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September 1, 2011

What’s New: People

The hustle and bustle that marks the beginning of the academic year has returned: The proliferation of laundry carts, redirected traffic, upperclass student volunteers pointing the way to newcomers and their families during Arrival Survival.

But for many at Pitt, the hazy days of summer have been anything but lazy: Facilities were renovated; faculty and staff were hired; academic programs were established.

The University Times asked deans and other school officials to provide a brief look at “What’s New? People, Places and Things” in their areas.

The summaries that follow are not all-encompassing, but rather are overviews of school news based on material submitted by the units. Information previously published in the University Times was not included here.

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Incoming freshmen and their families locate the new students' names on this welcome sign erected on the William Pitt Union lawn.

Incoming freshmen and their families locate the new students' names on this welcome sign erected on the William Pitt Union lawn.

New faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences include associate professors Marta Lewicka in mathematics and Pierre Landry in political science; assistant professors Jonathan Fenderson in Africana studies; Michael Meyer, Lily Saint and Peter Trachtenberg in English; Chloé Hoggin in French and Italian; Nadine McQuarrie in geology and planetary science; Mina Rajagopalan in history of art and architecture; Robin Ming Chen, Michael Joseph Neilan, Hisham Sati and Song Yao in mathematics; Gavin Steingoin in music; Marlene Cohen and Anne-Marie Oswald-Doiron in neuroscience, and Sungkyu Jung in statistics.

Also new are English lecturers Mark  Best,  Marylou  Gramm, Tom  McWhorter, Pamela O’Brien, Uma Satyavolu and Ellen Smith, as well as Pitt graduates Sten Carlson, Robin Clarke, Barbara Edelman, Jeff Martin, Dana Och, Amy Murray Twyning and Brenda Whitney.

New in mathematics is assistant instructor Eugene Trofimov, who holds a degree from Pitt; in political science, new lecturer Andrew Lotz holds a degree from Pitt.

Laura Brown joins the Department of Anthropology this fall as an assistant professor. Brown earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She specializes in the study of language and culture and the relationship between market commerce, ethnopragmatics and speech events.

Loukas Barton will join the anthropology department in January as an assistant professor. Barton earned his PhD from the University of California-Davis and is a specialist in the study of early human social organization and patterns of evolutionary development in relation to hunting and gathering subsistence.

Nathan Morehouse joins the Department of Biological Sciences as an assistant professor from the Université de Tours, where he served as the European Union Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow in the Institut de Recherechesur la Biologie de l’Insecte. Morehouse earned his PhD from Arizona State. His research focuses on the evolution and maintenance of multiple phenotypes within populations and species, and specifically examines animal coloration.

Jonathan Pruitt, a graduate of the University of Tennessee, also joins the department as an assistant professor.

The chemistry department has two new assistant professors. Jill E. Millstone comes from the University of California-Berkeley where she completed her postdoctoral work studying organic-inorganic hybrid photovoltaics. She received her undergraduate degree in chemistry and English from Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her PhD at Northwestern.

Her research focuses on the study of nanostructure surface architectures, with the goal of developing highly tailored materials for use in medical devices and alternative energy systems.

Sean Garrett-Roe most recently was a postdoctoral associate at the Graduate School of Chemical and Molecular Sciences, University of Zurich. Garrett-Roe developed a new ultrafast nonlinear infrared spectroscopy (3D-IR) technique that was awarded the 2009 Editors Choice Award by the Journal of Chemical Physics. This technique has revealed heterogeneous dynamics in hydrogen bonding in ambient water.

He was awarded his PhD in chemistry from the University of California-Berkeley for his work that led to development of both theoretical and experimental techniques to understand electron dynamics at the interface between a metal surface and a thin molecular film. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Princeton.

Garrett-Roe’s research at Pitt will focus on the development of multidimensional IR techniques (2D and 3D) to study ion uptake and selectivity in a variety of systems, including ion channels, ion sensors and ionophores.

Also new to the chemistry faculty are  lecturers Carol Fortney and Susan Maleckar, both of whom hold degrees from Pitt.

New faculty in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology include Jeremy Berg and Nathan Clark.

Berg, who has been named associate vice chancellor for Health Policy and Planning, is the outgoing director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and senior investigator of the Laboratory for Molecular Biology at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Clark, who will join the department in December, researches adaptive evolution and co-evolution between proteins using computational and experimental techniques. The main goals of his work are to understand the functional mechanisms behind protein adaptation in entire protein networks and to identify the evolutionary pressures that are driving them to change. Clark earned his PhD in genome sciences at the University of Washington.

Seungjae Baek joined the department in July as a post-doctoral research associate. He most recently was chief research engineer at Peromnii. He earned a PhD in computer engineering at Dankook University in Korea. He will be working in the Computer Architecture, Systems and Technology Laboratory.

Charles Exley and Kun Qian have joined the faculty in the East Asian languages and literatures department as assistant professors.

Exley graduated from Yale with a PhD in Japanese literature and taught at the University of Montana.

Qian received her PhD in East Asian literature from Cornell. Her teaching and research interests include modern Chinese fiction, drama, film and intellectual history. Her current research project deals with the ways that modern Chinese writers and film producers have represented the pre-modern Chinese Empire.

Also new in the department is assistant instructor Fan Fan. Fan recently completed her master’s degree in Chinese language pedagogy at Indiana University-Bloomington, where she also taught Chinese. Before coming to the United States, Fan received her BA in journalism and language education at Shandong University, China, and worked for a year as an intern teaching Chinese in a secondary school in Thailand.

The Department of Economics has four new assistant professors: Allison Shertzer; Roee Teper; Stephanie Wang, and Alistair Wilson.

Shertzer, who comes to Pitt from UCLA, works at the intersection of public economics, economic history and economic demography and is conducting research on the political economy of immigration.

Teper’s main fields are microeconomics, game theory and decision theory. His research focuses on individual and multi-agent decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. He comes to Pitt from Tel Aviv University.

Wang is an experimental economist who explores topics in behavioral game theory, finance and judgment and decision-making. Most recently a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, Wang completed her PhD in economics at Princeton.

Wilson, who comes to Pitt from New York University, is an experimental economist who uses economic theory, econometrics and computational methods to analyze a broad range of issues including communication in groups.

Todd Reeser, associate professor in the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures, is serving as acting director of the Center for Humanities this academic year.

The center welcomes two fellows: Donald Pease of Dartmouth will be in residence for the fall semester; Benjamin Kahan of Louisiana State will be in residence for the full year.

Holger Hoock, Amundson Professor of British History, comes to the Department of History from the University of Liverpool. Hoock specializes in Britain in the 1700s, art history and military history.

Laura Gotkowitz joins the history department as an associate professor. Gotkowitz completed her PhD from the University of Chicago, and taught at Harvard, Swarthmore and the University of Iowa. She is a historian of Bolivia, with particular interest in social movements; indigenous politics and cultures; gender and race/ethnicity, including the history of political violence, and human rights. Her research traces conflicts over land, labor, justice and nationhood in Bolivia from the liberal reforms of the late-19th century to the revolution of 1952.

New assistant professors  in history are Vincent Leung, a specialist in ancient China whose PhD is from Harvard, and Gregor Thum, a specialist in Germany and central Europe who comes from the University of Washington.

Also new in history are lecturers Leslie Hammond, who is a Pitt graduate, and Liann Tsoukas.

Diego Holstein is the new associate director at the World History Center.

An associate professor of history, he comes from a faculty position at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received his PhD in 2002. He is author of a book on social interaction and change in 13th-century Toledo.

The center has two new postdoctoral fellows: Elizabeth Campbell in world history, and Daniel Rood in world history of science.

Mazviita Chirimuuta joins the Department of History and Philosophy of Science as an assistant professor from the University of Birmingham, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow. She completed her PhD in physiology-visual neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

Her recent work has been on color vision, developing a theory of color that acknowledges the complexities of visual function revealed by recent perceptual science. Alongside experimental work on visual cognition, her latest research looks at the implications of neuroplasticity for questions concerning mechanistic explanation in the philosophy of neuroscience.

Marta Ortega-Llebaria has been named an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics. She earned her PhD at Indiana University and was a faculty member at the University of Texas-Austin before coming to Pitt as a visiting professor last year. Ortega-Llebaria’s research focuses on the intonation in non-tonal and tonal languages and L2 intonation; cross-language speech perception and production, and laboratory approaches to the phonology of Catalan, English and Spanish.

Anja Jauernig joins the Department of Philosophy as an associate professor. She comes from a faculty position at Notre Dame, where she  also was a faculty fellow at the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values and at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.

Jauernig completed her PhD in philosophy at Princeton. Her philosophical research focuses on the periods from the mid-17th to the early-20th century.

Also new in the philosophy department is assistant professor Kristen Inglis, whose PhD is from Cornell. Her areas of interest include ancient philosophy, ethics, history of ancient philosophy and history of ethics.

Lecturer Michael Kessler, whose PhD is from Harvard, will serve as the department’s undergraduate adviser. His areas of interest include political philosophy, philosophy of law, ethics, bioethics and philosophy of religion.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy has established the Pittsburgh Particle Physics, Astrophysics, Cosmology Center (PITT-PACC) and appointed Tao Han as its director. This center’s mission is to enhance research activities for particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology; strengthen interactions and collaborations among theorists and experimentalists in those fields, and promote outreach in these areas to the community.

Han joins the department as a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a professor and co-director of the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics Research.

He completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Han is a theoretical particle physicist whose research focuses on phenomenology. His phenomenological predictions have been at the center of detection concepts designed to lead to the discovery of the Higgs boson, which is a particle hypothesized to exist within what is called the standard model of nuclear and particle physics and is believed to be the origin of mass in all particles.

Other new faculty in physics and astronomy include assistant professors Carlos Badenes, whose PhD is from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, and Sergey Frolov, who earned his PhD at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign.

Badenes is an astrophysicist whose research addresses key observational and theoretical aspects of type IA supernovae. He comes to Pitt from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

Frolov is an experimentalist in condensed matter physics and nanoscience who is working in the areas of quantum nanowires, Majorana fermions in nanowires and nanowire quantum bits. Frolov comes from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology.

Lecturer Matteo Broccio comes to Pitt from Carnegie Mellon University. Broccio received his PhD at the University of Messina. His research interests include experimental biophysics.

Kathryn Monahan has joined the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. She was a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Washington and  the  University of California-Irvine after completing her PhD at Temple. She is the recipient of a Jacobs Foundation Young Scholar Award and the American Psychological Association Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology. Her research focuses on socio-emotional development in adolescence, with a particular emphasis on the development and prevention of antisocial behavior, substance use and risky sexual behavior.

Rachel Kranson joins the Department of Religious Studies as an assistant professor of modern Judaism and religion in America. Kranson is completing a dissertation called “Grappling With the Good Life: Jewish Anxieties Over Affluence in Postwar America, 1945-1967” in a joint program in history and Jewish studies at New York University. She is co-editor of “A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in the Postwar Era,” which was a finalist for the 2010 Jewish Book Awards-Barbara Dobkin Award in Women’s Studies.

Jackie Smith has joined the Department of Sociology from Notre Dame as an assistant professor. Her scholarship is in the field of social movements and globalization research, with particular focus on the global justice movement that operates through the World Social Forum and other people-to-people meetings.

Lecturer Mike-Frank Epitropoulos, who is a Pitt graduate, also has joined the sociology department.

Cynthia Croot comes to the Department of Theatre Arts as an assistant professor from a faculty position at Whitman College. She completed her MFA at Columbia. Croot specializes in directing. Her work includes classical and experimental texts, theatre history, dramatic theory and criticism, interdisciplinary collaborations, set design, theatrical adaptation, playwriting and viewpoints.

Jessie Ramey, currently a visiting scholar in the women’s studies program, will be an American Council of Learned Societies fellow in the program beginning  in January. She earned her PhD in history at Carnegie Mellon.

The School of Dental Medicine has appointed Seth Weinberg of oral biology as an assistant professor. Other new assistant professors are David Anderson of prosthodontics; Matthew Cooke of dental anesthesiology; Elizabeth Bilodeau of diagnostic sciences; Konstantinos Verdelis of restorative dentistry/comprehensive care, and Kelly Williams of periodontics/preventive dentistry.

In addition, Mark Wrigley was appointed as an instructor in the Department of Diagnostic Sciences and Sally Farah was appointed as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Prosthodontics.

Shannon Wanless joins the School of Education as an assistant professor in the applied developmental psychology program, Department of Psychology in Education. Wanless completed her PhD in human development and family sciences at Oregon State University, and holds an MA in early childhood education from the University of Michigan and a BA in sociology/anthropology and psychology from Denison University. Since 2009, she has been on the research faculty at the University of Virginia.

Her research interests are on improving early school success with an emphasis on promoting self-regulation.

Anna Mary Williford has been named public services librarian at Pitt-Greensburg’s Millstein Library. She held the position as a temporary employee since fall 2009. Williford, who earned her MLIS at Pitt, earned a BA in classical studies and English at the University of Richmond.

New faculty member Jacob Easley II has been named professor of education and chair of Pitt-Johnstown’s Division of Education. Easley, who previously served as associate professor at Mercy College in New York, received his PhD from Penn State. His research interests include education policy and politics; contextualized leadership; schools as organizations/organizational change and effectiveness; understanding ways in which the socio-political, economic, cultural and ideological factors in and around urban schools shape and define the formal processes of schooling, and intercultural and international 21st-century perspectives in educational leadership.

Easley recently published the book, “The Audacity to Teach! The Impact of Leadership, School Reform and the Urban Context on Educational Innovations.”

Other new faculty joining Pitt-Johnstown this year are assistant professors Christopher Cook, political science; Christine Dahlin, biology/vertebrae biology; Nickole George, nursing; Charles Kanyi, chemistry; Ross Kleinstuber, justice administration and criminology; Bethany McConnell, special education; Raghvendra Sengar, chemistry; Scott Tracy, secondary education; Paul Washington, energy and Earth resources; Brian Moyer, mechanical engineering technology, and Manisha Nigam, organic/green chemistry.

Also joining the Pitt-Johnstown faculty are instructors Halvor Aakhus, English writing; Daniel Broyld, history; Victoria Czarnek, mathematics; Shailesh Kadakia, electrical engineering technology; Ahmad Massasati, cartography/geographic information systems; Frank Pietryga, electrical engineering technology, and John Teacher, theatre arts.

Paul Bond has joined Pitt-Johnstown’s Owen Library as library instruction coordinator. Bond most recently worked at Bryant and Stratton College as an information literacy instructor. He received his BA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in graphic design and his MLS from the University of Buffalo.

Sherri Rae has been promoted to director of Student Activities at UPJ. Rae began her career at Pitt-Johnstown in 2001 as Greek coordinator. She earned her BA in history and MA in student personnel at Slippery Rock University.

The School of Law announced the appointment of two new faculty members.

David A. Garrow joins the faculty as research professor of history and law, holding a joint appointment in the history department. Prior to joining Pitt, Garrow was a senior research fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of “Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade,” a comprehensive history of the struggle for reproductive rights in America.

Garrow has taught at Duke, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, City University of New York, The Cooper Union, the College of William and Mary, American University and Emory.

He graduated magna cum laude from Wesleyan University and received his PhD from Duke.

Jasmine Gonzales Rose joins the law faculty as an assistant professor, coming from a post as a teaching fellow at California Western School of Law-San Diego. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Latino Law Review and as a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, language and citizenship.

Also at the law school, Jacki Herzog joined the administrative staff in July as director of employer recruitment. Herzog received her MA in human resources management and her professional in human resources certificate from Washington University-St. Louis.

After earning her law degree from Duquesne, she practiced employee benefits law at Reed Smith; Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and Tucker Arensberg.

Jan Drappatz, an expert in brain cancer treatment and research, has been appointed associate director of UPMC Cancer Centers adult neuro-oncology program, and associate professor of neurology and medicine in the School of Medicine. He comes from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he served on the faculty and as an attending physician in the departments of neurology and oncology.

Drappatz received his MD from the Johannes Gutenberg University School of Medicine. He completed residency training in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and completed his fellowship training in neuro-oncology at Dana-Farber.

The School of Nursing has made a number of recent administrative appointments.

Alice Blazeck, assistant professor in the Department of Acute/Tertiary Care, was named the department’s vice chair for administration.

Annette DeVito Dabbs, associate professor in the Department of Acute/Tertiary Care, has been named the department’s vice chair for research.

Jan Dorman, professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Development, was named the department’s vice chair for research.

Ann M. Mitchell, associate professor in the Department of Health and Community Systems, was named the department’s vice chair for administration. Mitchell also is an assistant professor of psychiatry in the in the School of Medicine.

Carol Stilley, research associate professor in the Department of Health and Community Systems, was named vice chair for research in her department.

Faculty joining the School of Nursing include Na-Jin Park as an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Community Systems.

Tonya Rutherford-Hemming joined the Department of Health and Community Systems as an instructor.

At the School of Pharmacy, Joshua Thorpe has been appointed as an associate professor in the Department of Pharmacy and Therapeutics. Thorpe is a nationally recognized pharmaceutical health services researcher with interests in quality of care, pharmaco-epidemiology and patient-centered outcomes of vulnerable older adults’ informal caregivers.

Thorpe also has been appointed as a core faculty member of the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion.

He earned his PhD in pharmaceutical outcomes and policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Prior to joining Pitt, he was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy and has served as a statistical service fellow for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Carolyn Thorpe has been appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacy and Therapeutics. Her research aims to improve the health of older adults facing multiple chronic conditions by focusing on three areas: comparative effectiveness of strategies for treating complex, older patients with multiple chronic conditions; quality medication prescribing and patient adherence, and multiple health behavior change in older adults.

Thorpe also has been appointed as a core investigator in the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System’s Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion.

She completed her PhD in health behavior and health education at the University North Carolina School of Public Health, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in health services research at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Duke University. She holds an MPH in health promotion from George Washington University. Before assuming her current position, she was the associate director of quantitative research for the health innovation program in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Graduate School of Public Health has hired a number of new faculty members.

Ruosha Li joins the school in the Department of Biostatistics as an assistant professor.

Abimbola Fapohunda and Chongyi Wei join the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences as visiting assistant professors.

In the Department of Environmental and Occupational  Health, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian and Sameera Sayeed have been appointed as visiting research assistant professors, Jane Clougherty as an assistant professor and Kyra Naumoff Shields as an assistant professor of public health practice.

The Department of Epidemiology has added Samar El Khoundary and Ping Tepper as assistant professors and Yahtyng Sheu as a visiting assistant professor.

Quasar Padiath is a new assistant professor and John Shaffer a new visiting research assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics.

In the Department of Health Policy and Management, Jagpreet Chhatwal joins the faculty as a visiting assistant professor and Julia Driessen as an assistant professor.

Three new faculty are joining the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs this year.

Michael Kenney has been appointed associate professor of international affairs. Kenney received his PhD from the University of Florida and has held research fellowships at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California.

Since 2003 he has been a faculty member at Penn State’s School of Public Affairs.

His research focuses on Islamic activism in Spain, the United Kingdom and Morocco. He recently was appointed as the lead reviewer for the Department of Homeland Security review panel assessing university-based Centers of Excellence on research and education in the study of terrorism.

Luke Condra has been appointed assistant professor of international affairs at GSPIA. Condra earned his PhD in political science from Stanford.

His research interests are in international security and the micro-dynamics of political violence. His current work on Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia focuses on elements of state building in areas characterized by conflict.

New assistant professor Ryan Grauer earned his BA with honors at the University of Chicago and is completing his doctoral dissertation on “Commanding Military Power: Organizational Sources of Victory on the Battlefield” at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn he won the School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and served as head teaching assistant for courses in international security and American foreign policy.

The School of Social Work has hired five new faculty members this year.

Azadeh Block has been named Bachelor of Arts in Social Work program director. Block previously taught in the undergraduate social work program at Slippery Rock.

In her scholarly interests, Block has focused on adolescent mental health treatment and improving methods of mental health treatment engagement in community social service agencies.

Former director of Pitt’s Counseling Center James A. Cox has joined the social work faculty this fall. Cox worked at the Counseling Center for 18 years, and had been its director for the past eight years. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York-Albany and holds two graduate degrees from Pitt — an MEd in counseling and an MSW — as well as an advanced certificate in industrial social work.

Cox has worked in a variety of counseling/mental health positions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Hershey Medical Center, Dickinson College, Duquesne, Carnegie Mellon, the Sickle Cell Society and Health America. His areas of interest are in multicultural counseling, brief treatment and alternative approaches to treatment.

Lovie Jackson has been appointed assistant professor of health and social work. Jackson earned her PhD in social work at the University of Washington. She completed a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at Pitt.

Jackson’s research interests include the multidisciplinary study of health and health care disparities; collaborative care models to address the health and mental health of traumatized underserved youth and families in diverse settings, and health services research using community-based participatory research and health information technology.

Jackson is a 2011 fellow of the Family Research Consortium and the M. Alfred Haynes Research Training Institute on Health Disparities.

Beth Mulvaney joins the social work faculty to teach in both the MSW and BASW programs. She has served as the school’s first coordinator for the Hartford partnership program for aging education since 2005.

Mulvaney earned her MSW from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a BA in psychology from the University of Virginia. She has 14 years of experience as a gerontological social worker, providing care management and program administration, as well as experience in long-term care, with an emphasis on behavioral care planning, dementia care and end-of-life care.

Mulvaney’s current research and practice interests include gerontology, ethics, palliative care and problem gambling prevention for older adults.

Marlo Perry has joined the school’s child welfare education and research programs as a research assistant professor. Perry earned her PhD in school, community and clinical child psychology and her MSEd in psychological services from Penn. She has worked with several large child- and family-serving systems to conduct policy-relevant applied research that benefits low-income children and families.

Charles Nieman is the new director of the Office of International Services, part of the Division of Student Affairs.

Prior to coming to Pitt, Nieman served as director of international student and scholar services at Kent State. He also has held appointments as an adjunct faculty member in the executive MBA program in Pitt’s College of Business Administration and in the higher education program in the School of Education. Nieman has concentrated on advanced leadership studies, international education administration and cross-cultural team building.

He recently completed his term as president of the Pennsylvania Council for International Education and will continue as a member of the council’s board of directors.

Tevya Zukor will take over as director of the Counseling Center Sept. 19. Zukor has been the director of the Counseling and Psychology Services Center at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. Prior to his tenure at Mary Washington, Zukor worked at the Thomas E. Cook Counseling Center at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Zukor earned both an MA and PhD in clinical psychology from George Mason University. He is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified group psychotherapist, and is a member of the American Group Psychotherapy Association.

Lawrence A. Carr has been named assistant professor of business and Meredith B. Kenyon has been named assistant professor of English at Pitt-Titusville.

Carr, who had been a part-time instructor at UPT for many years, received his AA in business administration from Community College of Allegheny County and his BS in business administration and MBA from Clarion University of Pennsylvania.

Kenyon received her BA and MA in English literature from St. Bonaventure University.

Karen Calhoun is joining the University Library System as assistant university librarian for organizational development and strategic initiatives. Calhoun will be supporting ULS’s efforts to deliver state-of-the-art community-centered library services for 21st-century research, teaching and learning. She comes to the University from Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit computer library service and research organization, where she served on the senior executive team. She also worked for 10 years at Cornell University Library, where she was senior associate university librarian for information technology and technical services.

Calhoun was the principal investigator for “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration With Other Discovery Tools,” a Library of Congress-commissioned study that proposed new directions for national and research library services in the digital era.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University, an MS in library and information science from Drexel University and an MBA from Franklin University.

School of Medicine

Alejandro Soto-Gutierrez has joined the Division of Experimental Pathology as an assistant professor of pathology.

Formerly a Harvard postdoc, he transferred institutions during the mentored training phase of his K99/R00 National Institutes of Health award because of Pitt’s ability to support his research focus on experimental technologies to treat liver diseases using bioengineering, cell transplantation and regenerative medicine techniques.

D. Lansing “Lans” Taylor has been named director of Pitt’s Drug Discovery Institute and Allegheny Foundation Professor of Computational and Systems Biology. A former professor at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon University, Taylor also has been a CEO and entrepreneur who has founded multiple biotechnology companies and chaired the board of the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse.

Avniel S. Ghuman is a new assistant professor of neurological surgery and of neurobiology, and director of magnetoencephalography (MEG) research at the UPMC Brain Mapping Center. His research focuses on using MEG to study the neurophysiological underpinnings of communication among brain regions, particularly abnormal neural activity associated with autism spectrum disorders.

Nathan A. Yates comes to the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology from Merck, where he was scientific director of the molecular biomarker laboratory in the company’s division of exploratory and translational sciences. Yates is an associate professor of medicine and director of the Schools of the Health Sciences’ Biomedical Mass Spectrometry Center. His research focuses on the use of mass spectroscopy, bioanalytics and informatics technologies to aid the detection, diagnosis and treatment of disease.

A former associate research scientist at Columbia University, Kara Bernstein is a new assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. She also is a member of the molecular and cellular cancer biology program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Her research focuses on molecular mechanisms of DNA double-stranded breaks, repair, recombination and early tumor development.

Martin Wijkstrom is a new assistant professor of surgery and director of islet cell transplantation in the Department of Surgery’s transplantation division. His research interests include xenotransplantation and the development of novel ways to induce transplant tolerance. He holds a patent for an immunotherapeutic method to prevent islet cell rejection.

—Kimberly K. Barlow & Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 44 Issue 1

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