- Details
- Department of Computer Science
Professor Mridul Aanjaneya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph. D. from Stanford University, followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is interested in Computational Physics, with a focus on applications in Computer Graphics and High-Performance Computing. Some of his recent work has proposed novel algorithms and data structures for capturing small scale details in Computational Solid and Fluid Mechanics.
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Professor Emily Allen-Hornblower, associate professor of Classics, has also served as the Undergraduate Director of Classics since 2010. She is a recipient of The Rutgers Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Service for her teaching in NJ prisons (2016), and of the Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence honors award for outstanding teaching and scholarly work (2015). Her areas of interest include: storytelling; religion and gender; ancient cultural history; ancient Greek and Roman epic; Greek drama (tragedy and comedy); and social justice. Her book and articles center on ancient (and modern) conceptions and portrayals of the human: the human condition and suffering; interpersonal relations; and factors of connection (and disconnection) between individuals and groups. She loves teaching and advising, and taking her students beyond the classroom (for instance to theater and museum outings), and to bring to light (and to life!) crucial aspects of the material covered in class by way of hands-on contact with material culture and a more experiential approach to studying and learning. She is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and received her Ph.D in Classics from Harvard University, along with a joint doctoral degree from the Sorbonne in Paris (where she received a BA in both Classics and English). Outside of the classroom, she is usually doing something that involves bicycling, her dog, and cooking — or any combination of the three.
Professor Christina Bergey is an assistant professor with the Department of Genetics. Her research interests include the evolutionary genomics of humans, other primates, and the insects that transmit their diseases. Most of the research projects take place in tropical regions of Africa, and the hypotheses are selected to be relevant to human health with a particular focus on infectious diseases like malaria and respiratory viruses. Besides fieldwork and a bit of molecular biology lab work, the majority of the research is computational/bioinformatics.
Professor Paul Blaney wears a variety of hats. His main vocation is as a fiction writer, but he also works as a freelance journalist, a teacher, editor, and publisher. Born and raised in London, he has lived and worked in Lisbon, Hong Kong, and Eugene, Oregon, and now lives in Easton, PA. Recent publications include Handover, a novella set in Hong Kong, and The Anchoress, another novella whose main protagonist locks herself in her walk-in closet and won't come out. In 2015 Paul's first novel, Mister Spoonface, was published. The book explores what it means to be a father in an era of artificial reproduction. As well as teaching in New Brunswick, in both SAS Honors and the English Department, Paul has developed courses that include study abroad programs in England and Ireland.
Steven Brechin, is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in Sociology Department. Professor Brechin’s current research explores some of the contours of a sociology of climate change, the serious social justice issues that climate change generates, and public understanding of climate engineering technologies. Additional projects include the levels of cooperation required to make significant reductions in greenhouse gases. He is also interested in capabilities of international organizations engaged in climate change. He is currently editing the 2nd Edition of the Routledge Handbook on Climate Change and Society. His earlier research focused on the sociology of biodiversity conservation, organized international reforestation programs, and environmentalism. Before arriving at Rutgers, Steve taught at Princeton, Michigan, Illinois, and Syracuse. He earned his graduate degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Professor Blakesley Burkhart is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She completed her Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2014 and was a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics thereafter. Her research is focused on understanding the nature of magnetic turbulence at all scales in the universe. This includes the solar wind, the diffuse and star-forming interstellar medium (ISM), the turbulent nature of nearby galaxies. She has won several major awards for her scientific work, including the Annie Jump Cannon Award and Robert J. Trumpler Award. Professor Burkhart has mentored students at every academic level and is excited to be a Faculty Mentor for the SAS Honors Program. 
Professor Sharon Bzostek, an associate professor of sociology and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the School of Arts and Sciences, received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2009. She is a social demographer and particularly interested in recent changes in family demography and their consequences for child and family well-being, as well as social disparities in health and health care. Prior to joining Rutgers University, Professor Bzostek was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at Harvard University. She is currently working on projects related to mothers’ re-partnering after a non-marital birth, better understanding survey respondents’ self-rated health, comparing parent and child reports about children's lives, and the effects of mixed health insurance coverage within families on children’s health care access and utilization. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Demography, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science and Medicine, and Health Affairs. Professor Bzostek serves as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education for the School of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Karthik C. S. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He earned his Ph.D. in 2019 at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Prior to coming to Rutgers, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University and New York University. He is interested in theoretical computer science and has spent time proving Hardness of Approximation results for problems in P, and understanding Hardness of Geometric problems such as Clustering, Closest Pair, and Fixed Point Computation.
Professor Qian Cai, is interested in molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating the autophagy-lysosomal pathway, and its impact on neuronal development, function, and degeneration. Autophagy-lysosomal function is now considered as indispensable for the homeostasis of cells. Neurons appear particularly vulnerable to autophagy-lysosomal dysfunction and toxin accumulation. Defects within this pathway have been directly linked to several major neurodegenerative diseases. Her lab has focused on addressing how retrograde transport of late endocytic organelles regulates autophagy-lysosomal function, thereby contributing to the maintenance of axonal homeostasis. Using genetic mouse models and cell biological approaches combined with time-lapse imaging and gene rescue experiments in live neurons, the Cai lab will determine how the mitochondrial quality is properly controlled through neuronal mitophagy, and how the defects within this system contribute to neurodegeneration. These studies will advance our understanding of pathogenesis of a variety of neurodegenerative diseases characterized by damaged mitochondria or a dysfunctional autophagy-lysosomal system.
Professor Joseph Casillas is an Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and Associate Faculty in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His main interests are in phonetics, laboratory phonology, and second language acquisition. A principle aim of his research is to better understand the relationship between language use and sound representation in the multilingual mind, as well as the structure of sound systems in human languages. Most of his research is conducted on bilinguals of varying proficiency and linguistic experience. Some of his recent projects have centered on native phonetic experience and its influence on L2 speech production, perception and lexical processing. He also focuses his attention on coding, statistical analysis, data visualization, and reproducible research, as well as training researchers to implement open research practices in the speech sciences, particularly in Bilingualism/Second Language Acquisition research. He also enjoys playing music, Casio watches and anything related to el andalú.
Dr. Madhavi Chakrabarty is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of Marketing at Rutgers Business School. She has a PhD in Cognitive Science and Human Factors from New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her areas of expertise are customer analytics, marketing insights, optimization and product design with a deep understanding of the digital ecosystems and the use of emergent technologies like AI, ML, AR/VR and Blockchain in Business Problem Solving. She serves as the Advisor for the Rutgers Association of Marketing and Strategy (RAMS).
Professor Ali Chaudhary is a sociologist specializing in the study of immigration, racial inequities, and music. HIs scholarship interrogates the significance of social categories as they shape opportunities and constraints in the everyday lives of immigrants and minority groups. He uses diverse methodologies, data sources, and theoretical perspectives to investigate how ascriptive social categories (race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc.) and their corresponding symbolic boundaries are activated, reinforced, and contested within organizations, politics, and popular music, among others. His current research program consists of three streams: 1) immigrant organizations, 2) immigrant politics and civic participation, and 3) the sociology of music. Before coming to Rutgers, Dr. Chaudhary was a Junior Research Fellow and Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. When he is not writing or teaching, Dr. Chaudhary spends his free time performing jazz guitar throughout Greater New York City and he frequently performs at university events on campus and in Highland Park/New Brunswick. 
Professor Ann Baynes Coiro works on seventeenth-century English literature and culture, ranging from William Shakespeare to Aphra Behn. The English seventeenth century encompasses the first two modern revolutions and has important connections to the present moment. During these years, for example: an insidious network of slavery developed across the Atlantic world; what we now call science developed with the discoveries of such crucial figures as Galileo, Hooke and Newton; the origins of modern political theory emerged (Hobbes and Locke, for example); women writers continued to insist on their centrality; economic and environmental theories took shape. Professor Coiro aims to excite students, across disciplines, about the past and the ways it animates the present. Much of Professor Coiro’s work is on the poetry of John Milton (she is a former President of the Milton Society of America), on relatively neglected post-Shakespearean drama and on early modern women writers, including Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish. She has also published on Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and Robert Herrick.
Professor Santiago Cuesta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience. He received his PhD from the National University of Rosario in Argentina. He then moved to Montreal, Canada, to do a postdoctoral training at McGill University and then to UT Southwestern, Dallas, to pursue a second postdoc. His research focused on the influence of the gut microbiota - the bacteria that live in our gut - in the development of addiction and substance use disorders using a multidisciplinary approach that combines behavioral neuroscience techniques and microbiological strategies. His lab aims at generating data that can help the development of therapeutic strategies and early intervention programs directed to reduce the detrimental consequences of addiction and substance use disorders, as well as other psychiatric conditions. Outside of the lab he enjoys cooking, listening to music and spending time with his family and friends.
Professor Gabriella D’Arcangelo graduated summa cum laude in Biological Sciences from the Universita’ degli Studi di Bari, Italy, and received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology & Behavior from the University of New York at Stony Brook and her postdoctoral research training in developmental neurobiology at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in Nutley, NJ and at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. She started her independent scientific career in Houston, TX as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and a Principal Investigator in the Gordon and Mary Cain Pediatric Neurology Research Foundation at Texas Children’s Hospital. Her work focused on brain development and childhood epilepsy. She joined the Rutgers faculty in 2007 as an Associate Professor in Cell Biology and Neuroscience. She is currently also affiliated with the Graduate Programs in Molecular Biosciences and Neuroscience, and the Human Genome Institute of New Jersey. Professor D’Arcangelo’s current research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that govern mammalian brain development and recovery from traumatic brain injury, and abnormalities in developmental or regenerative processes such as neurogenesis, neuronal migration, differentiation and synaptic connectivity, and cognitive dysfunction in developmental brain disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism or childhood epilepsy. Her research resulted in numerous scientific publications and federal and state grants along with and grants from numerous private foundations. She is also actively involved in teaching advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in cell biology and neuroscience, and offers research training to several undergraduate and graduate students.
Professor Jenevieve DeLosSantos, is the Associate Director of the Rutgers Early College Humanities Program (REaCH) and Director of Special Projects for the School of Arts and Sciences Office of Undergraduate Education. She is an art historian and former museum educator. Her research interests include 19th century American art, race and visual culture, Orientalism, and early film. She has previously worked as a museum educator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Zimmerli Art Museum, here on campus. Currently, her work involves teaching college-level humanities courses in select New Jersey high schools as part of the REaCH program. In addition to REaCH she enjoys working with the SAS Honors Program as a colloquium facilitator and has taught both Byrne Seminars and courses with the department of Art History on campus. As a first-generation college student, a New Jersey native, and a Rutgers alumna (Ph.D. 2015) she is dedicated to the Rutgers campus community and committed to mentoring and advising undergraduate students across all fields of study.
Professor Monica Driscoll, 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. 
Professor Brad Evans is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature and culture and the history of anthropology. He is the author of two books on the subject, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature (2005) and Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism (2019). He also co-produced the restoration of a silent feature film that premiered in 1914, In the Land of the Head Hunters, which was directed by the photographer Edward Curtis and starred an all-indigenous cast from the Kwakwaka’wakw community of British Columbia, Canada. The film is now listed in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Each of these projects has been quite different from the other, covering a broad range of media, but they were inspired by something the anthropologist Franz Boas wrote in 1911. In a major study of American Indian languages, Boas demonstrated that race, language and culture circulate independently and at remarkably different rates. Evans’s research has focused on historical episodes of uneven circulation—episodes that generated new thinking about the concepts of race and culture, the relation of art and anthropology, and the dynamics of artistic movements.
Professor Jia Fei is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from ETH-Zurich and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Jim Kadonaga at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). His lab at Rutgers studies the regulation of chromatin transcription by RNA polymerase II, focusing on the impact of chromatin modifications and epigenetics mechanisms on gene expression. The multidisciplinary approach his lab uses includes purified and defined biochemical systems, cell-based imaging, next-generation sequencing (NGS), bioinformatics and other genome-wide techniques. These studies will increase the breadth and depth of our understanding of the regulation of eukaryotic transcription through chromatin, which holds key implications for a broad understanding of health and disease.
Professor William Field has a love of political activism and has run for public office twice. His research has focused on voting behavior, particularly in the United Kingdom, and his current teaching love explores political ideology and the intersection of religion and politics. A graduate of Connecticut College (BA) and Brandeis University (PhD), he loves the size and diversity that is Rutgers. He serves as Director of the Undergraduate Political Science Program and supervises the department's internship programs. Professor Field is a member at Large and Legislative Chair, NJ Conference of the AAUP.
Professor Thomas Figueira was born on Broadway in Manhattan and educated in the public schools of New York City and Poughkeepsie, New York. He received his B.A. in Liberal Arts from Bensalem College of Fordham University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He is a Distinguished Professor of Classics and of Ancient History at Rutgers, where he teaches courses in ancient history, Greek, Latin, and classical civilization in the departments of History and Classics and in interdisciplinary programs. He has taught over fifty different courses. He is the author of Aegina (1981), Athens and Aigina in the Age of Imperial Colonization (1991), Excursions in Epichoric History (1993), The Power of Money: Coinage and Politics in the Athenian Empire (1998), co-author of Wisdom from the Ancients (2001); editor of Spartan Society (2004), Myth, Text, and History at Sparta (2016), and co-editor of Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (1985), Athenian Hegemonic Finances (2019), Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus (2020) among other volumes. In his areas of interest in Greek history and literature, he has written numerous articles, chapters, contributions, and reviews, that number over one hundred-fifty in their totality.
Professor Jerry Flynn’s background combines an extensive career in the information systems industry including the IBM Corporation with a recently completed PhD (2018) from Virginia Tech in business management. Practical experience in sales, marketing, and consulting in a variety of management and leadership capacities provided an opportunity to work with clients in many industries. Academic focus and interest include a broad set of topics including leadership, organizational behavior, human resource management, and business strategy. Research interests center on the topic of individual and organizational learning in instructional and experiential contexts.
Professor David Foglesong is a professor of history at Rutgers University. He is the author of The American Mission and the “Evil Empire": The Crusade for a "Free Russia" Since 1881 (2007) and America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920 (1995). His current research on how U.S. and Soviet citizen diplomats contributed to the overcoming of enmity between their nations in the 1980s has led to the publication of articles in Cold War History and Kontsept. Professor Foglesong earned a B.A. in European Studies, magna cum laude, from Amherst College in 1980. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. He has received fellowships and grants from the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and the MacArthur International Security Studies program.
Professor Feng Gao joined Rutgers Business School in 2015. Previously, she served as an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Gao received her Ph.D. in Business Administration in 2010 from the University of Rochester, and her Ph.D. in Economics in 2003 and M.S. in Mathematics in 2002 from University of Iowa. Professor Gao’s research focuses on capital markets and economic incentives of market participants, for example how SEC regulations change reporting incentives of public firms, and how engagement in corporate social responsibility changes the insider trading behavior of executives in public firms. Her research has been published in premier academic journals such as Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, and Contemporary Accounting Research. Professor Gao teaches Intermediate Financial Accounting I and II in Rutgers Business School. Her prior teaching experience includes managerial accounting and cost accounting.
Professor Arnold Glass 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 who attends all Rutgers football and basketball games. He enjoys talking with students about these topics and about all kinds of things. 
Professor Barth D. Grant, of the Department of 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.
Professor Martin Grumet has worked on nervous system development and spinal cord injury using stem cell transplants. Dr. Grumet’s lab is now focusing on the ability of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) to modulate inflammation after spinal cord injury. Because MSC disappear rapidly after intravenous injection, his lab has developed techniques to encapsulate the cells in alginate microspheres and inject then into the CNS. The alginate is inert and allows nutrients and waste to pass across its semi-permeable barrier, which allows cells in the capsules to survive for long periods after transplantation. The alginate also allows passage of cytokines, which is particularly important because MSC respond to inflammation by secreting anti-inflammatory cytokines. We have shown that encapsulated MSC suppress inflammation acutely after spinal cord injury. In recent studies we found that encapsulated MSC reduce inflammatory cytokines in animal models for sepsis.
Professor Guoping (Sam) Gu explores novel RNA and chromatin structures in transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Whether non-DNA sequence information (i.e., epigenetic information) can be heritable and have a phenotypic effect at later generations is a long-standing question for biologists. The answer appears to be yes. A landmark population study showed that grandchildren of World War II Dutch Hunger famine survivors had lower-than-normal weight. The ability of transmitting epigenetic information through cell cycle and generational boundaries is an essential component of gene regulation and developmental control, yet the molecular mechanisms remain elusive. The Gu lab primarily uses nematode C. elegans in our combined experimental and computational approaches. Our investigation focuses on two critical aspects of epigenetic regulation: (1) what triggers an epigenetic memory and (2) how epigenetic signals are transmitted through generational boundaries? We work on one mechanism that leads to a multigenerational epigenetic effect: RNA-induced chromatin modification. We found that the RNA-induced chromatin modification can last for multiple generations after the initial RNA exposure in C. elegans. A large number of human genes are now known to be physiological targets of RNA-directed chromatin modification. We would like to expand discoveries in C. elegans into human, with a focus on novel modes of RNA-chromatin interaction and epigenetic inheritance. Undergraduate students have been major contributors to my research program. The vast majority of them graduated with publications in research journals and succeeded in entering top graduate programs, for example, UPenn, NYU (MDPHD), Univ. of Colorado, Drexel, and Cornell.
Professor Sam Gunderson 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. Professor Gunderson’s research is focused on developing new technologies to detect all the alternatively spliced and polyadenylated mRNAs in a given cell type, something current gene microarrays fail to do. A recent development is a new gene silencing technology, which uses a completely different mechanism than RNA interference. He is looking for novel polymers and delivery systems to introduce U1in gene silencing molecules into cells and animals with the goal of developing genomic-wide high throughput methods for functional genomics. 
Professor Kemal Gürsoy is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice in the Management Science & Information Systems Department at Rutgers Business School. He teaches Statistics and Operation Management. His research interests are in areas of Stochastic Optimization, Applied Probability, and Random Geometry. He received his M.B.A. in 2002 from Rutgers University/RBS, Newark/New Brunswick, in Management Science, Statistics and Stochastic Optimization and Data Analysis. His Ph.D., from Rutgers University in 1997 concentrated in Management Science and Information Systems and Statistics. His M.S., from University of Pennsylvania focused on Systems Engineering, specializing in Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.
Professor Martha Haviland 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 Biology, Society and Biomedical Issues and Career Explorations in the Arts and Sciences: Medicine & Life Sciences 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.
Larry Jacobs, TED Talks featured speaker, Career Services Program Director, Professor of Psychology adjunct, and former H.R. Director, holds ED.S and M.S. in Counseling Psychology. He is proud to be part of the SASHP Faculty Mentor Program, to help you get your career on track and find your calling. He educates and inspires students on career & life planning, secrets to winning interviews, resume writing with your Wow factor, assist with your personal statement for Med School, choosing your major, set goals with an action plan, and he teaches Psychology. He serves as a liaison to SEBS and STEM students at RU. He encourages you to secure internships and volunteer work which bring you results for job offers. He is the founder of Kidstreet, the largest playground in NJ, carried the US Olympic Torch, founded Dare2Dream motivational program and presented to over 400,000 people. Born deaf, yet lives life to the fullest, he encourages you to plan for your dreams, to be the problem solver, and to be the very best you can be. Are you ready to find your passion? Make things happen….Now!
Professor Devanshi Jain is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics. Her research concerns gametogenesis, the process by which germ cells undergo meiosis and differentiate to generate gametes. She also strives to understand how defects in gametogenesis lead to infertility, miscarriage and birth defects. To this end, she uses genetic, molecular and genomic approaches in mice to study the regulation of gametogenesis. Her lab work aims to uncover new molecules involved in meiosis and to acquire a mechanistic understanding of their functions and contributions to gametogenesis. 
Professor Jennifer Jones, 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 specializes in 18th-century France and women’s history and teaches courses on both topics. She teaches seminars on the history of fashion, the history of girls, and the history of the French Revolution, among other topics. Her first book is Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. She is currently completing a book on Thérèse Levasseur, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s mistress. Professor Jones was the previous Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program.
Professor Sudarsun Kannan is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University's Computer Science Department with a research focus on Operating Systems. More specifically, he works on problems relating to heterogeneous resource (memory, storage, and compute) management challenges and understanding their impact on large-scale applications. Before joining Rutgers, Professor Kannan was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Computer Science Department and graduated from the College of Computing, Georgia Tech. His thesis explored methods to support hardware heterogeneity in Operating Systems. He deeply cares about teaching and mentoring students.
Professor Spencer Knapp 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."
Professor Seth Koven has interest in teaching and research in gender, social, economic, and cultural history of Europe, 1750 to the present, with particular focus on Great Britain; Modern European Women's history; comparative urban history (NY, Paris, London); comparative cultural history and historiography (US and Europe); and the history of sexuality. He has published on a variety of topics including the history of gender and welfare states; Slumming: Social and Sexual Politics in Victorian London (Princeton University Press, 2004) explores the relationship between eros and altruism in the shaping of social welfare in modern Britain. His current research project, "Christian Revolutionaries in 20th Century Britain: Peace, Poverty and Global Citizenship" focuses on a group of "Christian revolutionaries," all children of great and good "eminent Victorians," who committed themselves to lives of voluntary poverty in their pursuit of global social justice in the 20th century.
Professor Kelvin Y. Kwan, was an undergraduate at Caltech and a graduate student at Harvard University where he studied molecular biology and biochemistry. It was not until his post-doctoral career at Harvard Medical School when he ventured into the field of neuroscience and honed in on studying the sensory hair cells of the inner ear. He joins a well-established group of auditory neuroscientists to continue his research at Rutgers. Although Dr. Kwan’s research focuses on the development of cultured stem cells for the auditory system, he has also been heavily engaged with the nascent consortium of Rutgers scientists who use human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to probe mental health disorders. The ability to interact with colleagues in his field as well as reach out and benefit from cross disciplinary studies was a major draw for his arrival at Rutgers.
Professor Lei Lei is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department. She earned her Ph.D. at the University at Albany – SUNY in 2016. Her research focuses on social determinants of health, family dynamics, and social inequality in different societies, including China, India, and the US. One line of her research seeks to understand how social factors, such as residential contexts, working conditions, and family dynamics, get under the skin to produce and perpetuate health inequalities. Another strand of her research investigates the determinants and consequences of young adults' prolonged dependence on parents. She examines the role of gender, race, class, life-course events, and non-standard employment in determining the timing of home-leaving and home-returning among young adults in the US. 
Professor Michael Levine is a Professor in the German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literature Department at Rutgers. He earned his Doctorate degree from the John Hopkins University and his research interests are 19th and 20th century German literature, literary theory, and intellectual history. His research focuses on four major areas: intersections among literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic discourses; Holocaust Studies and the poetics of witnessing; the changing structure of the literary, philosophical, and operatic work in the German nineteenth century; and the legal and political legacies of Nuremberg. His awards include Camargo Foundation Fellowship in 2011, and he was received the 2010 SAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching.
Professor Alice Y. Liu, is interested in understanding the role protein quality control (QC) in the context of neurodegenerative disease pathogenesis and therapeutics. The rationale and import of this work include: (1) the importance of protein QC in stress resistance and longevity, and (2) defects in protein QC contribute importantly to pathogenesis of age-related neurodegenerative diseases (ND) such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s, Huntington’s, and prion diseases. Using a cell model of Huntington’s Disease (HD), her recent work showed the importance of protein QC in the aggregation and pathogenicity of the mutant Huntingtin protein (mHtt) and downstream transcription factor regulation. As a long serving Rutgers University professor, she firmly believes in the importance of research-based teaching and learning of undergraduate students and has regularly engaged students in her research. She enjoys teaching and interaction with students in the classroom as well as at the lab bench and works to inspire and challenge all her students to strive for their very best. 
Professor Barry Loewer has been a professor in the Philosophy Department at Rutgers since 1989. Prior to that he taught at University of South Carolina and the University of Michigan. He earned his BA from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His research is mostly in philosophy of science especially philosophy of physics. Professor Loewer has written on the foundations of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and cosmology and on the metaphysics of laws and objective chance. He co-directed a large Templeton grant in Philosophy of Cosmology a few years ago. He lives in Nolita in Manhattan with his wife Katalin Balog (also a philosopher at Rutgers Newark) and their cat Loki, and during Covid Lockdown, their son Milan, who is a junior at Columbia University.
Louis Masur is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History. A cultural historian who has written on a variety of topics, from Ben Franklin to Bruce Springsteen, his most recent work is The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America. Masur’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Slate. He has been elected to membership of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians and has received teaching awards from several institutions including Rutgers.
Professor Trip McCrossin teaches classes in the history and legacy of the Enlightenment, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, and in contemporary ethical and political issues and popular culture. He strives to organize them to be as thoroughly conversational and exploratory as possible, and to relate philosophy as often as possible to the cultures we live in, and in this spirit, contributes periodically to essay collections published in several "popular culture and philosophy" series. He studied at the University of Michigan and Stanford and Yale Universities, and before coming to Rutgers in 2003, worked for some years in the labor movement.
Professor Konstantinos Michmizos is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Rurgers, an Executive Council Faculty at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science and affiliated member of the Brain Health Institute and the Center for Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling (CBIM). Prior to joining Rutgers, he completed two postdoctoral trainings on robotics, at MIT, and computational neuroscience, at Harvard Medical School. He directs the Computational Brain Lab, with a focus that combines foundational research on computational neuroscience and neuromorphic computing with applications on neuro-mimetic and neuro-rehabilitation robots. His team's overarching goal is to harness neuro-AI into robots that either mimic or help us understand and restore brain function. Konstantinos's research has been supported, among others, by Intel and the NIH through the K Career Development Award.
Professor Kevin Monahan is an assistant professor in the department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. His research interests include gene regulation, chromatin, nuclear architecture, and olfaction. In 2022 he was named a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar. His lab studies the protein machinery that controls the 3D positioning of genes within the nucleus, and how the formation of 3D nuclear structures regulates gene expression
Professor Santosh Nagarakatte is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. His research interests are in Hardware-Software Interfaces spanning Programming Languages, Compilers, Software Engineering, and Computer Architecture. His papers have been selected as IEEE MICRO TOP Picks papers of computer architecture conferences in 2010 and 2013. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2015, ACM SIGPLAN PLDI 2015 Distinguished Paper Award, and ACM SIGSOFT ICSE 2016 Distinguished Paper Award for his research on LLVM compiler verification. His papers have also been selected as the 2016 SIGPLAN Research Highlights Paper and 2018 Communication of the ACM Research Highlights Paper. His PhD student David Menendez's dissertation was awarded the John C Reynolds ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2018.
Professor Srinivas Narayana is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research goal is to enable developers to implement novel and flexible packet-processing applications, with guarantees of safety and high performance. To achieve this goal, he applies compiler and formal methods technology in domain-specific ways to network software and hardware. Srinivas received his MA/Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2016 and a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2010. Srinivas completed a post-doc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. Srinivas's research has been recognized with the best paper award at the 2017 ACM SIGCOMM conference, a Facebook research award, and grants from the National Science Foundation and the Network Programming Institute.
Professor Badri Nath does research in mobile and wireless computing. His research work is addressing the gathering of data from all sources and using it for decision making. Some of the projects include pollution sensing from smartphones, messaging architecture for the web, software defined networks, and the use of physical data analytics in decision making. In particular, he is interested in gathering data from smartphones efficiently to influence decision making at all levels: individually, socially and globally. He is the winner of two test of time best paper awards (VLDB 2002 and Infocom 2015).
Professor Ana Pairet’s main areas of inquiry include the languages and literatures of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period in France and the Iberian Peninsula; Ovidian poetry; mythography; textual and generic transformation; history of the book; and translation. Her book on fictions of metamorphosis in medieval France (Honoré Champion, 2002), traced the evolution of narratives of bodily change in vernacular literature from the 12th to the 15th centuries. By studying the poetics of mutacion in distinct generic contexts (Ovidian poetry, courtly literature, mythography and historiography), she showed how the Middle Ages turned this polysemic figure into a literary artefac. Chief among her research interest has been the versified Ovide moralisé (ca. 1328), identified as one of the main Ovidian sources for 14th-century poets such as Machaut, Froissart, and Christine de Pizan. Her current book project bears on the translation of French courtly romances into European vernaculars during the early decades of print.
Professor Mukesh M. Patel is a serial entrepreneur and executive board advisor with experience in private equity, venture capital, angel investments, innovation, technology, business law, and education. As an award-winning Professor and recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching and Service, he designs and teaches inter-disciplinary and experiential courses at Rutgers Business School, Law School, Engineering School, Arts & Science, and Honors College, across levels and disciplines. Prof. Patel is a three times TEDx speaker, and has presented keynotes and/or been featured at prestigious conferences including the Google Campus in Seoul, Korea, a US Embassy Conference, a United Nations Conference, Association for Corporate Growth, TIE, The Harvard Club, and Future Business Leaders of America. He has guest lectured at numerous universities nationally and globally. Prof. Patel also serves on Advisory Boards of startups and emerging growth ventures.
Professor Anne Morrison Piehl is James Cullen Professor in the Department of Economics and faculty affiliate of the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She conducts research on the economics of crime and criminal justice, including work analyzes on youth homicide, policing, punishment, and the connections between immigration and crime, both historically and currently. Dr. Piehl has testified before the United States Sentencing Commission and the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Immigration, and has served on several panels of the National Academies of Sciences and on the New Jersey Commission on Government Efficiency and Reform (GEAR) Corrections/Sentencing Task Force. For her contributions In recognition of her study of some of the most pressing problems of our times, she was honored in 2015 with the Rutgers College Class of 1962 Presidential Public Service Award. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Professor Tom Prusa is a professor in the Department of Economics. He teaches Introduction to Microeconomics, International Economics, Intermediate Microeconomics, and Game Theory. He has received numerous undergraduate teaching awards including the Rutgers University Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education. His research focuses on the trade effects of administered protection such antidumping and safeguard actions and also the duration of trade between countries. 
Professor Nicholas Rennie 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.
Professor Nuria Sagarra is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She received her Ph.D. from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research straddles the domains of cognitive science, linguistics, and second language acquisition, seeking to identify what factors explain adults’ difficulty learning morphosyntax in a foreign language, with the aim of informing linguistic and cognitive models, as well as instructional practices. She investigates these topics using self-paced reading, eye tracking, and more recently, event-related potentials.
Professor Savita Sahay is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the Accounting department at Rutgers Business School. She received her Ph. D. in Accounting from University of California at Berkeley and has conducted research in Managerial Accounting, Financial Accounting and Government Accounting. She has worked as a mentor in University of Delhi, India and at C.U.N.Y. Baruch College in New York and loves to tell students not to be afraid of numbers. She has been teaching, researching and mentoring for almost 37 years.
Professor Sevil Salur joined Rutgers in 2011. She is an Associate Professor and member of the Graduate Faculty. Before coming to Rutgers, she was a researcher at UC Davis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Yale University. She studies experimental high-energy nuclear physics and investigates the properties of strongly interacting, hot and dense matter produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY. This dense matter, a soup of quarks and gluons, was present 0.000001 seconds after the Big Bang. It is re-created by collisions of nuclei at nearly the speed of light through a phase transition similar to the way that ice cubes melt to form liquid water. Professor Salur and her research group are working to determine the quantitative properties of this quark-gluon matter. Professor Salur has taught an Honors Seminar “Three Minutes After the Big Bang."
Professor Robert Scott grew up in Hamilton, Montana and received his Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. His research is united by an interest in environmental influences on hominid evolution. His interests span dietary adaptations and change. Professor Scott has done paleontological and paleoanthropological fieldwork in Indonesia, Turkey, Hungary, China, and Montana. He is the co-developer of a new repeatable method for quantifying primate and hominin dental microwear in three dimensions. This method has provided new insights into the diet of South African early hominins suggesting the importance of fallback food exploitation and was published in the journal Nature. Professor Scott’s most recent research effort explores hominin diet in another way: He is conducting comparative experiments on the digestion of cooked and raw meat. Professor Scott teaches the course “Extinction”, part of the pioneering SAS Signature course initiative. He also teaches “Human Osteology,” “Quantitative Methods in Evolutionary Anthropology” and “Evolution of Human Diet.” Most, recently Prof. Scott has co-developed a new Rutgers certificate program in Evolutionary Medicine. His hobbies include hiking and camping, gardening, and poker.
Professor Nataša Šešum is an Associate Professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, specializing in partial differential equations and geometric flow. She earned her Ph.D. in 2004 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Gang Tian. Her dissertation was Limiting Behavior of Ricci Flows. Professor Šešum was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014. In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. She teaches Linear Algebra and Calculus II, among other courses. Her numerous publications could be found on her website.
Professor Pallavi Shukla is Assistant Professor in the Department of Management & Global Business at Rutgers Business School. She received her Ph.D. in Management from Rutgers University. She teaches International Business, Business Policy & Strategy, and Global Management & Strategy at Rutgers Business School - Newark and New Brunswick. Before coming to academia, Professor Shukla worked in the financial services industry as a software consultant for over a decade. Her research interests lie at the intersection of global strategy, migration, and institutions literature streams. Her current research examines the role of skilled immigrants in facilitating cross-border trade and investment in multinational firms. Her book chapter in Palgrave’s Handbook of Global Migration - "Skilled migrants: Stimulating knowledge creation and flows in firms" – is forthcoming. Professor Shukla has published in the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, and Rutgers Business Review.
Professor Gleb Shumyatsky received his Ph.D. in the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology (USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia) and his postdoctoral training was at Columbia University with Eric Kandel, who received a Nobel Prize for identifying the molecular and synaptic mechanisms of memory storage in 2000. His lab is studying the molecular and cellular mechanisms of learning and memory as well as modeling in mice mental states such as autism and depression, using behavioral, molecular and genetic approaches. He welcomes undergraduate students who are passionate about science and in particular are curious about how the brain works.
Professor Andrew (Andy) Singson is a Full Professor in the Department of Genetics and a member of Graduate Programs in Molecular Biosiences as well as the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. He teaches Honors courses in the Department of Genetics. Professor Singson received his undergraduate degree from University of California, Davis, and his Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego. He has had numerous grants from National Institutes of Health. Professor Singson 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 multi-cellular organisms. In his free time, Dr. Singson is also the faculty advisor for the Rutgers University Cycling Team.
Professor Mai Soliman is an assistant teaching professor in the Division of Life Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Rutgers University in 2017 where she investigated the spatial/temporal expression of the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) associated Engrailed 2(EN2) in transgenic mice. She teaches Genetics and General Microbiology for the SAS Genetics Department. During the COVID pandemic, she restructured her high-enrollment Genetics course into a flipped classroom with half the students meeting one day a week and the other half meeting on the other. At a time when the pandemic restrictions prevented 400+ students from meeting in a closed space, this flipped classroom model allowed the class to return to in-person instruction. The model was successful during the pandemic and has been adopted for this course. In 2021, Dr. Soliman won the SAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education.
Professor Kristen Springer is Associate Professor and Under Graduate Director of Sociology at Rutgers University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006; MA, Yale University, 2000). Most of her research centers on three related areas: 1) long-term health effects of childhood abuse; 2) marital income dynamics and men’s health; and 3) masculinity ideals, socioeconomic status, and health outcomes. She has research published in journals including American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Public Health, Gender & Society, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science & Medicine, and Social Science Research. Professor Springer’s research has also been featured in national and international news sources including ABC News, LA Times, The New York Times, US News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Distinguished Professor George B. Stauffer served as Dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts for twenty years before returning to the faculty in the fall of 2020. While he is known professionally as a Bach scholar, having published eight books on Johann Sebastian Bach and the music culture of the Baroque, he greatly enjoys teaching undergraduate courses on other topics, such as “Music and the Brain,” “Those Who Dared: The Great Women Composers from Hildegard von Bingen to Lady Gaga,” and “Who Needs Music.”
Professor Kristen Syrett is a member of the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science, where she directs the Laboratory for Developmental Language Studies. She and her team of research assistants and students investigate how children acquire the meaning of words, and how we as adults rapidly arrive at interpretations of sentences in a discourse context. Prof. Syrett's research on child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and experimental semantics and pragmatics involves experimental investigations with children age 2-6 and adults. Outside of research and teaching, she is an advocate for language and social justice, and enjoys hiking, yoga, intense workouts, her kids, and her beagles.
Jennifer Tamas is an Associate Professor of French. She received a PhD in Stylistic from Paris Sorbonne and a PhD in French Literature from Stanford University. She is interested in Feminist Theory (notions of agency, consent and resistance), Theater and Performance Studies, Ghost and Mourning as well as Motherhood and Childhood in French Old Regime. Her publications include numerous articles on passions and theater, a monograph on Racine’s tragedies, a co-edited volume about the linguistic power of silence on the theatrical stage and a collective volume about an influential woman of letters, Madame de Sévigné. Her current book project entitled “Take No For An Answer! The Art of Not Giving Consent Then And Now” examines women resistance in French Old Regime at a time when galanterie was a key value. Looking at the past, her analysis remains particularly relevant since galanterie is nowadays under attack. Her close reading of 17th century texts (especially female memoirs, fairy tales, plays, commentaries of the Bible) reveals textual refusals that have been undocumented. Her book challenges the foundations of romantic love by exploring our cultural heritage through a female gaze.
Professor Paola Tartakoff is a full professor in the departments of History and Jewish Studies and she is Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies. She teaches courses on Antisemitism, Medieval History, Jewish History, and the History of Jewish-Christian Relations. Her first book (2012) was based on archival research conducted in northeastern Spain on the history of Jewish conversion and the Inquisition. Her second book (2020) examines ritual murder accusations across Western Europe and the Mediterranean region more broadly.
Professor Max Tischfield is an assistant professor in the department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience. He is a Rutgers and SAS Honors Program alum who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research interests include using mouse models to investigate cellular and molecular mechanisms of human development and disease. More specifically, his lab studies cellular/circuit mechanisms of neurodevelopmental disorders, the development/function of meningeal lymphatic vessels and the brain’s glymphatic system.
Professor Ray Williams is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice Rutgers Business School- teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Business Law and Business Ethics. He has had three distinct careers: teaching, law, and banking and has been in the academe for the past 20 years. He attended Winston-Salem State University (NC) majoring in History and Political Science. He earned his law degree from Rutgers Law School (Newark (JD) and Widener Law School (LLM corporate law & finance). In Law he clerked in the Superior Court of New Jersey and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court D.N.J. He culminated his banking career as Vice President and Manager of The Loan Workout and Credit Departments of a regional bank. Education has been a life-long pursuit; Professor Williams is currently enrolled in an online Strategic Decision Making program at Stanford. His other interests are broad: music-all genres, roof top gardening, history and biographies, college hoops, poetry, urban economic initiatives, writing a novel or memoir, and composing a book of poetry for everyday people.
Professor Ping Xie, of the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, is interested in regulation of immune cell homeostasis and functionality which is central to the proper functioning of the immune system in vertebrates. Aberrant functions of immune cells and dysregulation of immune responses contribute to the pathogenesis of almost all human diseases, including infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, inflammation, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancers. To understand the molecular mechanisms of immune regulation, she starts from a critical regulator of the immune system, a cytoplasmic adaptor protein termed TRAF3. She is currently investigating the contributions and mechanisms of TRAF3 in B lymphomagenesis. She is also elucidating the functions and mechanisms of TRAF3 in innate immunity and inflammation by generating myeloid cell-specific TRAF3-/- mice. Knowledge gathered from these research programs will provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms of immune regulation and cancer pathogenesis, and will lead to the development of novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of B lymphoma and chronic inflammation.
Professor Jingjin Yu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. He received his B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China and obtained his M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, both from the University of Illinois, where he briefly stayed as a postdoctoral researcher. Before joining Rutgers, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is broadly interested in the area of algorithmic robotics, focusing on issues related to optimality, complexity, and the design of efficient decision-making methods. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and an Amazon Research Award.
Professor Lei Yu is a distinguished professor in the Department of Genetics. His research focuses on the molecular and genetic bases of complex brain disorders, including genetic predisposition for alcoholism and drug abuse, and molecular mechanisms that underlie such neuro-sensory processes as stress, neuropathic pain, and pain-relief analgesia.
Professor Peng Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers University, she obtained her Ph.D. from Georgia Tech and then was a postdoc at Yale University. Her research lies broadly in theoretical computer science, which studies computer science by using mathematical tools. More specifically, she designs provably efficient algorithms for structured numerical problems, such as linear equations and linear programs. She is also interested in combinatorial discrepancy theory, which studies how to partition a family of items into balanced groups and aims to improve the naive random partition. Her research received the best student paper award at FOCS in 2017 and the Georgia Tech College of Computing Dissertation Award in 2019. When not working, Peng enjoys playing with her cat, hiking, and playing Tractor (the card game).
Professor Yongfeng Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University and directs the Web Intelligent Systems and Economics (WISE) lab. His research interest is in Machine Learning, Machine Reasoning, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, Economics of Data Science, Explainable AI, Fairness in AI, and AI Ethics. Prior to joining Rutgers, he was a Postdoc Researcher at UMass Amherst, Assistant Specialist at UC Santa Cruz, and Research Assistant at the National University of Singapore, holding degrees in Computer Science (BE, PhD, Tsinghua University) and Economics (BS, Peking University). He is a Distinguished Editor for ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) and serves as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS) as well as Frontiers in Big Data. He is a Rutgers CS Best Professor Awardee for Teaching and Mentoring in 2018, a Siebel Scholar of the class 2015, and an NSF CAREER Awardee in 2021.
Professor He Zhu, is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. He has received an NSF grant for his project titled "SHF:Small: Formal Symbolic Reasoning of Deep Reinforcement Learning Systems", and is the sole investigator on the project. He is interested in deep reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence, that has become pervasive and is being deployed in decision-making systems such as autonomous vehicles. Professor Zhu received the Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation 2019, a top-tier programming language conference held in Phoenix in June. He co-authored the paper, entitled "An Inductive Synthesis Framework for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning,"
