The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.
Richard Mabbs joins the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned a Ph.D. and B.Sc. from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. His research falls under the broad umbrella of physical chemistry and focuses on low energy electron transfer induced processes, probed at the molecular level in real time. This work involves the initiation of an electron transfer under closely controlled energetic conditions using an ultra-fast laser pulse, followed by probing of the progress of the reaction via photoelectron imaging of the intermediates and products. The goal is to reveal the underlying, fundamental details of these processes, which have relevance in a diverse range of fields including biology, nanotechnology and plasma processes.
Corinna Treitel joins the Department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999. She has taught at Wellesley College and Claremont-McKenna College. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2004-05. Her interests include modern German history and the history of science and medicine. In 2004, her book A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern appeared with Johns Hopkins University Press. Her research concerns the history of natural foods and radical politics in Central Europe.
Guy Ortolano joins the Department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned a Ph.D. in 2005 from Northwestern University, where he spent two years as a member of the Society of Fellows. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Britain, with interests in the history of literary studies and the history of science. His research examines the cultural politics of disciplinary quarrelling between the humanities and the sciences (the so-called “two cultures”), and his next project will explore the rhetorical appeal of “novelty” in the context of Britain’s retreat from empire.
Brett Kessler joins the Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1999 in linguistics and studies psycholinguistics of reading and spelling. He is particularly interested in computational and statistical approaches to language, especially in the fields of phonology, historical linguistics, and the lexicon. His research has also explored how to statistically test the historical connections between languages.