Professor Barbara Balliet (Women’s and Gender Studies),Vice Dean, Douglass Residential College focuses on race, gender, and class in 19th-century American history, specifically representations of women in print culture; women's work; and women in commercial publishing in her research.  Recent scholarship on these topics includes: "To Labor not in Vain: Women's Work in 19th Century America," invited lecture at American Radiance: Views on Identity and Place in America: A Symposium, American Folk Art Museum, New York City, February 2002 and "Illustrating Gender: Women, Culture & Commerce in 19th Century Publishing."  Professor Balliet's interests also encompass feminist pedagogy, especially service learning in higher education settings; she co-edited (with Kerissa Heffernan) The Practice of Change: Concepts and Models for Service Learning In Women's Studies. Washington: American Association Higher Education, 2000.  

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Professor Maureen Barr (Division of Life Sciences – Genetics) fell in love with Genetics as a Rutgers undergraduate way back when (B.A. 1990).  She pursued her interests in medical and behavioral genetics and trained at Columbia (Ph.D.) and the California Institute of Technology (postdoc).  She joined the faculty and received tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.   In 2007, she returned to her alma mater as faculty of the Department of Genetics.   Her lab is interested in how animal behavior is shaped by the environment, genes, and neural circuits.  The Barr laboratory has also developed C. elegans models for several human genetic diseases, and is in the unique position to address the underlying molecular bases and interconnections of these devastating disorders.   When not in the lab or classroom, she may be seen running around Highland Park/New Brunswick or playing with her three sons.

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url:  http://lifesci.rutgers.edu/barrlab/

Professor Dennis Bathory (Political Science) is the chair of the Political Science Department, teaches political theory from Plato and Aristotle to Tocqueville, Freud and Weber.  His books include Leadership in America: Consensus, Corruption and Charisma and Political Theory as Public Confession - The Social and Political Thought of St. Augustine.  He has also written on the works of Alexis de Tocqueville and on Shakespeare’s plays on Rome and Roman Politics.  He was an undergraduate at Oberlin College and received his Ph.D. at Harvard.

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Professor Michael Beals (Mathematics) is Vice Dean for Undergraduate Education in the School of Arts and Sciences.  He is interested in the mathematics of wave phenomena, which technically is called the study of hyperbolic partial differential equations.  But really he is interested in all of mathematics, and teaches everything from Calculus and more advanced analysis courses to Linear Algebra and more advanced algebra courses to a special "Topics in Math for the Liberal Arts" designed for potential elementary teachers.  He also serves as dean for Educational Initiatives and helps us find departmental honors courses each semester!

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Professor Rudolph Bell (History) joined the faculty as an instructor in 1968.  In his forty years at RU he has always been active in undergraduate education, beginning as History vice-chair for undergraduates; continuing as a study abroad director in Italy, England and Ireland; holding the post of department chair for five years; teaching many times in the Honors Program; and most recently as a faculty union leader involved in addressing the balance of teaching and scholarly publication.  His research interests focus on Italy, from the Middle Ages to the present, with special concern for women, popular piety, and the history of the book. His publications include Holy Anorexia, which is about thin thaumaturgies, and How to do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians.  He is currently exploring remarriage decision-making among 16th-century Sicilian widows.

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url: http://www.history.rutgers.edu  

Professor Alex Borgida (Computer Science, Center for Cognitive Science) is interested in ways of representing knowledge about the ordinary world in the computer, and reasoning with such representations, sometimes called conceptual models . Conceptual models play an important role in the development and use of databases, software requirements, and artificial intelligence; the research problems he considers are motivated by such applications. A currently hot (hyped?) topic is the so-called Semantic Web, where the OWL-DL "ontology language" just happens to belong to a family of representation languages that he has been studying for over two decades. One of the main pleasures of his research is that it involves a wide range of subjects, including computing, formal logic, and the cognitive sciences (philosophy, linguistics, psychology). For example, current work on improving data quality in databases required learning about "intentional concepts" (philosophy, linguistic semantics) and the "theory of measurements" (philosophy, psychology, math). Outside Rutgers, he would very much like help in setting up an informal course to teach programming to children in elementary school, possibly using "Scratch" or a Python version of "Karel the Robot".

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url: http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~borgida (check it out for e-mail address, and other information, such as his passion for dessert)

Professor Linda Brzustowicz (Division of Life Sciences - Genetics) is a psychiatrist and molecular geneticist.  Her research focuses on identifying and understanding genetic factors that increase an individual’s risk for developing psychiatric illness.  Her laboratory currently studies schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism.  Work by her group spans a range of activities including recruitment and assessment of human subjects, development of definitions of illness for genetic studies, DNA sequence analysis for linkage and association studies, comparative genomic analysis, and gene expression studies.

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Professor Ed Castner (Chemistry and Chemical Biology) is a physical chemist interested in a broad range of problems involving intermolecular interactions and dynamics in the condensed phase.  Specific projects of interest in his group focus on room-temperature ionic liquids and polymer aggregates.  Instrumentation in our laboratories includes femtosecond lasers to measuring the molecular motions on the time scale of molecular collisions, vibrations, and rotations.  Recent research collaborations have touched on flexibility in DNA hairpin loops, energy-transfer in semiconductor nanoparticles, local environments in polymeric drug nanocarriers and green fluorescent proteins.  Before coming to Rutgers, Prof. Castner was a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.  His academic training includes a B.A. in Chemistry and Mathematics from the U. of Rochester, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physical chemistry at the U. of Chicago, and NSF and NATO postdoctoral fellowships at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen at the Netherlands.  He serves as an Associate Editor for The Journal of Chemical Physics.  When not on campus, he might be enjoying cooking, skiing, sea-kayaking, world travel, or organizing international research symposia.

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url: http://chem.rutgers.edu/faculty/castner.html

Professor Paul Clemens (History) is associate chair of the History Department and studies the American colonial period, the American Revolution, and legal and constitutional history.  He supervises student high school teachers and advises students interested in elementary and high school social studies teaching.  He teaches the introductory American history survey, constitutional history, Famous Trials (civil liberties and civil rights in modern America), and the American Revolution.  He has team-taught an interdisciplinary course on Jamestown (and taken students to visit Jamestown and Williamsburg); and he has recently offered a seminar in environmental history on the way humans and wolves have interacted.  In the Bryne first-year seminar program, he offers a seminar on the 1924 Leopold and Loeb kidnapping and murder case.  He was awarded the Faculty of Arts of Sciences award for distinguished teaching and the University Warren Susman Award for teaching excellence.  Outside the University, he enjoys hiking in northwest New Jersey and the West.  He has two children, both recently graduated from college, and both working in film animation.

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Professor Barbara Cooper (History) is interested in the intersections between culture and political economy, focusing upon gender, religion, and family life.  Drawing upon archival sources as well as oral interviews in the Hausa speaking region of Niger in the west African Sahel, her publications have addressed female labor and slavery, gift exchange as social discourse, oral genres and the oral re-performance of pilgrimage, movement and the construction of gender, and the negotiation of a shifting political economy through the re-definition of marriage.  She is currently writing a book on the history of a minority Evangelical Protestant community in majority Muslim Niger that engages with the history of U.S. interventions in Africa, the problem of religious violence, the relationships between religion, secularism, and modernity, and the construction of gender in Christianity and Islam.

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Professor Robin L. Davis (Division of Life Sciences - Cell Biology and Neuroscience), Executive Vice Dean, a neurobiologist trained at Stanford University, MIT, and Harvard Medical School, specializes in sensory neuroscience.  Her laboratory focuses on understanding the complex neuronal signaling responsible for transmitting acoustic information into the brain and evaluates spiral ganglion neurons, which are the first neural elements in auditory system.  Her lab uses using patch clamp electrophysiology to observe electrical signals transmitted by auditory neurons in vitro, fluorescent immunocytochemistry to visualize the voltage-gated ion channels that shape the signals, and molecular biological approaches to evaluate the genes involved in regulating and carrying out these processes.  This broad array of approaches to studying a specific group of neurons with known functional significance provides a window into the brain. 

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url: http://www.lifesci.rutgers.edu/~rldavis/

Professor Frank Deis (Division of Life Sciences - Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) began his Rutgers career at the Center of Alcohol Studies in 1972 and then joined the faculty of the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry in 1977.  He has spent the past few decades teaching biochemistry to thousands of students, and writing a popular textbook.  In 2000, he won the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education.  Getting involved with the Honors Program has allowed him to explore personal interests in evolution, paleontology, the origin of life, and human behavior.  He enjoys interacting with students and hopes to find new ways to inspire them and make them think. 

url: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~deis

Professor Monica Driscoll (Division of Life Sciences - Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) is interested in developmental neurogenetics, molecular genetics of neuronal cell death, mechanosensory transduction in touch and feeling, molecular mechanisms of aging.  One of the looming mysteries in signal transduction is the question of how mechanical signals such as pressure or force delivered to a cell are interpreted to direct biological responses.  A long-standing problem in the mechanotransduction field has been that genes encoding mechanically-gated channels eluded cloning efforts resulting in a large gap in our understanding of their function.  A new family of ion channels (the degenerin channels) are hypothesized to function as the central mediators of touch transduction and proprioception (how the body maintains coordinated movement) in C. elegans.  Her lab combines genetic molecular and electrophysiological approaches to determine and compare the composition/regulation of mechanosensitive complexes in an effort to contribute to the understanding of the function of this newly discovered channel class.  

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url: http://lifesci.rutgers.edu/%7Emolbiosci/faculty/driscoll.html

Professor Thomas Figueira (Classics) is a Professor of Classics and of Ancient History. He teaches courses in the Greek and Latin languages (prose and poetry) on all levels; classical civilization and archaeology; and Greek and Roman history.  Among his books are The Power of Money: Coinage and Politics in the Athenian Empire; Wisdom from the Ancients: Enduring Business Lessons from Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, The Illustrious Leaders of Ancient Greece and Rome, and Theognis and Megara: Poetry and Polis. In 2007, he will be speaking at conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and in Nottingham, UK. Prof. Figueira is working on a number of topics, including Attic demography; the Athenian tribute system; the economy of Sparta; the hero Aiakos; and the genesis of the democratic mind.

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Professor Bonnie Firestein (Division of Life Sciences - Cell Biology and Neuroscience) works in the field of neurobiology, and is interested in mentoring students who intend to pursue a Ph.D., going on to graduate school for research (this does not include pre-med students).  In order for neurons to communicate, distinct proteins must be targeted to distinct sites.  Since the neuron is a highly polarized cell, it is a model system in which to study protein targeting.  Dr. Firestein's laboratory studies the targeting of PSD-95, a protein that localizes solely to sites on dendrites termed the post-synaptic density (PSD).  It is at these sites that interneuronal communication takes place.  Understanding how proteins are targeted to the PSD will help us to understand events underlying synaptic plasticity and long-term potentiation.  Dr. Firestein would like to work with student mentees who are interested in research or scientific writing.

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url: http://lifesci.rutgers.edu/~firestein/   

Professor Leslie Fishbein (American Studies, Jewish Studies) received her B.A. in History from Hunter College in the Bronx and her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard.  She has served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Haifa in Israel.  Her scholarship includes works on film and history, American radicalism, documentary expression, the history of female deviance, and Jewish-American literature and culture.  She serves on the Advisory Board of the Rutgers New Jersey Jewish Film Series and likes to use film to teach visual literacy.  She currently is at work on a book on the self-representation of American prostitutes and madams entitled Memoirs of the Sex Trade: A Cultural History of Prostitution. For the 2008-2009 academic year she was a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Research on Women seminar on "The Culture of Rights/The Rights of Culture" during which she began work on another book to be entitled Tangled Tropes: Blacks and Jews in Vexed Conversation that explores the complexities of black-Jewish relations by examining the various ways in which blacks and Jews have used common tropes in their struggles for freedom, equality of opportunity, and social justice and ascribed to them different, and even discordant, meanings.

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url: http://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/faculty/l_fishbein.htm

Professor David Foglesong (History), born and educated mainly in California, is a historian of U.S. foreign relations.  His research interests include American-Russian relations, intelligence, covert action, religion, and "nation building."  In America's Secret War Against Bolshevism, he examined the covert as well as overt forms of U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil War.  He has just completed The American Mission and the "Evil Empire," which focuses on the recurring American drives to liberate Russia and the accompanying demonization of despotic Russian governments since the 1880s.  He teaches courses on the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy, Russian history, and U.S. experiences with "nation building" from the Philippines at the start of the twentieth century to Iraq in the early twenty-first century.  His seminars have given rise to his current research project, which centers on the U.S. occupations of countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Japan, Germany, and Vietnam.  

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Professor Judith Friedman (Sociology) focuses on changes in cities and suburbs.  She studies suburbanization nationally and within New Jersey, and she has looked at the ways visual artists perceive suburbs.  Now she is studying race relations, through time, in her Ohio home town.  She teaches courses on cities and suburbs, research methods, and race, and she has taught the Sociology Department Honors Seminar.  Professor Friedman also is a photographer.  She has had numerous exhibitions, and she is active in the International Visual Sociology Association.  

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url: www.rci.rutgers.edu/~judithjf

Professor Eric Gawiser (Physics & Astronomy) studied Physics and Public Policy as an undergraduate, got a Ph.D. in Physics for research in theoretical cosmology, and joined the Rutgers faculty in 2007 to study distant galaxies using the world's largest telescopes. He recently reported the first discovery of distant galaxies that are the ancestors of galaxies like our own Milky Way, which was covered by USA Today, BBC, and newspapers from as far away as Thailand, India, Turkey and Kazakhstan.  He enjoys advising undergraduate students and recently supervised the research of two Rutgers seniors.  As an Associate at the Hayden Planetarium, Professor Gawiser gives lectures for the general public on Astrophysics research, and he recently taught Astronomy & Cosmology for non-science majors at Rutgers.

URL:  http://physics.rutgers.edu/~gawiser

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Professor Angus Kress Gillespie (American Studies) covers a wide variety of topics including folk culture, Jerseyana, maritime studies, regionalism, the American South, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, film studies, U.S.-Philippine relations, as well as America’s relations with the Middle East.  Each class is carefully crafted to give students a thorough historical and cultural explanation of a topic, as well as rigorous critique of subject and method.  His teaching is all about listening, questioning, and being responsive, as well as remembering that each student contributes differently.   He works hard to elicit responses from even the quietest student, and he pushes all his students to excel. Alongside his teaching portfolio, Gillespie works closely with students every year to produce the New Jersey Folk Festival (NJFF), a major contribution to the University and the State. The NJFF is the largest student-run multi-arts folk festival in North America.

Professor Arnold Glass (Psychology) studies language and memory. He is especially interested in creating a computer program that understands language and is eager to meet students who share this interest.  He also runs experiments that investigate how people understand language and how well they remember things they have seen and heard.  Arnold is a life-long comic book collector and movie fan.  At one time he consulted with the various movie companies on selecting movie titles.  He is an avid Rutgers sports fan.  He enjoys talking with students about these topics and about all kinds of things.

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Professor Daniel M. Goldstein (Anthropology, Latin American Studies) is a political and legal anthropologist studying the effects of political democratization, economic globalization, and the law on poor, indigenous residents of a Bolivian city, exploring the often unintended consequences of global processes for the daily lives of these people. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1997, where his research was funded by awards from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Fulbright IIE. Subsequently, he received a Grant for Research and Writing from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and a Richard Carley Hunt fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which he used to complete his work on the book The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (DukeUP 1994). Currently, his work focuses on problems of insecurity for urban residents and market vendors in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the impacts of crime and violence on local lives and livelihoods. This research has been supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation, programs in Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Science. Goldstein is the co-editor (with Desmond Arias) of a collection titled Violent Democracies in Latin America, forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Professor Derek Gordon (Division of Life Sciences - Genetics) earned his PhD from Stony Brook University in mathematics in 1995. He then did postdocs in statistical genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Rockefeller University. At Rockefeller, he was promoted to assistant professor in 2000. In 2006, Dr. Gordon came to Rutgers University as a tenure-track associate professor. Dr. Gordon's area of expertise is linkage and association mapping. This research involves finding genes that increase risk of disease. Dr. Gordon has been on a number of mapping projects and has authored close to 80 peer-reviewed papers.

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Professor Barth D. Grant (Division of Life Sciences – Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) is interested in molecular membrane biology, especially the mechanisms controlling the uptake of proteins and lipids at the surface of cells, a process called endocytosis. The cells of our bodies are surrounded by a lipid bilayer that separates the molecules inside the cell from those on the outside.  This membrane barrier provides cellular identity, and is essential for life as we know it, but it also represents a problem.  How are large molecules that the cell needs to survive internalized?  Likewise, how can the composition of the membrane be controlled to optimize the interaction of the cell with its environment?  These fundamental issues of cellular function are solved in part by membrane traffic, the regulated movement of regions of membrane and their associated macromolecules using small carriers called vesicles. To gain new insight into the mechanisms that drive this pathway, the Grant lab takes advantage of the unique experimental features of the microscopic nematode C. elegans that have made it a leading model organism in nearly all areas of modern biological research. Chief among these features are highly advanced genetics and transgenic technology, very simple methods for gene knockdown (RNAi) and knockout, coupled with a transparent body that allows visualization of fluorescently tagged molecules in living animals.

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url: http://lifesci.rutgers.edu/grantlab 

Professor Douglas Greenberg (Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences) comes to the School of Arts and Sciences from his position as Professor of History at the University of Southern California (USC) and Executive Director of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.  Professor Greenberg holds a B.A. from Rutgers University (1969) with Highest Distinction in History, and he received his M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1974) from Cornell University. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  Greenberg’s career has focused on the strategic repositioning of the organizations he has led and the use of technology to advance academic and institutional missions. President and CEO of the Chicago Historical Society from 1993 to 2000, Greenberg also served as Vice President of the American Council of Learned Societies and as Associate Dean of the Faculty at Princeton University. He has taught history at Rutgers, Lawrence, and Princeton Universities, and joined the faculty at USC in 2006. The author and editor of many books and essays on the history of early America and American law, as well as on technology, scholarship, and libraries, he also writes and speaks widely about the Holocaust, genocide, and Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust United States.  In 2009, he will receive the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities.

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url: http://sas.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=217&Itemid=274

Professor Sam Gunderson (Division of Life Sciences - Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) does RNA-based research focusing on the regulation of gene expression at the level of processing of precursor mRNA in mammalian cells.  His lab seeks to understand how a single gene can produce 10's to 100's of unique mRNAs some of which can lead to unique proteins.  Biochemical methods are used to reconstitute regulatory pathways so as to gain mechanistic insight into the inner workings of gene expression regulatory complexes.  Technologies to control gene expression are also pursued.

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url: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~gundersn

Professor Kristjan Haule (Physics and Astronomy) joined the Rutgers faculty in 2005 and recently won several prestigious awards including Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, NSF Career award and Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence in 2009.  His research is in computational condensed matter physics and he focuses on theoretical description of materials properties.  The goal of the research is to develop new functional materials for future technologies.  He specializes in a class of materials where electrons show a correlated behavior, and hence the description in terms of independent constituents is not possible. Haule developed a computational tool to simulate the behavior of this class of correlated electron materials on a computer, and he successfully applied it to a various heavy fermion materials and transition metal based compounds.  During his three years at Rutgers, Haule has been the lead author of two research articles in Nature and Science, both prestigious international scientific journals.

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url: http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~haule/

Professor Martha Haviland (Division of Life Sciences - Genetics) received her Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the University of Michigan.  Her research focused on the genetics of quantitative traits associated with cardiovascular disease.  She currently teaches genetics and serves as the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Instruction, Division of Life Sciences.  She is passionate about undergraduate education in the life sciences and getting others involved in and excited about science, because she feels that science (particularly genetics) affects all of us, and to have meaningful discussions concerning the application of scientific discoveries, medical and scientific ethics, and allocation of resources in science, she believes individuals in our society must be better educated.

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Professor Milt Heumann (Political Science and Pre-Law Advisor) teaches courses on civil liberties and civil rights, the politics of criminal justice, and judicial decision-making. Professor Heumann received his B.A. from Brooklyn College in l968, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University  (1971,1976). His publications include Plea Bargaining, Speedy Disposition, Hate Speech on Campus, Good Cop, Bad Cop:Profiling, Race and Competing Visions of Justice. Professor Heumann has taught at the University of Michigan, Rutgers-Camden School of Law and Yale Law School (where he also was a Guggenheim Fellow).  His current research interests include the consequences of felony convictions (for voting, for professional licensing), as well as an examination of jury nullification in light of recent sentencing reforms.  He also plans to write a screen play based on a brilliant, albeit cantankerous, 88 year old attorney/friend, who working with only a few other local residents, challenged the decision making structure of a large closed community in New Jersey. 

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Professor Dorothy L. Hodgson (Anthropology) is Director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers. She is a cultural anthropologist who has worked for over twenty years with Maasai pastoralists in Tanzania, East Africa. She is interested in the intersection of culture and political economy in the everyday lives and experiences of people, especially as they shape and are shaped by gender relations. In her many books and articles, she combines historical and ethnographic sources and methods to explore such topics as the intersection of gender and ethnicity; the cultural politics of development; the relationship among civil society, the state and transnational organizations; the gendered politics of the spirituality and the missionary encounter; the rise and fall of the indigenous rights movement in Africa; and the ethics and politics of anthropological research. In her “spare” time, she enjoys her family and likes to cook, garden, travel, run and train for an annual sprint triathlon.

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Professor Shu-Chan Hsu (Division of Life Sciences - Cell Biology and Neuroscience) studies the precise yet dynamic networking among nerve cells, which is the cellular basis of many if not all brain functions. To establish and maintain this neuronal network, neurons adopt a highly specialized yet flexible morphology; the formation and modulation of this specialization requires precisely targeted membrane addition to designated sites of the plasma membrane. Dr. Hsu's lab is trying to define the molecular events underlying this process, using molecular biological, biochemical, immunochemical and cell biological approaches.  Their goal is to elucidate the biochemical events underlying secretory vesicle trafficking and to study how this process is regulated by cellular signaling pathways during neuronal growth, differentiation and regeneration.

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Professor John P. Hughes (Physics) while growing up in New York City (mostly oblivious to popular culture) just couldn't get enough of astronomy.  So you can imagine how thrilled he was to be involved in building satellites for NASA on the way to a degree in astrophysics from Columbia University.  These days Dr. Hughes has traded in his 2-inch diameter backyard telescope for the 10-meter diameter Southern African Large Telescope (funded in part by Rutgers) north of Cape Town.  One of his current research projects is a large-area, multiwavelength sky survey aiming for an accurate census of massive clusters of galaxies to measure the rate of structure growth in the Universe and thereby answer questions about the nature of dark matter and dark energy that control its evolution.  He also studies the aftermaths of supernova explosions, including both the superdense crushed interiors of massive stars and the exploded outer parts that fly off at speeds of thousands of kilometers per second.  A strong advocate for undergraduate research, Dr. Hughes also teaches High Energy Astrophysics, Stars and Star Formation, Astronomy and Cosmology, the Physics of Sound, as well as an honors seminar on the Science and Life of Albert Einstein.  Dr. Hughes enjoys travel, biking, skiing, opera, and now pays close attention to US domestic and international policy issues.

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url: http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~jackph/

Professor Alison Isenberg (History) focuses on modern U.S. history, particularly the history of cities and suburbs, business culture, historic preservation, and the built environment.  Before joining Rutgers, she taught at the UNC at Chapel Hill and Florida International University, and worked in urban planning and low-income housing finance in New York City.  Her book Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It received several awards.  During 2006-7 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.  She is currently working on two books.  Second-hand Cities tells the story of the antique trade, second-hand markets, and the recirculation of artifacts and neighborhoods, from the Great Migration to urban renewal and “white flight.”  The second book is about the field of urban design from the 1950s to the 1970s.  She’s done research on the history of the New Jersey shore, and is interested in learning more about the state’s cities and suburbs.

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Professor Larry Jacobs (Psychology), Assistant Director of Career Services, holds an ED.S. and Masters in Counseling Psychology and Student Affairs.  One of his goals in academia is to show that the fields of psychology and education, and understanding behavior and teaching others are fun and exciting.  As the founder of Dare2Dream, a motivational and interactive program on the power of your attitude and productiveness, he designed the program to inspire, support, and educate, and he has presented to over 80,000 people. Born deaf, yet living life to the fullest, Larry has been a mentor for individuals to live their dreams.  He always finds time to talk with students about setting goals and objectives, experiencing cultural diversity and disability awareness, and finding your passion for life. You turn any challenges and obstacles into gifts and opportunities.  Some of his volunteer activities included the founding and building of Kidstreet, the largest playground in the state of NJ; carrying the US Olympic Torch for the 1996 Olympic Games, and a USA Trials track runner.

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Professor Jennifer Jones (History) began teaching at Rutgers in 1991 after studying at Grinnell College as an undergraduate and pursuing her Ph.D. in European history at Princeton. She regularly teaches Development of Europe I and II, which over the course of a year permits her to travel from the Parthenon of Athens in the 5th century BCE to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  She specializes in 18th-century France and women’s history and teaches courses on both topics.  She teaches seminars in both the history department and Women’s and Gender Studies on the history of fashion, the history of girls, and the history of the French Revolution.  Her first book is Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France.  She is currently writing a book on Thérèse Levasseur, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s mistress, and is researching children’s experience during the French Revolution. 

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Professor Chuck Keeton (Physics) studies the mysterious "dark matter" that surrounds galaxies and pervades the universe.  Each galaxy's gravity acts as a gravitational lens to distort our view of the universe behind the galaxy.  Professor Keeton observes gravitational lensing with the Hubble Space Telescope and various telescopes on the ground, and analyzes the observations to map the invisible dark matter in distant galaxies.  Some physicists have suggested that the universe could contain a fourth dimension that has never been seen.  Professor Keeton recently suggested a way to test this idea with gravitational lensing by microscopic black holes, which might even exist in our own Solar System.  This research was featured by media such as MSNBC.com, National Public Radio, and Nova online.  In his free time Professor Keeton enjoys singing choral music.  He has performed with the Rutgers Kirkpatrick Choir in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and he sings early music with the Rutgers Collegium Musicum.

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Professor John F. Kenfield (Art History) has been teaching ancient Greek and Roman art and culture in the Department of Art History since 1971.  In 1994, the Rutgers College Parents Association named Professor Kenfield “Outstanding Teacher of the Year” for his continuing work in the Introduction to Art History I (01:082:105), and in 1998 The Rutgers Students Unofficial Guide to College (p. 21) named Professor Kenfield one of the ten best teachers in the School of Arts and Sciences.

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Professor Spencer Knapp (Chemistry) was born in Baytown, TX, and raised in Tallmadge, OH.  As a Fellow of the Ford Foundation, he received degrees in 1972 and 1975 from Cornell. Following an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard, he came to Rutgers.  His research interests include the synthesis of natural products, enzyme inhibitors, and complex ligands, and the development of new synthetic methods.  He developed GlcNAc-thiazoline inhibitors, which serve as powerful tools for understanding the human enzymes O-GlcNAcase and N-acetylhexosaminidases (the latter associated with Tay-Sachs and Sandoff’s diseases). He developed iodolactamization and the carbonimidothioate and N-benzoylcarbamate cyclizations; and natural products synthesized include griseolic acid, siastatin B, and capuramycin. He has collaborated with over 40 Rutgers undergraduates and has 21 publications with undergraduates as coauthors.  Many of these have gone on to top graduate schools, and now hold positions in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Courses taught include Organic Chemistry and the Honors Seminar “Science in the News.”

url: http://rutchem.rutgers.edu/content_dynamic/faculty/spencer_knapp.shtml

Professor John Krenos (Chemistry) has research interests in chemistry education and chemical dynamics, principally the experimental study of electronic energy transfer collisions by molecular beam and spectroscopic techniques.  He teaches Honors General Chemistry, and served as the Vice Chair for the Undergraduate Program in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from 2000-2009.  He coauthored a Study Guide accompanying a major honors chemistry textbook, and participated in an NSF supported project on establishing an Undergraduate Research Center for Chemistry and Closely Allied Fields at Rutgers.  He currently serves as the President of the Board of Education for the New Brunswick Public Schools chairing its Curriculum Committee.

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url (research): http://chem.rutgers.edu/content_dynamic/faculty/john_krenos.shtml

url (teaching): http://chem.rutgers.edu/~krenos/chem163_f09/index.html

Professor Alex Kusnecov (Psychology) received his PhD in 1990 from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. This was followed by a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester Medical School in New York State, where he continued his training in psychoneuroimmunology. His research focuses on the functional relationship between brain and behavior, the endocrine system, and the immune system. Using mouse models, he seeks to understand how central and peripheral events related to infection and activation of the immune system influence the cognitive and emotional state of animals, and through what molecular mechanisms this might occur. In addition to animal behavioral neuroscience research, Dr. Kusnecov is also conducting human studies of the startle reflex response, and how this is modulated by genetic and cognitive and emotional processes. His involvement in the Mind-Body Center at Rutgers also allows for collaborations on the relationship between psychosocial variables, aging and the immune response.

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Professor Beth Leech (Political Science) focuses on non-government institutions -- interest groups, social movements, community organizations, and the news media -- and the roles they play in representation and policymaking.  She is fascinated by questions of research design and teaches quantitative research methods.  She has written two books about lobbying and is currently finishing a book about cooperation. Her favorite undergraduate class is a hands-on seminar on citizen groups that a student helped her design; she taught a workshop based on that class in Mongolia and South Africa (http://www.globalpact.org/about).  A former newspaper journalist, she has also worked as an anthropological researcher in Kenya.  She's originally from Nebraska, got her undergraduate degree from Northwestern and her Ph.D. from Texas A&M.

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Professor Alice Y. Liu (Division of Life Science – Cell Biology and Neuroscience) is a proud faculty of this great research University of the State of New Jersey.  She is interested in understanding why the ability to withstand stress is diminished in aging in general and in neurons in particular.   She studies the regulation of a stress induced genetic mechanism – induction of the heat shock response (HSR); the increased expression of HSP chaperones serves to facilitate protein folding to confer stress resistance.   Her current research is focused on the identification and elucidating the mechanism of action of drugs/small molecules that can enhance the HSR to “protect” cells under stress for possible therapeutics development.  Dr. Liu teaches the course Molecular Biology (146:478).  She firmly believes in the importance of research based learning and has mentored a good number of undergraduate students over the years.    She enjoys working and interacting with students in the classroom and at the lab bench.   In her capacity as a teacher, she tries to inspire and challenge ALL of her students to strive for their very best.      

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Professor Jenny Mandelbaum (Communication) received her BA in French and Philosophy from Oxford University in England, and an MA and Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas.  Her research examines the organization of everyday interaction, using video and audio tapes as a resource for describing, for instance, how we tell stories in conversation and what we "do" through the stories we tell.  Her findings include accounts of how we "construct" relationships and identity in and through interaction.  Currently she and her students are working on a large database of videotaped Thanksgiving dinners.  She looks forward to the continued participation of Honors students in these projects.  She teaches classes at all levels (including Intro. to Communication -- Comm 101), and enjoys the challenges of introducing technology into the classroom.

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url: http://scils.rutgers.edu/~jennym/

Professor Terry Matilsky (Physics) spends his days lurking in the astrophysics wing of Serin.  He has taken pictures from rockets from 100 miles in space (no, he hasn't been in them), but enjoys ground-based landscapes (wilderness like Yosemite and Yellowstone) best.  He's sold some of his least favorite photographs to ad agencies on Madison Avenue, just to see whether it could be done, but remains totally undiscovered as a true artist.  He is currently interested in fundamental theories of gravitation: it appears that the standard "dark matter" scenarios are significantly flawed, and recent work in string theory points us toward modification of our current ideas about gravitational dynamics.  He has examined a new idea that postulates an additional interaction in four spatial dimensions that has the potential to solve the dark matter problem, as well as address some fundamental questions in cosmology and high-energy physics.

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url: http://xray.rutgers.edu/~matilsky/ 

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Professor Kim S. McKim (Division of Life Sciences - Genetics) focus and research interests include understanding the mechanisms of Genetics and Heredity.  Since this includes studying DNA repair and how the chromosomes replicated and segregated during cell division, this research has important implications for reproductive biology and cancer.  Dr. McKim teaches courses in both basic and advanced Genetic analysis in addition to supervising the research projects of several undergraduates each year. 

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Professor Paul McLean (Sociology) studies elite social networks in historical contexts, specifically Renaissance Florence and early modern Poland.  This involves gathering pretty large datasets from archival sources to get something approaching a comprehensive view of the relational structure of such networks.  How such networks are patterned and how they evolve has important consequences for the trajectory of political and economic development and the emergence of various kinds of institutional innovations in those societies.  Besides mapping the structure of such networks, he is interested in the art of networking (even if he is not very good at it himself!), the sentiment of honor, and various themes (e.g., chance and game-playing) in the sociology of culture.  He teaches courses in political and economic sociology, the sociology of culture, social network analysis, and classical social theory.  He also enjoys hiking and is a singer of art songs and Renaissance polyphony in his spare time.

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Professor Carolyn M. Moehling (Economics) is an associate professor of Economics at Rutgers and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  Her research focuses on the interactions between households, markets and governments in the past.  Her current research projects include studies of the fertility of the Irish both at home and after immigration to the United States, the connections between immigration and crime in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the evolution and impact of Progressive Era social programs on American families.  Professor Moehling currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic History and Explorations in Economic History.

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Professor Oded Palmon (Finance and Economics) conducts his research in the area of Corporate Finance.  He concentrates on Corporate Governance, and in particular on Executive Compensation.  Before joining Rutgers University (in 1988) Professor Palmon has been a faculty member at The University of Houston and The University of Haifa.  He got his undergraduate degree at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. at The University of Chicago.  Professor Palmon is planning to be on leave in Spring 2009, but has expressed interest to continue to work as a Faculty Mentor.

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urp: http://business.rutgers.edu/default.aspx?id=472

Professor Timothy Power (Classics) studies the culture and politics of Greece from the sixth to the fourth century BCE, primarily Athens, with a special focus on the private and public performance of music and poetry there. He has published work on the Epinician poets Bacchylides and Pindar, dithyrambic choral poetry in Athens, the elegiac poet Ion of Chios, and the intensely politicized culture of competitive musicians in Greece and Rome. Currently he is beginning a book on the cultural acoustics of Classical Athens, how voice, sound, and listening shaped the sociocultural experience of the city's inhabitants. When not researching or teaching, he enjoys cooking, walking, playing music, and reading detective novels.

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Professor Barry Qualls (English), Vice President for Undergraduate Academic Affairs, mostly does research on Victorian Literature, Biblical literature, and poetry, but his students claim that he knows everything about everything.   (Really, try this!  It's amazing!)  Somehow, despite his busy schedule, he always finds time to talk with students about English literature and about their college education.  Professor Qualls was named the 2006 New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support Education. 

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url: http://english.rutgers.edu/faculty/quallfac.htm

Professor Joanna Regulska (Women's and Gender Studies, Geography), Dean of International Programs for the School of Arts and Sciences, received her MA from University of Warsaw, Poland and PhD from University of Colorado, Boulder. Most of her current research and teaching concentrates on women’s agency, political activism, grassroots mobilization and construction of women’s political spaces. She also continues her work on the impacts of post-1989 political and economic transformations on the processes of democratization, citizens’ participation and decentralization in Central and Eastern Europe. Her current multi-year NSF funded research, jointly with Dr. Beth Mitchneck (U of Arizona), examines everyday practices and livelihood strategies of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Georgia. She is an author and co-author of over 90 articles and reports and of five books, most recently Women and Citizenship in Central and East Europe with Jasmina Lukic and Darja Zavirsek, and Cooperation or Conflict: State, the European Union and Women with M. Grabowska, M. Fuszara and J. Mizielinska. She is currently working on edited volume with B. Smith From Cold War to the EU: Gender in Europe. Her research and policy work has been extensively supported (over $9 million) by public institutions and private foundations. 

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Professor Stephen Reinert (History) is an Associate Professor of History, and Director of Rutgers Study Abroad.  His research focus is comparative Byzantine, Balkan, and Turkic history and culture, primarily in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He is currently writing monographs on the last great medieval Crusade ("The Crusade of Nicopolies"), the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425), and Byzantine polemics against Islam.  He is also polishing a translation and commentary of the mid-fifteenth century Chagatay poet, Gada'i. 

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Professor Nicholas Rennie (German/Comparative Literature) has taught courses on German and European intellectual history, German drama, literature of the Age of Goethe, the Frankfurt School, contemporary literary theory, and theories of the visual. He studied at Princeton, the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), and Yale, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. He has received numerous awards, including a School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship supporting his work at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (2002-2003) and the Free University Berlin (2007-2008). He is the author of Speculating on the Moment: The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi, and Nietzsche (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), and has written articles on Lessing, Goethe, Leopardi, Nietzsche, and Benjamin. He recently published a piece on theater performance as a theme of Goethe’s Faust, as well as a comparative analysis of this play and Molière’s Dom Juan; and he is currently working on a book project entitled Forbidding Images: Writing and the Visual in German Theory 1766/1939. In addition to his research and teaching, Prof. Rennie has a special interest in Study Abroad and in Rutgers University’s summer, semester and year programs in Berlin.

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Professor Michael Aaron Rockland (American Studies) has been at Rutgers since 1969.  Prior to beginning his academic career, Dr. Rockland served in the U.S. Diplomatic Service as a cultural attaché in Latin America and Spain.  He has also held Fulbright lectureships in Norway, Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru, and still lectures widely overseas under the auspices of the State Department.  He is interested in ethnicity (particularly the American Jewish experience) and mobility: see his books Homes on Wheels, Looking For America on the New Jersey Turnpike and Snowshoeing Through Sewers.  His novel, A Bliss Case, was a New York Times "Notable Book."  He has written extensively for magazines such as Philadelphia, Adventure Travel, Explorer's Journal, and New Jersey Monthly, where he has long been Contributing Editor.  His most recent book is 'The George Washington Bridge: Poetry in Steel,' and he has a new novel coming out in fall, 2009 titled 'Stones.'  Finally, he has also done considerable work in television production and filmmaking and studied at the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State.

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Professor Robyn Magalit Rodriguez (Sociology) received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching, as well as research focus, is primarily on the topic of migration and globalization. Amongst the key questions she explores include: what explains international migration from specific countries to others? What are the consequences of migration to the political institutions of both sending and receiving countries?  What sorts of impacts does migration have for racialized and ethnic relations in destination countries and how are these relations differently experienced by men and women? Professor’s Rodriguez's first book examines migration from the Philippines. She specifically attempts to address how and why the Philippines has become the top labor-exporting country in the world with millions of migrants working in over one hundred countries globally. Her current book project examines contestations around immigration, citizenship and local forms of belonging in municipalities throughout the state of New Jersey.

Professor Chris Rongo (Division of Life Sciences - Genetics) is interested in the molecular mechanisms that underlie neuronal communication, the means by which our nervous system senses, interprets, remembers, and responds to the outside world.  Much of this communication occurs at chemical synapses, and his lab has been identifying the factors that regulate the localization of neurotransmitter receptors (particularly glutamate receptors) to synapses using a genetic approach in the nematode C. elegans.  Glutamate receptors are implicated in several diseases of the nervous system, and are a primary neurodegenerative agent activated by mechanical damage (e.g., traumatic injury) and by oxygen deprivation (e.g., stroke).  Thus, a better understanding of these receptors might facilitate the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases attributable to neurodegeneration.  Dr. Rongo is the first Rutgers faculty member to be honored as Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. 

url: http://mbclserver.rutgers.edu/labs/rongo/

Professor Jeff Rubin (Economics) is the director of Undergraduate Studies in economics.  His main research interest in is health economics with a special focus on the financing of Medicare. His prior research includes studies of the effects of mental health law on the allocation of mental health resources and the effect of health insurance on the use of medical care.  He also studied housing markets and evaluated efforts to expand the availability of affordable housing.  Professor Rubin serves as the faculty adviser for the College Fed Challenge team at Rutgers, which has won the NY District championship in two of the last five competitions and come in second two times and third once.  During this period the team has received a total of $80,000 in prize money, some of which is distributed to the students and some of which is given to the economics department.

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Professor Dianne Sadoff (English) specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, but has also written books about the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis in the nineteenth-century and about film adaptations of English novels.  She has edited books on teaching literary and cultural theory to undergraduates and on postmodern rewritings of Victorian literature and culture.  She's new to Rutgers University, and has taught at Antioch College, Colby College, the University of Southern Maine, and Miami University.

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Professor Amrik Sahota (Division of Life Sciences - Genetics) is involved in three major activities: (i) kidney stone disease; (ii) large-scale genetic studies; and (iii) molecular diagnostics.  His lab focuses on the molecular pathology of kidney stone disease, studying the disease process in animal models, in cultured cells and, in collaboration with clinical colleagues, in human renal biopsies.  This combined approach has provided, and continues to provide, fundamental insights into the molecular bases of pathological changes, including inflammation, fibrosis, tissue calcification, and cell death.  His lab establishes and maintains cell, DNA, and database repositories for complex human diseases and collaborates with other investigators in the identification of genes for these diseases.   They continually develop and implement into clinical practice molecular diagnostic assays based on advances in molecular biology and genetics. 

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Professor Kira Sanbonmatsu (Political Science) is a Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Before joining Rutgers, she taught at The Ohio State University. She studies gender, race/ethnicity, parties, public opinion, and state politics. She is the author of Where Women Run: Gender and Party in the American States and Democrats, Republicans, and the Politics of Women's Place. Her articles have appeared in such journals as American Journal of Political Science, Politics & Gender, and Party Politics. Her current research concerns attitudes toward women’s descriptive representation; gender stereotypes; women’s recruitment to elective office; and the relationship between party representation and women’s representation.

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Professor Richard Schroeder (Geography) teaches courses on Africa, development and the environment.  He was the founding director of the Rutgers Center for African Studies and remains heavily involved in African Studies programming on campus.  An environmental and social geographer, his research has taken him to Nigeria, The Gambia, and Tanzania.  He is particularly interested in the social, cultural and political impacts of environmental policy interventions related to agroforestry, community forestry, non-timber forest products, wildlife tourism, trophy hunting, and gem stone mining.  His most recent research project examines the dramatic rise of South Africa as a regional economic power in post-apartheid Africa.  Specifically, this project explores controversies surrounding race and national identity that have been spawned in the wake of heavy South African investment in Tanzania.

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Professor Jeffrey Shandler (Jewish Studies) focuses on Jewish culture in America and Eastern Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present, in his scholarship and teaching, with special interests in modern Yiddish language, literature, and culture; Holocaust remembrance in literature, film, museums, tourism, education, and other cultural practices; and the role that broadcasting, photography, film, and other media play in modern Jewish life. Shandler’s most recent book, Jews God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America, examines the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on the religious life of American Jews, with examples ranging from early recordings of cantorial music to hasidic outreach on the Internet.  He is also the author of a book on contemporary Yiddish culture and a study of how the Holocaust has been presented on American television.  Shandler has translated works of Yiddish children’s literature into English and has cureted exhibitions on Jewish culture for several museums. Currently he is writing an intellectual history of the shtetl and is co-editing a volume of essays on how Anne Frank and her diary are revisited in literature, films, broadcasts, theater pieces, musical compositions, visual art, memorials, educational programs, and other cultural works.

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Professor Mary Shaw (French) focuses most of her research on 19th- and 20th-Century French poetry, particularly Mallarmé, but her work explores poetry's relations with other genres (theater and various types of fictional and non-fictional prose) and with disparate art forms (music, dance, and the visual arts). She often works across centuries as well. Much of her teaching has revolved around the Zimmerli Art Museum's fin-de-siècle illustrated book and journal collection, and she has been especially invested in the CASE program, which involves undergraduates in teaching French language and culture to children through puppet theater and other means. In recent years, she has also published poetry and a bilingual children's book. You will also find her teaching some of the beginning French literature courses.

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Professor Neil Sheflin (Economics) studies applied macroeconomics and instructional technology.  His work has included research on the economics of trade unions, the development of inflation cycles for the Center for International Business Cycle Research, cost-benefit analyses of NASA remote satellite sensing systems, telecommunications demand modeling, financial sector modeling of large scale econometric models of the United States, Economic Loss Analysis for the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, and the development of statistical sentencing guidelines for the Administrative Office of the Courts of New Jersey.  Dr. Sheflin is faculty advisor to the Economics Honor Society (ODE). His outside interests include sailing, sports cars, history, and jazz.

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url: http://www.econweb.rutgers.edu/sheflin

Professor Andy Singson (Division of Life Sciences - Genetics) has research interests in the molecular mechanism of fertilization (sperm-egg interactions). The long-term goal of research in his lab is to understand the molecular events that mediate gamete recognition, adhesion, signaling and fusion. The genetic and molecular dissection of these events will also provide insights relevant to other important cell-cell interactions during the development of multicellular organisms.  In his free time, Dr. Singson is also the faculty advisor for the Rutgers University Cycling Team.

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 Professor William Steiger (Computer Science) studied Mathematics at MIT and got his PhD in Statistics at the Australian National University.  He is interested in Probability, Geometry, Combinatorics, and other mathematical areas that relate to the Theory of Computation.  He has been a director of the DIMACS REU (research experiences for undergraduates) program and has  received the Faculty of Arts and Science award for distinguished contributions to undergraduate educations.  In 2005 and 2008 he received the Computer Science Graduate Students Society award for excellence in graduate teaching.

Professor Arlene Stein

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Professor Camilla Stevens (Spanish and Portuguese) teaches courses on Spanish American literature and culture.  She specializes in Spanish American drama, theater and performance theory, and Pan-Caribbean cultural studies. Her research highlights the role of theater in the cultural politics of constructing, defining, and remembering collective identities. She is currently researching the representation of race in contemporary dramatic texts and performances that question notions of a fixed national or ethnic identity in the Caribbean context of colonialism, globalization, and migration. Originally from Minnesota, her academic pursuits have led her from Tulane University (B.A. in Latin American Studies and Spanish), to the University of New Mexico (M.A. in Hispanic Literature), and the University of Kansas (Ph.D.), as well as to Spain, Ecuador, Brazil, and many parts of the Caribbean. 

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Professor Ruth Steward (Division of Life Sciences - Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) has research interests in the Toll-Dorsal (NF-kB/Rel) pathway functioning in establishing dorsal-ventral polarity in the early Drosophila embryo, in the humoral and cellular immune response, and in hematopoiesis.  The pathway is conserved in flies and vertebrates. In mammals it controls the immune and inflammatory responses and is critical for cell growth and survival. A large number of mammalian tumors are associated with mis-regulation of the NF-kB/Rel proteins.  She is also working on histone methylation and its effect on chromatin organization in Drosophila.

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url: http://waksman.rutgers.edu/Waks/Steward/steward2.html

Professor Stephen Stich (Philosophy) is interested in how the mind works, how it evolved, and how minds create cultures that profoundly influence the minds that created them.  In recent years, he has been actively involved in the Innateness and the Structure of the Mind project (http://www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/AHRB-Project/) and the Culture and the Mind project (http://www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/culture&mind/) – both of which are international, interdisciplinary efforts aimed at expanding our understanding of the mind.  Stich is also deeply committed to undergraduate teaching and regularly teaches the Philosophy Department’s Introduction to Philosophy course.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield (U.K.), and has lectured on every continent except Antarctica.  In 2007, he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (http://www.institutnicod.org/conf.htm).  When not teaching and doing research, Stich enjoys traveling and trekking in the far corners of the world.  For lots of other stuff, including some cool travel photos, visit his website.  

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url:  http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/  

Professor Sarolta Anna Takács (History) received her B.A. in Classics from the University of California, Irvine, her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from UCLA (she also attended the University of Heidelberg and the Free University in Berlin). Before she came to Rutgers, she taught at the University of Oregon, at UCLA, and at Harvard where she also held the position of academic dean.  Professor Takács studies the Roman and Byzantine world.  Her newest book, Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons: Women in Roman Religion, looks at Roman women and the role they played maintaining Rome’s socio-political structure as well as the understanding of the Roman self by means of religious rituals.  A forthcoming book investigates the power of rhetoric through the traditional virtues of the ancient Romans (the mos maiorum).  Professor Takács is also the editor of a monograph series (Roman Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches). Professor Takács is the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program.

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Professor Kathryn Uhrich (Chemistry and Chemical Biology), Dean of Math and Physical Sciences, focuses in her laboratory on the synthesis and characterization of biocompatible polymers for medical and dental applications such as drug delivery and tissue engineering.  Her research accomplishments have been recognized and disseminated in hundreds of publications and conference proceedings along with hundreds of invited presentations at local, national and international levels.  In addition, Dr. Uhrich currently holds over one hundred US and world-wide patents and applications.  She has served the university on faculty and administration search committees as well as other executive and advisory committees including the Advisory Committee to the Office for Promotion of Women in Science, Engineering and Math since 2006.  She has been the recipient of the Johnson & Johnson Discovery (1996), Hoechst Celanese Innovative Research (1996 and 1997), and National Science Foundation CAREER (2000) awards.  Other recent awards include the Thomas Alva Edison patent award (2003), New Jersey’s Outstanding Scientist in Biomedical Research (2004), American Chemical Society-sponsored Buck-Whitney award (2005), and the New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Award (2007).  Currently, she is co-Director of an NSF IGERT program on “Biointerfaces” (2004-08) and on “Stem Cells” (2008-12).

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Professor Drew Vershon (Division of Life Sciences - Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) is one of our most enthusiastic molecular biologists, and he loves involving undergraduates in research; his lab focuses on the regulation of transcription in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Specifically, he is investigating how different regulatory proteins interact to control gene expression and how these interactions influence the regulatory activity of the proteins. 

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Professor Itzhak Yanovitzky (Communication) joined Rutgers in 2001 after earning his doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. His primary research interests include health communication (particularly the use of communication campaigns to promote healthier behaviors and lifestyles) and the strategic use of communication to support social change. In addition to teaching courses in persuasion and social influence at all levels (undergraduate and graduate) he is also an expert in the area of program evaluation and quantitative methodology. Dr. Yanovitzky regularly mentors undergraduate students both inside and outside the Honors Program and he is the recipient of the 2009 Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates’ Research Mentor of the Year award.  

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URL: http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~iy/

Professor Virginia Yans (History) is currently working on a biographical study of the anthropologist Margaret Mead. She has written and produced a 90 minute documentary film MARGARET MEAD: AN OBSERVER OBSERVED which aired nationally as a PBS Television Special and continues to be broadcast worldwide.  She is actively involved in a number of public history projects including the Ellis Island National Museum, the Women's History Museum and Leadership Center planned for lower Manhattan, and the South Street Seaport Museum.  Newer interests include a history of collectors and collecting and a history of "single persons."  Recent dissertations she has directed include several topics related to immigration including women's citizenship, Japanese picture brides, and immigrant language usage. Along with Professor Rudolph Bell, she co-directed two projects at the RCHA during 2003-2005, one on "singleness" and another on the "gendering of children."