New Tenure Line Faculty 2011

 

Anthropology

 

Mitchell Hendrickson(PhD, University of Sydney) studies the medieval Khmer empire in Cambodia for the last decade. His research focuses specifically on Angkor, the region which served as the seat of the Khmer empire from the 9th- to 15th- centuries, and the roles that transport, ethnic minorities and industrial production served in the rise and fall of this important region.  Through his investigation of the Cambodian Middle Period and affiliation with the Greater Angkor Project, Hendrickson has made important strides in the field of archaeology and mended many of the gaps in understanding of the historical, cognitive and environmental factors that helped evolve the grandeur of the Khmer dynasty into modern Cambodian culture.

 

Biological Sciences

 

Hua Jin (PhD, University of Michigan) comes to UIC from Stanford University where she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. Jin’s research focuses primarily on molecular and cellular solutions to human pathologies. In herpostdoctoral fellowship at Stanford she investigated primary cilium, an eyelash-like organelle implicated in vertebrate development and genetic diseases such as polycystic kidney disease and mental retardation. Prior to this, she worked to identify the major contributors in plant endoplasmic reticulum quality control as a doctoral student at University of Michigan. Jin’s research has been published in such prestigious science journals as The Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Plant Cell and Molecular Cell.

 

Katheryn Warpeha(PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago) joined the Department of Biological Sciences as a research assistant professor in 2002. Warpeha’s research investigates the complex world of cellular signaling in plants, specifically in G-protein regulation. Funding through a National Science Foundation research grant allows Warpeha’s lab to determine the abiotic signals eliciting G-protein signaling and the resultant effects on organism development using the surrogate species Arabidopsis thaliana. Additionally, her studies of the G-protein regulation of cellular antioxidant levels have allowed for further elucidation of signaling pathways that affect seedling reactions to global changes in biotic and abiotic factors. Warpeha’s analysis as it deals with soybeans is sponsored by the Illinois Soybean Association. Her research has been published in numerous journals, including The Plant Cell and Plant Cell & Environment.

 

Communication

Eulalia Puig Abril (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the intersection of political communication as it pertains to controversial issues as well as new technologies, and political and civil participation. Recently, her work has evolved towards studying the connections between community and health-related issues through observation of such civic practices as blood donation. This research was published last year as a chapter in Civic Culture and Local Government (Universidad Nacional de Colombia Press, 2010). Puig Abril has traveled the world in her education, studying in countries such as Spain, Australia, Denmark and the United States. Her recently-defended dissertation assessed the consequences of partisan news exposure on the discussion of controversial issues, as opposed to a balanced news exposure. Bilingual in Spanish and English, Puig Abril’s work has been published in both languages in several book chapters and journals.

Economics

Marcus Casey (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) holds research interests in urban, labor and demographic economics, and applied microeconomics. Before coming to UIC, Casey was a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Economics at Duke University. Through the implementation of his dissertation and fellowship tenure, Casey is in the process of developing a research agenda which will address issues of segregation and racial transition in neighborhoods. Casey has lately published several papers addressing racial concerns in the housing market, addressing topics such as price discrimination, dynamic sorting equilibrium and the “neighborhood effect” on housing prices.

Ben Ost (PhD, Cornell University) specializes in the economics of education, labor economics and applied econometrics. His recent publication entitled “The Role of Peers and Grades in Determining Major Persistence in the Sciences” (Economics of Education Review, 2010) examines the relationship between peer quality in introductory classes and the likelihood of a student continuing on in the major. Ost is also working on several other publications related to teacher attrition and the impact of letter grades on student course selection. With his expertise in education economics, Ost additionally serves as a referee for the Economics of Education Review and the Journal of Human Resources.

 

English

Roger Reeves (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) joins the UIC Department of English in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. His poetry considers the traditions of American poetry as well as the race and gender issues that exist in this country today and in its history. A prolific writer, his poetry has been published in journals and anthologies such as the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, MELUS, Best New Poets 2009, and Poetry Magazine. Reeves has received numerous fellowships in poetry in his academic career including the Ruth Lilly and James A. Michner Fellowships. He is additionally a two-time Cave Canem Fellow, an organization which cultivates the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.

 

History

Jeffrey Sklansky’s (PhD, Columbia University) research revolves around American 19th- and 20th- century cultural and intellectual thought with emphasis in the history of political and economic thought. He is the author of The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), a recipient of the 2004 Cheiron Book Prize and has been profiled in History News Networks “Top Young Historians.” He is the author of several journal articles, reviews and book chapters, the most recent of which is titled “The Moneylender as Magistrate: Nicholas Biddle and the Ideological Origins of Central Banking in the United States” (Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 2010). Prior to his arrival at UIC, Sklansky was an associate professor and the interim chair of the Department of History at Oregon State University.

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science

Ryan Martin (PhD, Purdue University) studies topics in statistics such as empirical Bayesian analysis, the foundations of statistics, high-dimensional interference, mixture models and Monte Carlo methods. His recent research analyzes interferential models for variable selection in regression and in nonparametric problems. Martin has published in Statistical Science, Frontiers in Applied and Computational Mathematics and The Annals of Statistics, and in his time at Purdue was awarded a VIRGE fellowship for teacher training.  

 

Before arriving to UIC this fall, Cheng Ouyang (PhD, Northwestern University) was most recently a Golomb Assistant Professor at Purdue University. Ouyang’s current research focuses on stochastic analysis and its applications to partial differential equations, differential geometry and mathematical finance. The central theme of his research is stochastic differential equations involving Malliavin calculus, Gaussian and Levy processes. His research has been published in the Journal of Functional Analysis, Stochastic Processes and their Applications and Mathematical Finance. Ouyang has been invited to speak at probability seminars across the country; his most recent talk at Purdue University was titled “Short-time Kernel Expansion for Solutions of SDE’s Driven by Fractional Brownian Motion.”

 

Political Science

Cedric Johnson (PhD, University of Maryland – College Park) comes to UIC from Hobart and William Smith Colleges where he was an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and director of The Fisher Center for the Study of Women and Men. His research interests in American politics and political thought alongside racial and ethnic polities have led to three book publications. One novel, entitled Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), was a recipient of the 2008 W.E.B. DuBois Outstanding Book Award at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and received nominations for the 2008 Ralph Bunch Book Award and the 2009 J. David Greenstone Award. Johnson also has published numerous journal articles, book chapters and reviews, and essays concerning the topics of racial and gender politics.

 

Petia Kostadinova (PhD, Florida State University) researches comparative politics and comparative political economy, East European politics and the European Union. Her current projects can be divided into two main categories: one category focuses on the impact of the European Union on non-member states. The other category concerns the role of public preferences in shaping social and economic policies in the post-communist countries. She is the PI or co-PI of several EU-funded grants to provide outreach or new courses on the European Union. Before coming to UIC, Kostadinova was the associate director of the Center for European Studies and was an assistant professor for the Department of Political Science at Florida State University.

Psychology

Courtney Bonam (PhD, Stanford University) studies the role race plays, not as a physical trait, but as a dynamic set of social processes. In her research, she investigates how a place or neighborhood can become imbued with racial meaning and how this meaning contributes to racial inequality. In addition, she analyzes the perceptions and experiences of biracial people to illustrate the dynamism of race and how it leads to both positive and negative outcomes for the group. She has published and presented her research concerning multiracial relationships and racial location discrimination at numerous symposia. Before coming to UIC, Bonam held appointments as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and as a research fellow at Wangari Maathai Center for Economics, Educational, and Environmental Design.

Sociology/African American Studies

Andrew Clarno (PhD, University of Michigan) first came to the Department of Sociology in 2008 as a visiting assistant professor. His research focuses include globalization and empire, urban and political sociology of Africa and the Middle East, race and ethnicity, and nationalism and state formation. In 2011 he won the Civic Engagement Research Award for his National Science Foundation-funded research on the “Interplay between Public and Private Actors in Shaping Local Immigration.” For the 2011-12 year Clarno has received a Russell Sage Foundation grant for his research entitled “New Destinations in an Old Gateway.” In addition to these prestigious grants, Clarno has published extensively in journals and book chapters. With his expertise in race relations, Clarno has been invited to numerous conferences and presentations across the country for segregation and border politics issues.