Faculty

Research/Areas of Interest: Political Theory, American Politics, Civic Studies

Research/Areas of Interest: Creative Writing Religion Education

Research/Areas of Interest: Foreign language methodology; Second language acquisition; Immersion techniques; Curriculum and instruction: university/high school/middle school with an emphasis on interdisciplinary curriculum development, content-based learning, technology/video in the classroom, cooperative learning, blended and distance learning; Experiential learning/Community and service learning; Caribbean literature and culture with an emphasis on Puerto Rico

Research/Areas of Interest: Insect behavior, ecology and evolution; firefly conservation

Research/Areas of Interest: Chinese Language, Chinese Syntax and Language Teaching Pedagogy

Research/Areas of Interest: Theoretical and Computational Biophysical Chemistry. The YSL Group aims to elucidate the structures and functions of biomolecules by integrating the power of advanced computations with the elegance of chemical theory. Our focus is to develop and apply computational methodology to significant biological problems that are difficult to address experimentally. Two major research projects in the YSL Group are (1) to understand and design cyclic peptides with desired conformations to modulate protein–protein interactions and (2) to elucidate the structural and functional roles of post-translational modifications and non-natural amino acids on protein folding.

Research/Areas of Interest: American Sign Language; deaf studies

Research/Areas of Interest: State health policy, consumer engagement in health care choices, Medicaid policy, health policy synthesis

Research/Areas of Interest: Victorian Literature Criticism and Theory Comedy Film and Cultural Studies

Research/Areas of Interest: Music and dance of West Africa.

Research/Areas of Interest: • Solidarity economy movements and economic democracy • Community land trusts • Popular education, social movements, community organizing • Community and climate resilience.

Research/Areas of Interest: Quantum Information, Quantum Simulation, Adiabatic Quantum Computation, Computational Physics Quantum information faces three basic questions. Firstly, what are quantum computers good for? Secondly, how do we build one? Thirdly, what will quantum information contribute if technological obstacles to constructing a large scale quantum computer prove insuperable? The first question is the search for problems which quantum computers can solve more easily than classical computers. The second is an investigation of which physical systems one could use to build a quantum computer. The third leads to the search for spinoffs in classical computation, and the question of where the classical/quantum boundary lies. I am interested in all three questions.

Research/Areas of Interest: Sex work, migration, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, borders, Mexico, United States My research focuses upon how the US/Mexico border is both productive of and made legible by socially meaningful forms of difference through categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. My first book, Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border, is based on twelve months of ethnographic research conducted from 2008 to 2009 in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas during the height of the drug war. My analysis of two groups of migrants – Mexican sex workers and the white American missionaries who seek to love them – reveals how both groups create value through relations of obligation and love. I am in the early stages of two research projects. The first examines gender and sexuality-based activism in Mexico City. The second is about gender and fitness culture in the United States.

Research/Areas of Interest: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century British Fiction, especially James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; Literary Theory: semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, phenomenology; Media studies and the history of the book; Roland Barthes; Proust

Research/Areas of Interest: Bioanalytical and Materials Chemistry. To solve outstanding problems in global health, the Mace Lab applies a multidisciplinary approach combining aspects of analytical chemistry, materials science, and engineering. The primary goal of the Mace lab is to develop low cost, patient-centric technologies that can improve access to healthcare. To achieve this, the Mace Lab designs devices that improve the self-collection of blood and enable the diagnosis of diseases in resource-limited settings, and they are exploring ways the methods that are developed in the lab can used by others. Their main techniques leverage the properties of paper and other porous materials to integrate function into simple, affordable devices. Unique to laboratories in Chemistry departments, his group specializes in handling human blood and saliva. Technologies developed in the Mace lab have made the leap to clinical sites in Africa, South America, and the US, owing to their network of clinical, academic, and industry collaborators. The Mace Lab has broad expertise in assay development and device prototyping, which they apply to evaluating the efficacy of candidate therapeutics, performing separations that lead to new measurements, and making field-deployable kits for point-of-care testing. They have additional expertise in instrument development, phase separation in systems of polymers, and microfluidics.

Research/Areas of Interest: wild chimpanzee health and behavior, primate conservation, evolution of leadership

Research/Areas of Interest: Assessment

Research/Areas of Interest: Social Cognition, Stereotyping, Prejudice, Discrimination

Research/Areas of Interest: Classical tradition and reception; linguistics; ancient drama; ancient mathematics; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit language and literature

Research/Areas of Interest: Secondary language acquisition

Research/Areas of Interest: First-year writing, authentic and equitable assessment, social/emotional learning, reflective learning.

Research/Areas of Interest: Experimental high energy physics, elementary particle interactions, neutrino oscillations, neutrino-nucleus interactions, baryon instability searches. Design and execution of experimental measurements that reveal or constrain the existence of new elementary particles, that delineate the properties of known elementary particles, and that quantify the interactions and symmetries that govern fundamental energy systems of the subatomic realm.

Research/Areas of Interest: Middle East and Inner Asia

Research/Areas of Interest: Spanish Language

Research/Areas of Interest: Astronomy; galaxy formation and evolution; extra-galactic surveys; active galactic nuclei; near-infrared astronomy Understanding how galaxies form and evolve means understanding how the tiny differences in the distribution of matter inferred from the cosmic microwave background radiation grew and evolved into the galaxies we see today. The working hypothesis is that galaxies form under the influence of gravity, and galaxy formation can be seen as a two-step process. First, the gravity of dark matter causes the tiny seeds in the matter distribution to grow bigger with time. As they grow more massive, the gravitational attraction becomes stronger, making it easier for these structures to attract additional matter. As the dark matter structures grow, they pull in also the gas, made of hydrogen and helium, which is the primary ingredient for the formation of stars, and hence for the formation of the stellar content of galaxies. The formation of the stellar content inside these dark matter structures involves many physical processes that are much more complicated and quite poorly understood from a theoretical perspective. These physical processes include, for example, how gas cools and collapses to form stars, the process of star formation itself, merging of galaxies, feedback from star formation and from active super-massive black holes. My research activity in the past decade has focused on understanding how galaxies formed after the Big Bang, and how their properties (e.g., the stellar mass, the level of star formation activity, the morphology and structural parameters, the level of activity of the hosted super-massive black hole, etc.) have changed as a function of cosmic time. Since we cannot follow the same galaxy evolving in time, we need to connect the galaxies we observe at a certain redshift (i.e. a certain snapshot in time) to those we observe at a smaller redshift (i.e., at a later time in cosmic history) in order to infer how the properties of galaxies have actually changed and what physical mechanisms are responsible for these changes. The better we understand the galaxy properties at a certain time and the more finely in time we can probe the cosmic history, the easier it becomes to connect galaxies' populations seen at different snapshots in time, linking progenitors and descendants across cosmic time. Ultimately, my research aims at understanding what galaxy population seen at one epoch will evolve into at a later epoch, and what physical processes are responsible for the inferred changes in the galaxies' properties. In order to do this, I have adopted two different but complementary approaches. The first approach consists of statistical studies of the galaxy populations at different cosmic times; the second approach consists of detailed studies of individual galaxies to robustly derive their properties.