Stevens welcomes new faculty to campus

HOBOKEN, N.J. ― With the 2009-2010 academic year under way, Stevens welcomed many new faculty members to campus this fall.

“Please join me in welcoming this diverse group of scholars to Stevens, and congratulating those who have recently been named to our faculty. These stellar faculty members will advance Stevens in the areas of education and research across all disciplines,” said George Korfiatis, Provost and University Vice President.

New faculty members include a mathematics professor who has received international recognition for groundbreaking work group theory; a specialist in managing project uncertainty; an expert in enterprise governance and enterprise systems; and a lecturer in urban politics, national political movements and racial identity.

Dawn Digrius joins the College of Arts and Letters as an Assistant Professor of History and the History of Science. She will teach introductory courses in European intellectual and cultural history and an upper-level course on Charles Darwin and the intellectual upheaval precipitated by his theories of evolution. She will also direct the Gender and Cultural Studies Program, an interdisciplinary minor degree program that explores issues of gender, culture, race, ethnicity and sexuality. Her research centers on the history of scientific ideas and methods and their impact on society. She recently contributed a chapter on botanist Gregor Mendel, a founding figure of modern genetics, to the book Icons of Evolution: An Encyclopedia of People, Evidence and Controversies. She is currently writing a chapter for an upcoming encyclopedia on Charles Darwin, focusing on the influence of his theories on the science of botany, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Before coming to Stevens, Digrius held teaching posts at Clemson University, Drew University and Fairleigh Dickinson University. She earned her undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees at Drew University, where her dissertation on the development of paleobotany in 19 th-century Europe won the university’s Mary Pennywitt Lester Prize in 2007 for Best Dissertation in History.

Karolina Glowacka has been appointed an Assistant Professor of Project Management at the Howe School of Technology Management, where she teaches an introductory course in the subject to graduate students. She specializes in managing project uncertainty, including devising built-in contingencies to cope with unplanned changes in resources, deadlines and operating environments, as well as more significant disruptions. She addresses decision-making in complex project settings, including multi-project environments that share – or in some cases compete for – resources such as workers. Much of her recent scholarly work focuses on boosting the efficiency of healthcare operations. She has developed models for optimizing outpatient sch eduling and improving patient flows in emergency rooms. A recent article in the Journal of the Operational Research Society describes a method of using data mining to shorten patient wait times while making efficient use of medical staff. Before coming to Stevens, Glowacka was a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University. She received a bachelor’s degree in Accounting from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a doctorate in Operations Research from the University of Pittsburgh.

Mo Mansouri has been appointed an Assistant Professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at the School of Systems and Enterprises, where he will teach two new courses in enterprise governance and enterprise systems. The former discipline examines the organizational evolution of enterprises and the taxonomy of self-governing networks of firms known as extended enterprise systems, while the latter develops systemic approaches for quantification of governance within complex environments such as financial, healthcare, transportation, and energy infrastructure. Mansouri joined Stevens as a Postdoctoral Associate in 2008. His current research focuses on resilience, the capacity within organizations and complex systems such as maritime transportation, to resume normal operations following significant disruption. He has recently written about systemic approaches to decision-making by stakeholders of maritime systems that rely on risk management methodologies, as well as methods for devising a governance framework for marine transportation. Prior to joining Stevens, Mansouri was a consultant to non-profit, philanthropic and development organizations such as the World Bank. His services ranged from evaluating the effectiveness of the management and operations systems of economic and social development programs to creating systemic tools to assist decision-making in strategic philanthropy. He received a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Tehran and a doctorate in Engineering Management from George Washington University.

Alexei Miasnikov, who won international recognition for his groundbreaking work in a branch of algebra known as group theory, has been appointed Director of the Mathematics department. He is best known for his proof, with colleague Olga Kharlampovich, of one of the longstanding, unsolved problems in group theory posed by the eminent logician, Alfred Tarski. He also specializes in algorithmic and model theoretical algebra, computational complexity and statistical methods in pure mathematics. His research has promising applications in the fast-evolving field of cryptography. Miasnikov has consulted with Stevens for the past three years on the design of the university’s new Algebraic Cryptography Center at the Schaefer School Engineering and Science. It was set up to investigate new techniques from computational algebra and their applications to practical problems in cryptography and cryptanalysis, such as securing transactions conducted over open communications channels on the Internet. Miasnikov will focus mainly on research programs within the mathematics department, in particular in applied algebra and cryptography. Ongoing research on these topics can be accessed via Web-based seminars run by the cryptography center, which are open to mathematicians worldwide. Miasnikov is currently the Canada Research Chair for combinatorial algebra, as well as a Microsoft Research Fellow. He is on the doctoral faculty of the City University of New York (CUNY) and is also affiliated with McGill University.

Gregory Morgan, a specialist in the history and philosophy of science and applied ethics, joins the College of Arts and Letters as an Associate Professor of Philosophy. His research probes the relationship between science and aesthetic and ethical values, by exploring the means by which scientists use values to guide their search for scientific knowledge and the way methodological values shape our understanding of facts. A recent scholarly paper examined the post-DNA research of Rosalind Franklin, the woman whose data were used (without her consent) by Francis Crick and James Watson to solve the structure of DNA. He is currently writing about the measurement of microbial biodiversity. In addition to teaching courses in environmental ethics and policy and the philosophy of biology, he will help establish a new master’s program that will explore ethical issues surrounding emerging technologies, technology-driven business, and environmental policy. Before coming to Stevens, Morgan was a professor at Spring Hill College, where he taught courses in logic, philosophy of science, theoretical and environmental ethics, and philosophy of economics, among others. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University as well as master’s degrees in Molecular Biology and the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh.

Yu Tao has joined the College of Arts and Letters as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. She will teach introductory courses on sociology and modern civilization, as well as an upper-level course on ethnic culture, including a close look at the cultural traditions of minority groups in the United States. Tao has written extensively on the status of ethnic and minority workers in the global science and engineering workforces as well as on their respective educational achievements. Her current research examines the career status and earnings of native- and foreign-born Asian scientists and engineers in the US, as well as the impact of gender on the earnings of scientists and engineers within different ethnic groups. She plans to develop upper-level and graduate courses that explore these topics. Tao earned master’s and doctoral degrees in the Sociology of Technology and Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a master’s in Educational Media and technology from Boston University.

Jonathan Wharton, a lecturer in urban politics, national political movements and racial identity, has been appointed an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research interests range from urban studies, with an emphasis on gentrification and redevelopment, to U.S. political history, to the role of policy in local, state and national governments. His scholarly paper, “Gentrification: The New Colonialism in the Modern Era,” was published in a recent issue of the Journal of the Oxford University Round Table: Forum on Public Policy. Wharton also serves as the program advisor for the Institute’s minor concentration in pre-law and public policy studies, a program he helped establish. He brings wide experience in the public policy arena to his research and teaching. As a consultant to the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, he helped elucidate policy positions and prepare legislation. He also worked as a research analyst for the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services and as a policy aide on Capitol Hill. Wharton received a master’s degree in Public Administration and a doctorate in Political Science from Howard University, as well as a master’s in History from Rutgers University.

Michael Zavlanos will join the Schaefer School of Engineering and Science in January 2010 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include a range of topics in the emerging discipline of network science, which explores links among physical and engineered networks in search of common principles that determine network behavior. He focuses on robotic and sensor networks, with applications in shape formation, communication maintenance and intruder detection, as well as on genetic and social networks, whose structure and operations respectively determine the way in which many diseases are formed and information is spread. He has recently co-authored scholarly papers on methods for identifying interactions in genetic networks, as well as on ways of maintaining connectivity and controlling structure in mobile robot networks. Zavlanos earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. He plans to teach an upper-level course at Stevens next spring on feedback control systems, systems whose output signals are looped back through them via a controller to obtain a desired behavior, as anti-lock braking systems prevent a car’s wheels from locking up and skidding.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870 and celebrating 140 Years of Innovation, Stevens Institute of Technology, The Innovation University, is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,234 undergraduate and 3,700 graduate students with more than 400 faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.

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