University Times

Pitt's full-time faculty includes 434 new faces this academic year, most of them in the medical school.

Associate Chancellor Vijai Singh, who reviews Pitt faculty letters of appointment for the chancellor, said: "We've recruited some outstanding people, not just in the School of Medicine but throughout the University. These include very accomplished senior people, most of whom are coming to us from top Association of American Universities institutions, as well as some very promising assistant professors."

The following is a sampling of new Pittsburgh campus professors, as noted by deans and department chairpersons. Those administrators and the University Times want to emphasize that this is only a sampling and not a complete list of important new faculty members.

q Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean N. John Cooper said he is "very, very pleased" with the quality of FAS's 30-plus new hires.

Cooper noted that the chemistry department has recruited an associate professor of organic chemistry, Kay Brummond from West Virginia University, who specializes in natural products synthesis and synthetic methodology, and three assistant professors: Shigeru Amemiya, a bioanalytic chemist from the University of Tokyo; inorganic chemist Stephane Petoud from the University of California at Berkeley, and magnetic spectroscopist Sunil Saxena, also from UC-Berkeley, who studies biological systems and materials science.

Computer science has recruited an associate professor — former AT&T labs researcher Diane Litman, who specializes in natural language processing — and two assistant professors: artificial intelligence specialist Milos Hauskrecht, who comes to Pitt from Temple University after earning his doctorate at MIT and doing post-doctoral work at Brown, and Patcharwat Uthaisombut, a Michigan State Ph.D. who is an expert in the design and analysis of algorithms.

The communication department has recruited an associate professor, Ronald Zboray, who specializes in "orality" and literacy in America as well as history of media, and assistant professor Joan Leach, an expert on medical communication and rhetoric of science. Leach, currently on the faculty of the University of London's Imperial College, will join Pitt in January.

Lise Vesterlund, a behavioral and experimental economist whose research interests include charitable giving and public finance, has joined Pitt's economics department as an assistant professor. She will work with the department's three other specialists in experimental economics, a field that uses laboratory methods (and, often, human subjects) to assess economic theories.

Vesterlund earned her Ph.D. from Iowa State University and had been an assistant professor there since 1997, taking a leave last year to do post-doctoral work at the Harvard Business School.

The English department has recruited two assistant professors, Kimberly Latta and Stefan Wheelock.

Latta teaches about women's issues and John Milton, among other subjects, and has written about women, politics and literature in the years 1650 to 1865. She directed a U.S. House of Representatives task force on women's issues before completing her Ph.D. at Rutgers. Wheelock, who earned his Ph.D. from Brown, has written about 18th century cross-Atlantic literature concerning the slave trade. He will teach African American literature and culture.

The history of art and architecture department has recruited Karen Gerhart from Northern Arizona University as an associate professor. Gerhart's specialty is Japanese art, primarily 17th century painting.

Among the eight School of Dental Medicine faculty members recruited since July 1, Dean Thomas W. Braun noted Bernard J. Costello, an assistant professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery, and Titus K. L. Schleyer, associate professor of restorative dental sciences.

Schleyer will begin at Pitt in January. He is an associate professor at the Temple University School of Dentistry and chairs the dental informatics department there. Costello recently completed a fellowship at the Georgetown University Medical Center's Postnick Center for Facial Plastic Surgery.

The School of Education has added three assistant professors.

Cynthia Coburn, of the Department of Administrative and Policy Studies, completed her doctorate at Stanford this summer. Coburn's dissertation focused on the relationship between political mandates and changing professional ideas on the one hand and actual teacher beliefs and changes on the other, notably in reading instruction.

Dan Dewey is finishing his dissertation at Carnegie Mellon in second language education. Experienced in teaching Japanese, Dewey has studied the determining factors essential to immersion programs for learning languages. His appointment is in the instruction and learning department.

John Jakicic will be phasing in at Pitt over the next year as he moves his research projects from Brown University. He earned his doctorate in health, physical and recreational education at Pitt in 1995. Jakicic has been studying the relationship between various exercise programs and weight loss, including ways in which exercise improves health and the factors that determine what exercises are actually performed in different programs.

In the School of Engineering, John A. Barnard has been named professor and chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He comes to Pitt from the University of Alabama, where he was professor of metallurgical and materials engineering and associate director of the Center for Materials for Information Technology.

Two junior faculty appointees also have joined the engineering school. Robert Ries comes to Pitt from the research faculty at Carnegie Mellon's School of Architecture as assistant professor in civil engineering. Ming-En Wang, from Eastern Michigan University, joins Pitt's industrial engineering faculty. He holds a Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. His areas of interest include product development and manufacturing and information systems.

Sean O'Connor joins Pitt's law school faculty from private practice in Boston. His specialty is emerging biotechnology and information technology companies.

Law Dean David Herring said, "We're very fortunate to have recruited Professor O'Connor. He will help us launch a new biotechnology certificate program here at the law school, with support from Dr. Levine in the Health Sciences and the Office of Technology Management."

O'Connor's teaching will focus on legal issues in the commercialization of science and high technology.

The School of Information Sciences (SIS) recruited Jose-Marie Griffiths as the first holder of the Doreen E. Boyce Chair of Library and Information Science, a chair endowed by the Buhl Foundation. Griffiths was chief information officer and professor of information science at the University of Michigan.

SIS recently announced other appointments, including those of Karen Gracy in the Department of Library and Information Sciences and Vladimir Zadorozhny in the Department of Information Science and Technology.

Gracy, who earned her Ph.D. from UCLA, has an interdisciplinary background spanning film scholarship, archival studies and policy studies on the preservation of, and access to, knowledge. The SIS administration lauded Zadorozhny's "exceptionally strong database background and considerable experience in software engineering." He earned his Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Prior to joining SIS, he was an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

Zhijia Shen began July 1 as the new head of Pitt's East Asian Library, having held a similar position at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The School of Medicine is by far Pitt's largest school, with some 1,400 full-time faculty members, many of them clinical faculty who teach in hospital settings but not in the classroom. (Fewer than 30 percent of Pitt medical faculty members are tenured or in the pipeline for tenure.) "I sign as many as 20 faculty appointment letters a day," said Arthur S. Levine, dean of the medical school and senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences. Of the faculty recruited for senior academic positions in the medical school this year, Levine cited the following, among others:

* Ivet Bahar, the new director of the school's Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Bahar, who earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Istanbul Technical University, had been a professor in Istanbul's Bogazici University's chemical engineering department since 1993, and directed Bogazici's Polymer Research Center since 1992.

* David H. Perlmutter, Vira I. Heinz Professor and Chair of Pediatrics, and professor of cell biology and physiology. From 1996 to 2001, Perlmutter was the Donald Strominger Professor of Pediatrics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He earned his M.D. from the St. Louis University School of Medicine.

* Jeannette E. South-Paul, professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine. After earning her M.D. from Pitt in 1979, South-Paul held faculty appointments at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Ft. Gordon, Ga.

Dean Levine commented: "Dr. South-Paul is the first African American to chair a department at Pitt's medical school, and one of very few African American women to chair a department at any medical school in this country. But that isn't why we hired her. We hired her because she was the very best person available for the job."

* Peter L. Strick, a professor in the neurobiology, neurosurgery and psychiatry departments and co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Strick's research focuses on the structure and functions of brain regions concerned with control of movement and cognition. Most recently, he was the George Perkins III Professor of Neurosurgery at the State University of New York Science Center in Syracuse.

* Richard D. Wood, a professor in Pitt's pharmacology department and Richard Cyert Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Since 1988, Wood had served as a research, senior and principal scientist at Clare Hall Laboratories in South Mimms, U.K. He was an honorary professor at University College in London from 1995 to 2001.

— Bruce Steele and Peter Hart