New members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
At the start of fall term, Vox of Dartmouth is pleased to introduce
to our readers the teachers and scholars who have recently joined the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences. Profiles of Dartmouth’s newest faculty members will
continue in the Oct. 22 issue of Vox.
“It is such a pleasure to welcome these terrific new faculty to Dartmouth,”
says Dean of the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences and Professor of Biological Sciences Carol Folt.
“Discovery and innovation is part of the everyday lives of each of these
scholars, and they all are looking forward to bringing this spirit to the
classrooms, laboratories, and studios of the campus.”
Dale Mierke
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Dale Mierke
Professor of Chemistry
Dale Mierke holds a B.S. in chemistry and in biological sciences from the
University of California, Irvine, and he received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from
the University of California, San Diego. Mierke’s post-doctoral study continued
at the Biopolymer Research Institute in Padova, Italy, and as a Fulbright
Fellow at the Technical University of Munich. He has held appointments at the
University of Massachusetts Medical School (in pharmacology) and Clark
University (in chemistry). He comes to Dartmouth from Brown, where he held a
joint appointment in chemistry and in molecular pharmacology at Brown Medical
School.
Employing spectroscopic and theoretical techniques to characterize
structures, Mierke’s research aims to determine the relationship between the
structure of certain peptide hormones and how they act, and in particular, how
they interact with their receptors. This knowledge can make it possible to
design molecules that interact with receptors with higher affinity, duration,
and specificity. Mierke’s explorations are relevant to the potential creation
of therapies for osteoporosis, cystic fibrosis, drug addiction, and Parkinson’s
disease.
Mierke’s work includes studies of parathyroid hormone, a key regulator of
calcium levels in the blood; and of cholecystokinin, a peptide hormone active
in both the central nervous system and the gastrointestinal tract, associated
with panic attacks, anxiety, and satiety. Another focus considers the protein
PSD-95, which acts as molecular scaffold, enabling other proteins to come
together and interact. His work with this protein is yielding intriguing
results related to designing and synthesizing a peptide with a pharmacological
profile relevant to the receptors of the neurotransmitter, glutamate.
Mierke’s research has been widely published in journals including
Molecular Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the
Journal of Biological Chemistry, Biopolymers, Peptide
Science, and Biochemistry. Mierke also serves as editor or on the
editorial boards of prominent journals covering research on medicinal
chemistry, peptides, and biopolymers, and has served on numerous review panels
for the National Cancer Institute and other funding agencies, both in the
United States and Europe. He is an award-winning teacher (Dreyfus Scholar,
Cottrell Teacher/Scholar) and mentor of students from the undergraduate through
postdoctoral levels. He has designed and taught courses that introduce students
to research techniques and equip them with the skills for independent
research.
Eric Zitzewitz
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Eric Zitzewitz
Associate Professor of Economics
A graduate of Harvard with an A.B. in economics, Eric Zitzewitz holds a
Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He comes to
Dartmouth from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was also a visiting
professor at Columbia Graduate School of Business in 2003–04. Zitzewitz has
been an economics and business analyst with the management consulting firm
McKinsey and Company. He will be teaching a Department of Economics senior
seminar, Topics in Money and Finance, during winter term 2008.
Zitzewitz’s research interests include industrial organization and agency
issues, particularly in the financial and information industries. He is
interested in prediction markets, which are increasingly being used by
businesses as a tool for forecasting and decision making. Prediction markets
tap into the collective wisdom of a group; prices in a prediction market
reflect the participants’ beliefs regarding the likelihood of an event or the
outcome of a process. Zitzewitz explores the degree to which the prices set by
prediction markets can be interpreted as probabilities, as well as what can be
learned from how the prices of assets in financial markets vary with the
probabilities of events such as wars and elections.
Zitzewitz’s expertise on mutual funds led to him testifying twice before
Congress, going before the House Judiciary Committee (in 2005) and the House
Financial Services Committee (in 2003) to speak on the trading and management
of mutual funds. He participates regularly in mutual fund industry conferences
about compliance, trading practices, and fair value. Zitzewitz has also
published on the effects of bias in areas ranging from financial media to
sports judging.
Zitzewitz’s work is widely published in such scholarly journals as the
Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review,
and the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. He has also
contributed book chapters for Elsevier’s forthcoming Handbook of
Investments and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, among
others. Zitzewitz serves as a referee for journals in economics and finance,
and for university presses including Oxford, Princeton, and Yale.
Sonu Bedi
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Sonu Bedi
Assistant Professor of Government
Sonu Bedi joined Dartmouth’s Department of Government in January
2007. Bedi holds A.B. and A.M. degrees in philosophy from Brown. His
undergraduate career included a year at the University of Oxford studying
philosophy. Bedi holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and was a senior editor
of Harvard’s Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review. He has worked in
the Suffolk County (Mass.) District Attorney’s office as a student prosecutor,
with the American Civil Liberties Union, and with Gay and Lesbian Advocates and
Defenders in Boston. He practiced law as a first amendment and litigation
associate with Cahill, Gordon & Reindel in New York before completing a
Ph.D. in political science at Yale.
Bedi works at the intersection of law and political theory. His research
seeks to illuminate contemporary problems through normative and legal analysis.
Bedi’s current research reconceptualizes limited government by rejecting rights
such as the rights to privacy and religion. He has published an article in the
Journal of Political Philosophy on the dilemma of the religious
exemption. In light of this work, he has been retained by the Ontario Attorney
General’s Office as an expert in a pending constitutional case concerning
religious accommodation from a motorcycle helmet law. He is also the co-editor
of Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental and the
Unforeseen, forthcoming from NYU Press in November 2007. The book brings
together studies that analyze the importance and the impact on politics of what
might (or might not) have been.
Bedi has taught courses in constitutional law and civil liberties at
Dartmouth. He is conducting a seminar on race this term.
 Mark Borsuk
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Mark Borsuk
Assistant Professor of Engineering
Mark Borsuk joins Thayer School
of Engineering following a year as a research assistant professor in the
Department of Biological Sciences. Borsuk graduated from Princeton with a
B.S.E. in civil engineering and operations research. He holds an M.S. in
statistics and decision sciences and a Ph.D. in environmental science and
policy, both from Duke. His postdoctoral work was at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (EAWAG), in Dubendorf, where he was
a research group leader in the area of integrated modeling and decision
analysis.
Borsuk’s research broadly concerns the use of scientific information in
complex decision making processes. He develops models that integrate knowledge
and data across disciplines to help envision, understand, and predict the
consequences of human actions on social, technical, and natural systems, often
using Bayesian networks as a tool. This information is then combined with
representations of human preferences and risk attitudes to support policy and
management decisions. Major areas of application have included restoration of
large rivers, management of coastal water quality, and mitigation of climate
change. One current interdisciplinary research project asks whether the way in
which information on mercury pollution is presented can affect individual and
organizational behavior; another explores how the existence of scientific
uncertainty shapes society’s perceptions about climate change.
Borsuk’s work is widely published in journals including Environmental
Science & Technology, Environmental Modeling and Software,
Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, and the Journal of
Climate, and has been supported by grants from the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation. Borsuk has
also contributed chapters to the Encyclopedia of Ecology, forthcoming
from Elsevier, and Risk Assessment for Environmental Health (Wiley
2007). He serves on the editorial boards or as a reviewer for a number of
journals in the fields of environmental modeling, decision theory, operations
research, and water resources.
Borsuk’s teaching emphasizes real-world problem solving using theoretically
supported methods. He is teaching Decision-Making Under Risk and Uncertainty at
Thayer School this fall.
 Soyica Diggs Colbert
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Soyica Diggs Colbert
Assistant Professor of English
Soyica Diggs Colbert studies African American drama. Her research and
teaching interests extend to 20th-century American literature and culture,
including American drama, as well as performance studies, psychoanalysis, and
gender studies. She completed her Ph.D. in literatures in English at Rutgers
University in 2006, concurrently earning a certificate in women’s and gender
studies. Colbert received her B.A. from Georgetown University. She is the
recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Fellowship for Dissertation
Writers from the Mellon Foundation in 2005.
Colbert comes to Dartmouth following a year as a humanities fellow at
Stanford University. During her fellowship, she taught seminars titled “Race
and Performance” and “Black Drama” in the Stanford Department of Drama.
Earlier, she was a lecturer in the Department of English at Rutgers University
from 2002 through 2006, and a lecturer in the Department of African American
Studies at the College of New Jersey in 2004.
Colbert is a contributor to the North American Women’s Drama Collection,
authoring pieces on Lorraine Hansbury and Suzan-Lori Parks, and to Routledge’s
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Essays on dramatist Alice
Childress and on James Baldwin are forthcoming in collections published by
Routledge and Rodopi Press, respectively. She has presented conference papers
at venues including the Modern Language Association, the American Society for
Theatre Research, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Colbert
is teaching a course on Black Theater USA in the Department of Theater this
term.
 Seth Dobson
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Seth Dobson
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Seth Dobson is a comparative anthropologist whose research interests—in
primatology, functional anatomy, and paleoanthropology—cluster around facial
expression, communication, and the origins of language. He holds A.M. and Ph.D.
degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. Dobson’s dissertation adapted
a system of quantifying facial expression used in psychology, the Facial Action
Coding System (FACS), to build a method for quantifying facial mobility in
monkeys and apes. He joins the Dartmouth faculty as assistant professor of
anthropology after spending 2006-2007 as the Robert A. and Catherine L.
McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology.
Dobson has begun studying the social function of facial expressions in
gelada monkeys, with fieldwork to be conducted in Simien National Park, in the
highlands of Ethiopia. He has conducted pilot studies with captive monkeys in
the Bronx Zoo, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the St. Louis Zoo. He has also
participated in paleontological fieldwork in Wyoming and Utah.
Dobson’s publications and presentations include studies of comparative
facial mobility, and of skull, jaw, and other bone structures. His work has
been included in the Journal of Human Evolution and the
International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
During his McKennan fellowship, Dobson took part in teaching courses on
lemurs, monkeys, and apes, and on primate societies, as well as serving as an
adviser on senior honors theses in anthropology and for the Women in Science Program (WISP).
Dobson’s courses for fall term 2007 include Introduction to Biological
Anthropology.
 Sergi Elizalde
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Sergi Elizalde
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Sergi Elizalde received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 2004, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the
Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, the Institut
Mittag-Leffler (Sweden), and at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (Spain). He
has a B.S. in Mathematics from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya,
Barcelona. His research interests are in enumerative and algebraic
combinatorics and their applications to other fields such as computational
biology.
Much of Elizalde’s work is in pure mathematics. His doctoral research
considered pattern-avoiding permutations, especially enumerative questions,
both exact and asymptotic, studying the distribution of parameters in these
permutations. Recently, he has been working on a bijection between generalized
triangulations of polygons and nonintersecting lattice paths. Additionally, his
work on finding bounds on the number of inference functions of graphical models
connects combinatorics to computational biology, where such models are used in
sequence alignment.
Elizalde came to Dartmouth in 2005 as a John Wesley Young Research
Instructor, earning a competitive postdoctoral position in the Department of Mathematics. During his
fellowship years, Elizalde participated in teaching courses including
Introduction to Calculus, Algebraic Combinatorics, Graph Theory, Discrete
Probability, and Multivariable Calculus. He will be teaching Algebraic
Combinatorics this term.
His work has been published in Advances in Applied Mathematics, the
Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Discrete Mathematics, the
European Journal of Combinatorics, among others. He contributed two
chapters to Algebraic Statistics for Computational Biology (Cambridge
University Press, 2005), and he is a frequent invited participant in colloquia
and seminars throughout the country and abroad. Elizalde has been a referee for
numerous scholarly journals and he has participated extensively in the
International Mathematical Olympiad as contestant and instructor for the
Spanish team. Elizalde is also an accomplished pianist and speaks six
languages.
 Robert Hawley
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Robert Hawley
Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences
Bob Hawley began studying glaciers as an undergraduate at the University of
Washington, in the course of receiving a B.S. in geological sciences. His
undergraduate research was supported by the National Science Foundation’s
Research Experience for Undergraduates program. Fieldwork has taken him to east
and west Antarctica, as well as to Greenland, where he participated in the
inaugural winter-over Summit Camp during the 1997-98 boreal winter. Hawley has
logged more than 23 months of field experience in the Antarctic and Greenland
over 12 field seasons. He returned to the University of Washington for his
doctoral studies, earning a Ph.D. in geophysics in 2005. Since then, he has
been a research associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the
University of Cambridge.
Hawley’s research in glaciology focuses on the firn layers of polar ice
sheets, which are composed of granular, refrozen snow. He studies the physics
of changes in firn density, the mass balance of large ice sheets, and the
interpretation of ice core records. His interest in measuring changes in firn
density in situ led to his development of Borehole Optical
Stratigraphy, a technique for documenting changes in ice grain size and ice
density. Lowering a video camera down into a borehole in an ice sheet makes it
possible to document the patterns of light and dark associated with variations
in the ice. Identification of firn layers, and the ability to track their
movements, aids in layer-based dating of previously extracted ice cores. Hawley
has also interpreted data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission,
which includes gathering information about the thickness of polar land and sea
ice with radar altimetry.
Hawley’s work has been published in the Journal of Glaciology,
Geophysical Research Letters, and the Annals of Glaciology,
among others. He serves as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and
for the Norwegian research council. Hawley maintains a Weblog of his field work
at http://coldclimes.blogspot.com.
 Jerald Kralik
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Jerald Kralik
Assistant Professor of
Psychological and Brain Sciences
Jay Kralik received A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from Harvard
University. He continued his studies with postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard’s
Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, the Duke University Medical Center’s Primate
Neurophysiology Laboratory, and the Laboratory of Systems Neuroscience at the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) prior to joining the Dartmouth
faculty.
While at Duke, Kralik was part of a research team that pioneered the
translation of brain activity into signals that moved robotic arms. As monkeys
reached for food, neuronal activity read from multiple cortical areas was used
to drive robotic arms in real time, one at Duke and a second at MIT, which was
directed by sending the signals over the Internet. The group’s research in
motor neuroprosthetics was published in the journal Nature.
Kralik’s research at Harvard focused on evolutionary changes that allow
primates to overcome impulsivity during decision making and problem solving.
His later work at NIMH, which will continue at Dartmouth, involves seeking to
understand the neural mechanisms that make inhibitory control possible. His
research has implications for suggesting methods of treating clinical disorders
such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or substance abuse, which involve extreme
impulsivity. Kralik, who received the Derek Bok Award for Teaching Excellence
while a teaching fellow at Harvard, will be teaching a section of Issues in
Neuroscience on evolutionary psychology.
His work is widely published in such journals as Animal Cognition,
the Journal of Comparative Psychology, Animal Cognition, the
Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology, the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, and Nature.
 Catherine Norris
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Catherine Norris
Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Catherine Norris is a student of social psychology and social neuroscience.
She comes to Dartmouth following postdoctoral studies at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, as part of the National Institute of Mental Health Training
Program in Emotion Research. Norris completed her undergraduate and graduate
work at the University of Chicago, and holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in
psychology. Her dissertation, “Exploring the Negativity Bias: A Social
Neuroscience Approach,” considers the well-known human habit of paying more
attention, all other things being equal, to bad news over good. Norris’s
research on emotions and the brain—which includes mapping neural responses to
emotional stimuli—focuses on the fact that all things are not equal: there are
differences in how individuals’ brains react to social and emotional
stimuli.
Norris has co-authored a number of pieces on using functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), including the entry on that topic for The
Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment (Oxford University
Press, 2007) and for the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology. Her work has also been published in Psychophysiology,
the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology.
Norris was recognized at the University of Chicago for the quality of her
teaching, winning a number of competitive assistantships. She received the John
Dewey Prize Lectureship, for which she created and conducted the course
“Emotion” for Chicago’s Department of Psychology. She is teaching Experimental
Study of Social Behavior this term.
 Thomas O'Malley
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Thomas O’Malley
Assistant Professor of English
Thomas O’Malley is the author of In the Province of Saints (Little
Brown & Co., 2005), a novel chosen by the New York Public Library as one of
its 25 Books to Remember from 2005, and as a top-ten first novel for 2005 by
Booklist. Praised for its marriage of beauty and bleakness, the novel
tells the story of Michael McDonagh’s coming of age in Ireland during the
troubled late 1970s, and the damage he experienced around him and within his
family, village, and country.
Raised in Ireland and England, O’Malley holds a B.A. in English from the
University of Massachusetts, Boston, and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the
Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Excerpts from his next novel,
to be titled This Magnificent Desolation, are included in the
anthology A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks
Missing (Akashic Books, 2006), and an upcoming issue of Glimmer
Train. O’Malley’s stories have been anthologized in a collection published
by Washington Square Press, and in numerous journals and magazines, including
Shenandoah, Ploughshares, and the Mississippi
Review. O’Malley is also completing The Inspector From Cumbria,
in collaboration with visual artist Carlos Jackson. The novel takes place in
England of the near future, and imagines a world in which Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease has become a modern version of the plague. O’Malley’s work and study
have been supported by the Grace Paley Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, Mass., and by the Maytag Writing Fellowship at the University
of Iowa.
O’Malley has taught courses and workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry
at the Pratt Institute, the UCLA Writer’s Program, the Gotham Writers’
Workshop, Amherst College, and the University of Iowa. He will be teaching an
introductory creative writing course and a section of the senior creative
writing workshop this term.
 Jimmy Wu
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Jimmy Wu
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Jimmy Wu holds an A.B. in chemistry from Princeton University, and a Ph.D.
in organic chemistry from Harvard. He comes to Dartmouth from postdoctoral
studies at Stanford, where his research has been directed towards a total
synthesis of Communesin B, a substance that occurs in nature in microorganisms
associated with sponges and marine algae, and has shown anticancer activity in
laboratory tests. Wu has also worked as an associate chemist with Merck Process
Research, where he studied COX-II inhibitors, which are anti-inflammatory
agents.
Wu’s research is part of the growing field of organocatalysis, which in
spite of dramatic gains in the last decade, remains largely untapped,
especially in comparison to what is known about the use of traditional metal
catalysts. In addition to avenues of research made possible by the particular
potential reactivities of these organic catalysts, they can enable reactions
and processes that are potentially less toxic and more efficient than those
effected by traditional metal catalysts. Wu’s research at Dartmouth currently
focuses on three topics: enantioselective SN1 reactions, hydrogen-bond promoted
asymmetric Claisen reactions, and the development of C2-symmetric
urea and thiorea catalysts.
His work has been published extensively in such journals as the Journal
of the American Chemical Society, Organic Letters, and the
Journal of Organic Chemistry. Wu has been honored multiple times with
Certificates in Distinction in Teaching for his instructional work in courses
and labs at Harvard. He is teaching Organic Chemistry this term.
 Michelle Tolman Clarke
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Michelle Tolman Clarke
Instructor of Government
Michelle Tolman Clarke studies the history of political thought with a
specific focus on Machiavelli. She received a B.A. degree in philosophy and
political science from Tufts University, and M.A. and M.Phil degrees from Yale,
where she will receive her Ph.D. in December 2007. Her work considers
Machiavelli’s thought, the responses of other theorists to it, and the
application and relevance of Machiavelli to contemporary political contexts.
Her research interests reach across time—touching on the classical, early
modern, and Enlightenment eras—to consider how certain political concepts play
out in different times and places. Her dissertation, “Machiavelli’s Political
Pluralism,” argues that Machiavelli developed a novel political ontology
according to which human beings are divided about rather than
over power.
Clarke’s publications include “Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar’s Tree: Bacon’s
Criticism of Machiavellian Imperialism,” forthcoming in Political Research
Quarterly, and “On the Woman Question in Machiavelli,” in the Review
of Politics. She has spoken at the Whitney Humanities Center, the New
England Political Science Association Conference, the Yale Political Theory
Workshop, and will present a paper at a conference on Machiavelli at Yale in
2008.
While at Yale, Clarke was head teaching fellow in a number of courses in the
Department of Political Science, as well as a writing intensive fellow in
Yale’s Bass Writing Program. She also built an extensive record of professional
service there, including terms as representative to the Graduate Student
Assembly and as a member of the Dean’s Executive Committee.
Her courses at Dartmouth will include Political Ideas, Democratic Theory,
and Machiavelli and Machiavellianism.
 Laure Marcellesi
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Laure Marcellesi
Instructor of French
A native speaker of French, Laure Marcellesi holds an M.A. and M.Phil. in
French from Yale University, where she expects to receive her Ph.D. in French
in December 2007. Marcellesi also holds a Maîtrise in English Literatures and
Civilizations, from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She is the
recipient of numerous awards for academic achievements and teaching ability,
including an A. Bartlett Giametti Fellowship, and the Yale College Prize
Teaching Fellowship for “distinguished undergraduate teaching.”
Marcellesi brings a diverse range of teaching experience and training to her
Dartmouth classrooms, ranging from serving as a language instructor at Yale
both in New Haven and Paris, as a teaching assistant at Middlebury College, and
as an instructor in France from the primary level to the baccalaureate. Her
interest in translation extends into practical applications: Marcellesi has
served as a French-English translator for asylum seekers through a program at
Yale Law School, as well as for the musical group Baobab, touring from
Senegal.
Marcellesi’s planned research projects include preparing editions of some of
the texts that her dissertation, “From Noble Savage to Colonial Subject: Tahiti
in Eighteenth-Century French Literature,” considered. This work is supported by
her training in scholarly editing and the history of the book through master
classes at the Beinecke Library, including studies with Thomas Tanselle. Her
research agenda also includes a study of how 18th-century dramatists presented
“the Other” on stage, adding a consideration of theatrical portrayals of
precolonial and colonial Amerindian, African, and Middle-Eastern subjects to
her previous work on the Pacific Other.
By KELLY SEAMAN
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