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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Questions or comments about this article? We welcome your feedback.
Mark Borsuk
Soyica Diggs Colbert
Seth Dobson
Sergi Elizalde
Robert Hawley
Jerald Kralik
Catherine Norris
Thomas O'Malley
Jimmy Wu
Michelle Tolman Clarke
Laure Marcellesi