.S. House. American Political Science Review 89 (March 1995): 121-136. (with Richard L. Hall, University of Michigan).

Assistant Professor Jason Wittenberg
Political Science

Jason Wittenberg received a B.A. in physics from Berkeley, an M.A. in international affairs from The American University, and a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T. His primary research and teaching interests include the comparative politics of Eastern Europe, political behavior, religion and politics, and statistical methods. His current research focuses on the social bases of support for fascist and communist movements.

Wittenberg is also the author of a forthcoming book, tentatively entitled, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral continuity in Hungary. (Cambridge University Press), as well as an author and co-author of a number of articles on statistical methods and modeling. He was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has held fellowships at the Hellen Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University.

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