printable versionIntroducing 44 scholars who have recently joined the faculty
Every year around this time, Stanford Report welcomes new faculty members to campus by publishing brief summaries of their academic interests. The following appointments were made roughly over the past year, but the list is probably incomplete; some new faculty may not be mentioned because they arrived on campus toward the end of 2005 or have only recently accepted job offers. In any case, if you are a newcomer to the Stanford professoriate and are not mentioned in this article, please let us know: Send e-mail to John Sanford at jsanford@stanford.edu or call 736-2151.
Ran Abramitzky, assistant professor of economics, earned his doctorate from Northwestern University in 2005. His research interests include economic history and the economics of contracts and organizations.
Nick Bloom, assistant professor of economics, came from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. His main fields of interest include labor, applied industrial organization and macroeconomics.
Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering, was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania before joining Stanford. Using silicon integrated circuits to simulate how neurons compute, he links the seemingly disparate fields of electronics and computer science with neurobiology and neurology.
Lawrence Bobo, the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor and director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Program in African and African American Studies, comes from Harvard University. His research interests include race, ethnicity, politics and social inequality.
Simon Brendle, assistant professor of mathematics, came to Stanford from Princeton University in the spring of 2005. His area of expertise is differential geometry, especially the study of the deformation of surfaces by their curvature.
Jennifer Cochran, assistant professor of bioengineering, came to Stanford from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research program interfaces chemistry, biology and engineering to solve problems of biomedical relevance.
Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, was concurrently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for two years before coming to Stanford. An expert in the physics and chemistry of nanoscale materials, Cui holds four patents and in 2004 was selected by MIT's Technology Review magazine as one of the world's top 100 young innovators.
Karl Deisseroth, assistant professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, develops optical and stem-cell-based neuroengineering technologies for noninvasive imaging and control of brain circuits as they operate within living intact tissue in real time. Outcomes of this work may include fundamental new conceptualizations of neurological and psychiatric disorders, a wealth of basic neuroscience and bioengineering insights, and potent, specific circuit-modulation interventions for treatment of disease.
Michele Elam, associate professor of English, earned her doctorate from the University of Washington. A former fellow at Stanford's Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Elam's research interests include African American literature and theory and mixed race studies.
John Galayda, professor (research) at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, directs construction of SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source, a revolutionary new synchrotron X-ray source expected to deliver "first light" to experimenters in 2009. His research interests include the manipulation and control of electron beams using laser light, characterization of synchrotron radiation from a free electron laser and optimization of beam-based feedback stabilization systems.
Kay Giesecke, assistant professor of management science and engineering, joined Stanford in 2005 after teaching financial engineering at Cornell University's School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. On the faculty of Stanford's Financial Mathematics Program, he models financial risk, in particular credit risk, which is the distribution of financial losses due to changes in the credit quality of a firm in a financial contract (bankruptcy, for example).
Or Gozani, assistant professor of biological sciences, earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1999. His research focuses on how proteins regulate chromosome formation under normal conditions and in response to genotoxins, as well as the relationship between these activities and tumor suppression.
Janos Hajdu, professor at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, comes to Stanford from the Institute of Biochemistry at Uppsala University in Sweden. He is world-renowned for structural studies of single biological molecules at atomic resolution using coherent X-rays. His research is seminal in developing the theory, approach and instrumentation that will enable the use of the world's first X-ray free electron laser (the Linac Coherent Light Source), which is being built at SLAC for these experiments.
John W. Hatfield, assistant professor of political economy at the Graduate School of Business, earned his doctorate at Stanford last year. His main research focus is the economic policy and outcome effects of political institutions, particularly federalism.
John Haymaker, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, earned his doctorate from Stanford in 2004. He studies formal theories for design and construction processes and ways to implement these theories as computer models that can be applied to industry to improve sustainability.
Cathy Heaney, associate professor of psychology and of human biology, came from Ohio State University. Heaney's main area of expertise is occupational health and safety, with a special emphasis on occupational stress and work/family issues.
Tamar Herzog, professor of history, came to Stanford from the University of Chicago. She specializes in the legal and institutional history of colonial Latin America and early modern Spain.
Roger T. Howe, professor of electrical engineering, came to Stanford from UC-Berkeley, where he was chair of the Electrical Engineering Division and the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, he is an expert in micro/nanofabricated sensors, actuators and systems.
Joy Ishii, assistant professor of finance at the Graduate School of Business, earned her doctorate from Harvard in 2005. Her research interests include industrial organization and corporate finance.
Jennifer Kohler, assistant professor of chemistry and, by courtesy, of molecular pharmacology, earned her doctorate from Yale University in 2000. She studies how carbohydrate structures are assembled in cells and hopes to use this information to control cell synthesis.
Vladlen Koltun, assistant professor of computer science, was a postdoctoral researcher at UC-Berkeley before coming to Stanford in 2005. He designs algorithms—procedures for solving problems, particularly problems best solved using computers—and specializes in algorithms for geometric problems, which arise in areas including computer graphics, robotics, combinatorial optimization and database management.
David F. Larcker, professor of accounting at the Graduate School of Business, came from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of accounting at the Wharton School. His research interests include executive compensation, corporate governance, managerial accounting and applied econometrics.
Philip Levis, assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, comes to Stanford from UC-Berkeley. He researches embedded wireless networks, including programming languages, operating systems, network protocols, algorithms and applications.
Helen Longino, professor of philosophy, previously was a professor of philosophy and of women's studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include philosophy of science, social epistemology, feminist philosophy and the development of a social approach to scientific knowledge.
David MacFarlane, professor of physics, comes to SLAC from UC-San Diego. His expertise is in experimental particle physics, and he is presently the spokesperson for the BABAR experiment, a 600-person international collaboration studying matter-antimatter asymmetries at the SLAC PEP-II asymmetric energy B Factory.
Lawrence C. Marshall, the David and Stephanie Mills Director of Clinical Education and associate dean for public interest and clinical education at Stanford Law School, came from Northwestern University School of Law. Marshall specializes in capital punishment, clinical legal practice and appellate practice, legal ethics and wrongful convictions.
David Mazieres, assistant professor of computer science and, by courtesy, of electrical engineering, joined Stanford in September from New York University. An expert in computer operating systems and security, he works on distributed storage systems, on the Coral peer-to-peer content distribution network and on various anti-censorship, privacy-enhancing and anti-spam systems. A major focus of his current work is designing and building operating systems to contain and isolate untrusted code.
Lynn Meskell, professor of cultural and social anthropology, came from Columbia University. Her current research and teaching interests include a broad range of topics, such as Egyptian archaeology, South African heritage, gender and feminism, and ethics.
Subhasish Mitra, assistant professor of electrical engineering, was at Intel Corp. from 2001 to 2005 as a principal engineer and developed technologies that have seen proliferation in more than 40 Intel products and the chip-design industry as a whole. His Stanford research focuses on ways to design robust computer systems and information appliances, and covers various aspects of very-large-scale integration design and testing, computer-aided design, computer architecture and design in future nanotechnologies.
Marcyliena Morgan, associate professor of communication, came from Harvard. Morgan's research focuses on youth, gender, language, culture and identity, sociolinguistics, discourse and interaction.
Aki Murata,assistant professor in the School of Education, last year worked as an acting assistant professor at Stanford and as a postdoctoral research assistant at Mills College. Murata's research focuses on how elementary students learn mathematics and, in turn, how teachers understand how their students learn.
Harikesh Nair, assistant professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business, earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2005. His areas of expertise include technology products, network effects in technology markets and pricing. Nair also is interested in the videogame industry.
Sridhar Narayanan, assistant professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business, earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2005. His research interests include empirical analysis of consumer and firm behavior.
Michael Ostrovsky, assistant professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business, earned his doctorate from Harvard last year. His areas of expertise include game theory, industrial organization and finance.
Gerard Padro i Miquel, assistant professor of political economy at the Graduate School of Business, earned his doctorate from MIT in 2005. His main areas of expertise are economic and political institutions in developing countries.
Marc Pauly, assistant professor of philosophy, earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of Amsterdam. His specialties are logic, group decision-making and game theory.
Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences, earned his doctorate in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard in 2005. With a background in paleontology and the history of life, Payne uses rock and fossil records to study the environmental and ecological factors controlling patterns of extinction, survival and species diversification.
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, associate professor of classics, previously taught in the Department of Classics at the University of Crete. She specializes in Greek lyric poetry, aesthetics and dance.
Pantaleo Raimondi, professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, comes from L'Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Frascati, Italy. He is an expert on particle accelerator physics and has been instrumental in the performance upgrades of the Stanford Linear Collider, the Large Electron Positron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and the DAPHNE accelerator in Frascati.
Alberto Salleo, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, comes to Stanford from the Palo Alto Research Center. His expertise is in novel materials and processing techniques for large-area and flexible electronic and photonic devices.
Baba Shiv, associate professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business, came from the University of Iowa. His research includes consumer decision-making, decision neuroscience (with a specific emphasis on the role of emotion in decision-making), the neurological bases of emotions and non-conscious processes in decision-making.
Norman Spaulding, professor of law and the John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar, was a visiting professor at Stanford last year and taught at UC-Berkeley. He earned his law degree from Stanford in 1997. His main areas of expertise include legal ethics, legal history and civil procedure.
Azadeh Tabazadeh, associate professor of geophysics and of civil and environmental engineering, earned her doctorate in physical chemistry from UCLA in 1994 and was a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center from 1997 to 2005. Her research interests include global change science and education, atmospheric chemistry, and the impacts of human activity on aerosol and cloud properties.
András Vasy, associate professor of mathematics, joins Stanford from MIT. His main area of expertise is partial differential equations, such as equations describing wave propagation or scattering of quantum mechanical particles.
Blakey Vermeule, associate professor of English, came to Stanford from Northwestern University. Her research interests include British literature from 1660 to 1800, cognitive approaches to literature, major British poets, postcolonial fiction and the history of the novel.