University Scholars Council
Roger Allen
Professor of Arabic Language and Literature
Roger Allen received his D. Phil. from Oxford University. He has specializes in two major areas: Arabic literature, with particular reference to narrative and drama; and Arabic language pedagogy. Besides a major study on the Arabic novel and an anthology of critical writings, entitled Modern Arabic Literature, he has published over thirty articles on Arabic literature. He has produced a number of translations of modern Arabic narrative, including Najib Mahfuz's Mirrors and Autumn Quail, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's The Ship, Abd al-rahman Munif's Endings, and collections of short stories by Najib Mahfuz and Yusuf Idris. As guest-editor of many of journals he has also encouraged the publication of a large number of other translations.
Rita Barnard
Associate Professor of English
Director of the Program in Comparative Literature
Rita Barnard received her Ph.D. from Duke University. Her first book, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance, was published by Cambridge University Press and she has published articles in such journals as American Literature, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Novel. Rita Barnard teaches courses on a variety of topics in twentieth-century literature, including modernism, postmodernism, and colonial and postcolonial literature.
Maja Bucan
Associate Professor of Genetics in Psychiatry
Maja Bucan's research concerns the characterization of large chromosomal regions, homologous in mouse and humans, using a combination of genetic and physical mapping approaches. The ultimate goal of these studies is the identification of mouse mutations that are potential models for human genetic diseases. Her research falls into two main lines. One concerns the generation of functional chromosomal maps of the mouse genome while the goal of the second project is the localization and identification of genes underlying behavior in mammals.
Robin Clark
Associate Professor of Cognitive Science
Faculty Member of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
Robin Clark received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include mathematical linguistics, formal semantics and learnability.
Thadious Davis
Gerealdine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought
Professor of English
Thadious Davis received her Ph.D. from Boston University. Her research interests include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issues of race, region, and gender. She has published two books on William Faulkner, most recently Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. Her current interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction. Her biography, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, reflects her interest in life writing. She is co-editor of the book series "Gender and American Culture."
Dennis DeTurck
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
Davidson Kennedy Professor of Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences
Dennis DeTurck received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include partial differential equations and differential geometry.
Robert Engs
Associate Professor of History
Robert Engs received his Ph.D. from Yale University. 1972. His primary teaching areas are African American history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the history of the South. His research focuses on the postbellum era, specifically the responses of the freedpeople and white Southerners to emancipation. He has a special interest in the roles of education, religion, and of missionaries in the emancipation process. His two books, Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Va., 1861-1890 and Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited; Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839-1893 reflect his interests. He has also written on slavery, the emancipation process during the Civil War, postbellum Southern politics and economics, American missionary work at home and abroad, and on the civil rights era.
Warren Ewens
Professor of Biology, Emeritus
Warren Ewens received his Ph.D. from Australian National University. His research interests cover all areas of mathematical, statistical and theoretical genetics. One of his main areas of interest is evolutionary population genetics, in particular, statistical and mathematical aspects of the population genetics theory. One specific field is phylogenetic tree reconstruction Another field of interest is the statistical theory arising from the recognition of the stochastic, or random, aspect of gene replacement processes.
Peter Fader
Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor
Professor of Marketing
Pete Fader's research focuses on using data generated by new information technology, such as retail point-of-sale scanners and the Internet, to understand and forecast repeat purchasing patterns in a variety of different domains. Recent projects include predictive and explanatory models for electronic commerce (e.g., forecasting models for website usage and purchasing behavior) consumer packaged goods industries (e.g., models of trial and repeat for new products), and the music industry (e.g., understanding the role of radio airplay in generating album sales).
Antonio Feros
Associate Professor of History
Dr. Feros received his Ph.D. in European history from the Johns Hopkins University. He teaches courses in political, cultural, intellectual and imperial history. Dr. Feros has written on subjects ranging from ethnic relations in the early modern Spanish empire to ideas and images of kingship, and political and court cultures in early modern Europe. He is the author of Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598-1621 (2000) and is currently working on two new projects: national and ethnic identities in the early modern Spanish World, and the constitution and construction of the Spanish empire.
Steven Fluharty
Professor of Pharmacology
Professor of Animal Biology
Vice Provost for Research
Steven Fluharty received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of Ang II action in the brain. In particular, radio ligand binding techniques, quantitative autoradiography, and immunocytochemistry are used to determine the localization of AngII receptors in the central nervous system, and biochemical techniques are then used to determine receptor coupling to ion phosphatidylinositol hydrolysis, in cultured neurons. Recent efforts include purification of neuronal AngII receptors, the development of receptor-directed polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies, as well as the cloning of the genes which encode for these receptors.
Richard James Gelles
Dean, School of Social Policy and Practice
Richard James Gelles holds the Joanne and Raymond Welsh Chair of Child Welfare and Family Violence in the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise is in child welfare and domestic violence. He was influential in the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.
Louis Girifalco
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
Louis Girifalco received his Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. His research interests include the statistical mechanics of solids and the theory of cohesion.
Sarah Barringer Gordon
Professor of Law and History Sally Gordon received a JD and MAR in ethics from Yale University, and a PhD in history from Princeton. She works in the law, religion and history, on topics ranging from abortion to polygamy, prayer to zoning. Her first book, The Mormon Question was published in 2002. She is currently at work on a second book on law and religion in the twentieth century.
Herman Gluck
Professor of Mathematics
Herman Gluck received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His research interests include differential geometry, dynamical systems, and topology of manifolds.
Greg Guild
Professor of Biology
His current research focuses on the cell biology of cellular shape. Polarized actin filaments are common in eukaryotic cells and provide the scaffolding for cell movement and cell shape. The Guild lab uses Drosophila bristle cells as a model system to investigate actin bundle assembly and cell shape architecture by employing molecular and genetic tools to modify actin bundle assembly and confocal and electron microscopic techniques to evaluate the cell biological consequences at high temporal and spatial resolution.
Ruben Gur
Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry
Director of the Brain Behavior Laboratory
Dr. Gur received his B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1970 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology (Clinical) from Michigan State University in 1971 and 1973, respectively. He did Postdoctoral training with E.R. Hilgard at Stanford University and came to Penn as Assistant Professor in 1974. His research has been in the study of brain and behavior in healthy people and patients with brain disorders, with a special emphasis on exploiting neuroimaging as experimental probes. His work has documented sex differences, aging effects, and abnormalities in regional brain function associated with schizophrenia, affective disorders, stroke, epilepsy, movement disorders and dementia. His work has been supported by grants from the NSF, NIH, NIMH, NIA, NINDS, private foundations (Spencer, MacArthur, EJLB) and industry (BioLogic, Novo, Pfizer).
William Hamilton
Ralph Landau Professor of Management and Technology
Professor of Management, Operations and Information Management, and Systems Engineering
Director of the Jerome Fisher Management and Technology Program
Dr. Hamilton received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1967. His main research interests are technology strategy and planning; entrepreneurship, and technological innovation. Dr. Hamilton has received numerous professional and teaching awards, including being a White House Fellow, receiving the Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award for Teaching Excellence, the David W. Hauck Award for Excellence in Teaching Undergraduates, the Undergraduate Division Excellence in Teaching Award and the Outstanding Teaching Award for distinguished undergraduate teaching.
Rebecca Huss-Ashmore
Professor of Anthropology
Rebecca Huss-Ashmore is a medical anthropologist with a background in counseling and human biology. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the editor of six books and the author of numerous articles on health and nutrition in populations dealing with environmental and economic change. Her current work focuses on the semiotics of healing and the importance of language, especially narrative, in healing and in making sense of illness. She has spent the last six summers doing research on cosmetic surgery as a healing system. She is now working on a book on narrative and the role of stories in creating a positive self-image for cosmetic surgery patients.
Robert Inman
Miller-Sherrerd Professor
Professor of Finance, Business and Public Policy, Real Estate and Economics
Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
Dr. Inman received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research areas are public finance, political economy, and urban fiscal policy. He has current projects on economic federalism in the United States, Europe, Russia, and South Africa.
A.T. Charlie Johnson, Jr.
Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Secondary Appointments in Electrical and Systems Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering
Member of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter and the Institute of Medicine and Engineering
Charlie Johnson received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990. His main research interests are novel transport phenomena that emerge in nanometer-scale systems and materials, and nanotechnology in general. Projects include carbon nanotube electronics, bio-inspired molecular electronics, and carbon nanotube-based biomolecular detectors. His honors and awards include a David and Lucille Packard Science and Engineering Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for distinguished teaching at Penn.
Sarah H. Kagan PhD, RN
Professor of Gerontological Nursing
Secondary Faculty, Department of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery Clinical Nurse Specialist, Abramson Cancer Center
Sarah Kagan is a practicing gerontological nurse whose research and scholarship focuses on the experience of illness, particularly cancer, for older adults. In addition to faculty appointments in the Schools of Nursing and Medicine, Professor Kagan practices in the Abramson Cancer Center and enjoys an ongoing collaboration with the School of Veterinary Medicine. She received her PhD from the University of California, San Francisco where her training including social and behavioral science and qualitative methods. Her current research employs variations in narrative, interactionist methods to develop understandings of public and private identity in women over 50 who have cancer, embodied aesthetics in young and old women and men who have oral tongue cancer, and the meaning and experience of pet ownership for cancer survivors.
Howard Kunreuther
Cecilia Yen Koo Professor
Professor of Decision Sciences and Business and Public Policy
Co-Director, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center
Dr. Kunreuther received his Ph.D. from MIT. His current research interests include studying ways that society can deal more effectively with problems of managing catastrophic risks, especially in determining the siting of noxious facilities. He is also concerned with how insurance can be utilized to deal with natural hazards and environmental risk more effectively through a better understanding of the concepts of insurability.
Mitchell Litt
Professor of Bioengineering
Professor of Chemical Engineering
Dr. Litt received his D.Eng.Sc. from Columbia University. His research interests include biotransport, cellular bioengineering, and biorheology, with special emphasis on the properties of mucus, blood, and other body fluids. The research is focused on the development of diagnostic instrumentation for medicine and dentistry.
Ponzy Lu
Professor of Biological Chemistry
Chair, College Biochemistry Program
Director, Roy and Diana Vagelos Program for the Molecular Life Sciences
Dr. Lu pursed doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from there in 1971. His current research is on macromolecular complexes involved in gene regulation at transcription through molecular biology and molecular spectroscopy. Both nuclear spin labels and fluorescent chromophores are being employed for proteins and DNA recognition sequences. In addition to the biochemical and genetic methods, there is a major use of chemical synthesis of defined DNA sequences and analogs.
Richard Marston
James R.F. Guy Professor of Finance
Professor of Economics
Director, Weiss Center for International Financial Research
Dr. Marston received a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His main research interests are international financial markets and foreign exchange risk management. Dr. Marston's current projects involve the exchange rate exposure of manufacturing firms as well as the Wharton derivative survey.
Educated at Columbia University (humanities and sciences) and Harvard University (technology and city and regional planning), Martin Meyerson's first academic appointment was as an assistant professor of the social sciences at the University of Chicago. From there, in early 1952 he became an associate professor of land and city planning at Penn and then a full professor. At the age of 34, he became the first tenured Frank Backus Williams professor of city and regional planning at Harvard, and soon the director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard. Subsequently dean of the College of Environmental Design and professor at Berkeley, he became the interim chancellor there. Later, from the presidency of the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to Penn in mid-1970 and served as president until early 1981.
Max Mintz
Professor of Computer and Information Science
Co-Chair of the University Scholars Council
Dr. Mintz's research program focuses on developing robust algorithms for decision-making under uncertainty with applications to machine perception and robotics. Recent and current research topics include: robust fixed-geometry confidence regions for multivariate location parameters; algorithms for robust multisensor fusion; algorithms for set-valued state estimation with performance guarantees; applications of confidence sets in mobile robotics and computational vision.
Anne Norton
Alfred L. Cass Term Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature
Dr. Norton's most recent books are Bloodrites of the Poststructuralists and the forthcoming 95 theses on Politics, Culture, and Method. She has also written Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture, Reflections on Political Identity and Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture. She is always in interested in revolution, and is now working on questions of time, ethics and politics, and on Muslim political thought.
Robert A. Rescorla
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Psychology
Dr. Rescorla received his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He studies elementary learning processes, particularly Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning. He is best known for a formal model of Pavlovian conditioning (the Rescorla-Wagner model), which is the mostly widely accepted theory of elementary associative learning. He is a former Dean of the College.
Harvey Rubin
Associate Professor of Medicine
Dr. Rubin's research focuses on a general model for the mechanism of inhibition of serine proteases by serine protease inhibitors (serpins) based on site directed mutagenesis, atomic resolution crystal structures and NMR spectroscopic analyses. The model has led to a general description of necessary and sufficient criteria for the design of specific interactions between the inhibitor and the enzyme. In order to study the serpin/enzyme system his lab has developed cloning and expression systems for human serine proteases and protease inhibitors. The researchers are now in the position to carry out detailed investigations of the structure and function of both components of this system.
Larry Silver
Farquhar Professor of the History of Art
Larry Silver (Art History; Ph.D. Harvard, 1974) has been at Penn for eight years, coming from earlier stints at Berkeley and Northwestern. He specializes in old master paintings and prints, especially from the Netherlands and Germany, and his new book (2005; Penn Press) discusses pictorial types,e.g. landscapes, emerging within the early art market. He has also been active in researching modern Jewish artists, and produced an exhibition at Penn on this subject in 2001. Current research projects include a book on Rembrandt's religion and research on Bosch and Bruegel. He also delights in teaching the departmental intro class, "The Rise of Modern Visual Media."
John Trueswell
Professor of Psychology
John Trueswell's research focuses on understanding how language is learned and processed by children and adults. His research emphasizes the study of language comprehension in real time by examining how people make rapid decisions about the intended meaning of a utterance as each word is heard. Much of his lab's research is done by recording people's eye movements as they hear spoken descriptions of their surrounding visual world. In this way, a moment-by-moment record can be obtained of what the listener thinks the speech is referring to in the world. A central thrust of this research is to understand how we rapidly coordinate linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge to determine the meaning of utterances.
Rogers M. Smith
Professor of Political Science
Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches American constitutional law and American political thought, with special interests in issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequalities. He has published over 100 essays and five books. His 1997 book Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History received six “best book” awards and was a Finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Smith received a B.A. degree from James Madison College, Michigan State University in 1975 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1980.
Jan van der Spiegel
Professor of Electrical Engineering
Chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering
Director of the Center for Sensor Technologies
Professor Van der Spiegel received his Ph.D. from the University of Leuven in Belgium. His research interests are in analog and digital integrated circuits for intelligent sensors, data acquisition and sensory data processing systems. His sensor work focuses on new approaches to vision sensors that are able to detect certain features such as motion, line orientation, line stops, and polarization difference. He is currently also working on acoustic-phonetic feature extraction for automatic speech recognition. A related aspect of Dr. Van der Spiegel's research is low-power, low-voltage and low-noise integrated circuits for sensors and data acquisition systems. Dr. Van der Spiegel is also interested in introducing web-assisted learning, in particular in the laboratory.
Flaura Koplin Winston
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics
Director, TraumaLink at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Dr. Winston, a former University Scholar, received her PhD in Bioengineering and MD from the University of Pennsylvania. An internationally recognized leader in injury prevention, Dr. Winston is the founder and Director of TraumaLink, the interdisciplinary pediatric injury research center (traumalink.chop.edu). Her focus for the past decade has been on the predominant mechanism of childhood injury death, traffic crashes. Applying her background in biomechanical engineering, pediatric medicine, and public health, she has systematically built a scientific foundation for evidence-based childhood injury prevention and treatment. She heads multiple research projects including Partners for Child Passenger Safety, a national study on child passenger safety funded by State Farm Insurance, and a study of posttraumatic stress disorder following pediatric traffic-related injury funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Health Resources Administration, U.S Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Winston has received awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Governors' Highway Safety Association, and Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
Michael Zuckerman
Professor of History
Dr. Zuckerman received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. He is still incorrigibly committed to coming at History that way. He teaches courses in popular culture, national character, human nature, and religion. He has written on subjects from democracy to family life to business, from American identity to the Constitution to religion, from the university to children's rights to race to the role of ideas in history, and on people from Thomas Jefferson to P. T. Barnum to Oliver North, from Horatio Alger to Lewis Mumford to Doctor Spock. He is now finishing the editing of a collaboration of historians and developmental psychologists on the history of childhood from the middle ages to the new millennium.
Ex-Officio Members
Director, Student Financial Aid
Lee Stetson
Dean, Undergraduate Admissions
Harriet Joseph
Associate Director, University Scholars
Linda Wiedmann
Associate Director, Benjamin Franklin Scholars
Last updated on August 28, 2007