The School of Arts and Sciences Welcomes New Faculty

The School of Arts and Sciences has appointed 24 new members to its standing faculty for the 2012-2013 academic year. The School is pleased to welcome:

Amada Armenta, Assistant Professor of Sociology: International migration, urban sociology, political sociology, criminology, and race and ethnicity, with a special interest in the US Hispanic population. Ph.D. from UCLA.

Cullen Blake, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy (as of January 1, 2013):  Astrophysics, focusing on the search for planets orbiting small stars and the structure and evolution of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. Ph.D. from Harvard.

Margaret Bruchac, Assistant Professor of Anthropology (as of January 1, 2013):  Cultural expression, indigenous archaeologies, museum anthropology, and Native American studies.  Comes to Penn from the University of Connecticut.  Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts.

Camilo Garcia-Jimeno, Assistant Professor of Economics:  Political economy, economic history, applied econometrics, applied theory, and development. Ph.D. from MIT.

Guy Grossman, Assistant Professor of Political Science: Comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa; governance institutions and public goods provision. Ph.D. from Columbia.

Alexander Guerrero, Assistant Professor of Philosophy (joint appointment with Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine). Political philosophy, ethics (including bioethics), philosophy of law, and epistemology.  Ph.D. and J.D. from New York University.

Ryan Hynd, Assistant Professor of Mathematics: Analysis of partial differential equations arising in stochastic optimal control, continuum mechanics, and the calculus of variations. Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.

Onoso Imoagene, Assistant Professor of Sociology: Immigration, race and ethnicity, and inter-ethnic group relations, with a special interest in the African second generation in the US and UK. Ph.D. from Harvard.

Sara Jaffee, Associate Professor of Psychology: Developmental psychology, in particular the development of anti-social behavior and the role that environments play in exacerbating underlying genetic vulnerabilities. Comes to Penn from King’s College London. Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Charles Loeffler, Jerry Lee Assistant Professor of Criminology: Effects of criminal justice sanctions on the development of crime and other life outcomes. Ph.D. from Harvard.

Irina Marinov, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science: Ocean biogeochemistry and climate change, with a special interest in how the ocean controls atmospheric pCO2 and the global climate, and feedbacks between climate change and the ocean carbon cycle and ocean ecology. Ph.D. from Princeton.

Enrique Mendoza, Professor of Economics (as of January 1, 2013):  International macroeconomics, with a focus on international real business cycles, fiscal policy and taxation, and emerging market financial crises. Comes to Penn from the University of Maryland. Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario.

Amy Offner, Assistant Professor of History (as of January 1, 2013):  Twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American history, transnational history, political economy, social history, and history of economic thought. Ph.D. from Columbia.

Guillermo Ordonez, Assistant Professor of Economics: Macroeconomics, with a special interest in financial crises and information imperfections in financial markets. Comes to Penn from Yale. Ph.D. from UCLA.

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology (joint appointment with the Law School, where she is Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander ED’18, GR’21, L’27 Professor of Civil Rights):  Race, gender, and the law, focusing on contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Comes to Penn from Northwestern. J.D. from Harvard.

Andrew Shephard, Assistant Professor of Economics: Labor economics, public economics, microeconometrics, and applied microeconomics. Comes to Penn from Princeton. Ph.D. from University College London.

Daniel Singer, Assistant Professor of Philosophy (as of January 1, 2013):  Epistemology (specifically epistemic value and formal epistemology), theory of normativity, philosophy of science, and theoretical computer science. Ph.D. expected from the University of Michigan.

Adam Smith, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations: Early Chinese civilization, with a special interest in the history of Chinese writing. Ph.D. from UCLA.

Alison Sweeney, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy: Biophysics of optical phenomena, in particular the photonics of evolved structures and living systems that make use of sunlight. Ph.D. from Duke.

Henry Towsner, Assistant Professor of Mathematics: Mathematical logic, proof theory, and combinatorics (particularly Ramsey theory). Comes to Penn from the University of Connecticut. Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon.

Sonia Velazquez, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages: Early modern Spanish literature, with a focus on Spanish Golden Age drama of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Ph.D. from Princeton.

Naomi Waltham-Smith, Assistant Professor of Music: Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoires, especially Beethoven; music theory and analysis. Ph.D. from King’s College London.

Yuichi Yamamoto, Assistant Professor of Economics: Microeconomic theory, game theory (in particular repeated games), and contract theory. Ph.D. from Harvard.

Guobin Yang, Associate Professor of Sociology (joint appointment with the Annenberg School for Communication): Social movements, collective memory, civil society, and media and communication, with special interests in Chinese internet studies, China’s environmental movement, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in history.  Comes to Penn from Barnard College. Ph.D. from New York University and Ph.D. from Beijing Foreign Studies University.