New Tenure Line Faculty 2009

Simone Buechler, PhD, just finished a post-doctoral fellowship with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University where she was working on completing a book manuscript on the impact of labor market restructuring on women living in favelas in São Paulo, Brazil. Before accepting her position in, she was an assistant professor/faculty fellow in the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University. Her research interests include: urban and regional planning, global and local economic development processes, immigration, social movements, labor market restructuring and policy, and squatter settlements. She conducted extensive ethnographic and statistical research on the impact of economic globalization on low-income women and urban labor markets in São Paulo, Brazil and the strategies of local actors to deal with the negative impacts. Her publications include chapters on this research in The Global City Reader edited by Neil Brenner and Roger Keil and Deciphering the Global edited by Saskia Sassen and an article entitled, "Sweating it in the Brazilian garment industry: Bolivian workers and economic global forces in São Paulo" in the journal Latin American Perspectives. Her new research is on Brazilian immigrants to Newark, New Jersey with a focus on the impacts of the current economic recession, return migration, and municipal governance and immigration. She received a PhD from the Urban Planning Department at Columbia University where she studied under Saskia Sassen and Peter Marcuse. Before returning to get her doctorate, Buechler worked at the United Nations Development Fund for Women on the issue of microcredit and women.

Assistant Professor of Physics Ursula Perez Salas, PhD, joined the Physics Department in January of 2009, in a joint position with Argonne National Laboratory, where she will pursue her interest in biological membranes and understand how they achieve their multitude of functions in the cell. Born in Mexico City, Perez Salas completed her PhD in Chemical Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Under Robert M. Briber, she studied the diffusion profile across the interface of crosslinked polymer films using neutron reflectivity and related this diffusion profile to the adhesion properties of similarly crosslinked polymer slabs. She then worked with Susan Krueger, Charles F. Majkrzak and Norm F. Berk at the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research involved obtaining the chemical profile of thin films of biological interest using a novel reflectivity technique from which it is possible to retrieve the phase and reconstruct the complex reflectivity amplitude of the film. In September of 2006 she joined Argonne National Laboratory as an Assistant Physicist in the Neutron and X-Ray Scattering Group within the Materials Science Division where she is participating in the development of next generation neutron scattering instrumentation. She has started a research program on biomembranes and the topics of research include understanding the affinity of cholesterol to different lipids, as cholesterol-lipid complexes are implicated in forming domains or rafts which are critical in trans-membrane signaling processes, as well as the problem of membrane protein crystallization, proven to be challenging as very few membrane protein structures have been obtained compared to their soluble counter parts.

Nicole Kazee received her PhD from Yale University in May 2009. She will be joining the faculty with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. Her research and teaching interests are in areas of American politics and policymaking, including state government, national institutions (the presidency and Congress), interest groups (particularly the business community), and the politics of social policy (e.g., health care and antipoverty programs). Her dissertation, entitled "Wal-Mart Welfare," examined the contemporary policymaking process in the states, using health care programs for the poor to explore the factors that shape variation in legislative decisions. In particular, the research highlighted the importance of institutional rules, fiscal norms, and the political role of employers. She has received full-year research fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Miller Center of Public Affairs, and PEO International.