Penn Arts and Sciences Welcomes New Faculty for 2017-2018

Penn Arts and Sciences has appointed 30 new members to its standing faculty for the 2017-2018 academic year.

The School is pleased to welcome:

Juan Pablo Atal, Assistant Professor of Economics: Health economics; long-term health insurance contacts, particularly in Chile; public economics, including worker productivity and pricing; tax enforcement; industrial organization. Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Katie Barott, Assistant Professor of Biology: Physiological mechanisms of coral acclimatization to climate change; cellular mechanisms regulating coral response to ocean acidification; the role of bacteria in competition between corals and algae. Ph.D. from Michigan State University.

Mia Bay, Professor of History (as of January 1, 2018): Late modern American intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on African-American history. Social history of segregated transportation; intellectual history of African-American women; racial ideology across color lines. Ph.D. from Yale University. Comes to Penn from Rutgers University.

Ashley Brock, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages: Comparative literature; modern and contemporary Latin American literature, with a focus on experimental techniques of mid-twentieth century writers in Spanish America, Brazil, and the United States. Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.

Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology: Environmental sociology; global urbanization and climate change; socio-political conflicts in large cities of the global north and south and in locations shaped by the geography of commodity chains. Ph.D. from New York University.

Margo Crawford, Professor of English: African American Literature and visual culture, with a focus on the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Race, gender, and sexuality studies; literature and theory of the African diaspora; comparative ethnic literature. Ph.D. from Yale University. Comes to Penn from Cornell University.

Stephanie Dick, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science: Mathematics and computing in the postwar United States; artificial intelligence and automated reasoning; mathematical proof, computer memory and digital representation; human-machine interaction; software creation practices. Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Ivan Drpic, Associate Professor of History of Art: Late Byzantine art, architecture, and material culture; medieval aesthetics; theories of the image; agency of art objects; history of subjectivity; cultural interactions between Byzantium and the Slavic world. Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Marc Flandreau, Howard Marks Professor of Economic History and Professor of History: Economic history, with a focus on the international monetary system and the financial entanglements of international institutions from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I. Ph.D. from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. Comes to Penn from the Graduate Institute of International Studies and Development in Geneva.

Amit Gandhi, Professor of Economics (as of January 1, 2018): Demand and production functions; methodological model identification in industrial organization, including those in demand systems and production functions and in auction models. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Comes to Penn from the University of Wisconsin.

Kristen Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies: Labor, gender, religion, and political culture in socialist and post-socialist Bulgaria and Eastern Europe; status and transformations of Muslim communities in Eastern Europe. Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Comes to Penn from Bowdoin College.

Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Professor of Chemistry: Organometallic chemistry; mechanistic understandings of organometallic reactions; use of organotransition metal catalysts in commercial production of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and organic materials. Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Comes to Penn from the University of Washington.

Pilar Gonalons-Pons, Assistant Professor of Sociology: Social stratification; family, gender, and international migration; social demography; comparative social policy. Gendered effects of the Great Recession on work and family dynamics. Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Jay Gottfried, Arthur H. Rubenstein University Professor, Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor of Psychology and Neurology: Use of high-resolution olfactory functional MRI, multivariate statistical analyses, psychophysical paradigms, and physiological recordings to understand cognitive transformation of odor inputs into olfactory percepts; impact of learning, memory, and experience on odor perception at neural and behavioral levels. Comes to Penn from Northwestern University. M.D. and Ph.D. from New York University.

Gregory Goulding, Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies: Modern South Asian literature, particularly Hindi and Urdu literature and Hindi poetry; multilingualism in Hindi and Marathi literary production; post-Independence modernity in the Hindi-speaking world. Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.

Sarah Gronningsater, Assistant Professor of History: 18th and 19th century American history; history of slavery and emancipation in New York State; legal history of emancipation; slave agency; antebellum legal culture. Ph.D. from University of Chicago. Comes to Penn from California Institute of Technology.
 
Emily Hammer, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations: Anthropological archaeology; focus on cultural landscapes and environmental history in the Middle East and South Caucasia; digital humanities, including GIS and satellite imagery analysis for archaeology. Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Jonathan Heckman, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy: String theory; quantum field theory and its application to particle theory, quantum gravity, mathematics, and information theory; high energy physics and particle phenomenology. Ph.D. from Harvard University. Comes to Penn from University of North Carolina.

Morgan Hoke, Assistant Professor of Anthropology: Biocultural anthropology; human biology; focus on the bio-cultural interface and the production and reproduction of health disparities; plasticity of the human organism resulting from differential nutrition. Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Annie Liang, Assistant Professor of Economics: Microeconomic theory; behavioral economics; decision theory; game theory and its applications; machine learning algorithms in benchmarking predictability of theories when subjected to data testing. Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Megan Matthews, Assistant Professor of Chemistry: Experimental biochemistry; mechanistic enzymology; metallobiochemistry; proteomics; roles of protein modifications in normal cell function and diseases. Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University.

Marcia Norton, Associate Professor of History: Social and cultural history of colonial Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic world; environmental history; history of science. History of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic world; human-animal relations and colonialism in early modern Mesoamerica, lowland South American, and Europe. Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Comes to Penn from George Washington University.

Aurelie Ouss, Assistant Professor of Criminology: Criminal justice policy; economics of crime; effects of legislation and experiences in prison on recidivism; behavioral and economic determinants of sentencing; innovations in machine learning and uses of 'big data' on social policy. Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Ileana Perez-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science: Microbial ecology; ecophysiology, bioenergetics, and biogeochemistry of chemosynthetic microorganisms from marine geothermal environments; kinetics and efficiencies of microbial metabolic activities. Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History: Intellectual, cultural, and political history of the Atlantic World; history of France during the Enlightenment and Age of Revolutions; democratic political theory; transatlantic revolution studies; modern history of ideas. Ph.D. from Harvard University. Comes to Penn from Yale University.
   
Donovan Schaefer, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies: Embodiment, affect, and emotion of religious practices; new materialist approaches to religion and power; science and technology studies; secularism studies; affect theory. Ph.D. from Syracuse University.

Kathryn Schuler, Assistant Professor of Linguistics: Psycho- and neurolinguistics; cognitive and neural biases in child language acquisition; statistical learning in language and non-linguistic tasks. Ph.D. expected from Georgetown University.
   
Whitney Trettien, Assistant Professor of English: Sound studies; history of material texts; women's literature of the Renaissance; digital humanities methodology; media archaeology. Ph.D. from Duke University. Comes to Penn from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Dagmawi Woubshet, Associate Professor of English: African American literature and culture; Ethiopian literature and art; AIDS and narratives of loss; contemporary African and African American visual culture; queer experience in the African novel. Ph.D. from Harvard University. Comes to Penn from Cornell University.

Bo Zhen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy (as of January 1, 2018): Theory and development of meta-materials for use in high-performance computing, solar energy harvesting, and display technologies; nanophotonics; topical photonics; non-Hermitian physics. Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.