Kerik Cox joined the Department of Plant Pathology at Geneva in August as an assistant professor. A tree-fruit and berry-crop pathologist, he has M.S. (2000) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees in plant pathology from the University of Georgia, Athens. He completed postdoctoral training at Clemson University, where he investigated the potential of Gastrodianin anti-fungal protein to confer tolerance to soilborne pathogens in herbaceous and woody plant model systems and characterized a summer fruit disease complex of “Babygold” peach varieties in the Piedmont region of South Carolina.
Giles Hooker is a new assistant professor with joint appointments in the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology and the Department of Statistical Science. He graduated from the Australian National University and earned a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University. His research concerns machine learning and functional data analysis with a special focus on statistical methods for differential equations.
Qiaoming Long has joined the Department of Animal Science as an assistant professor of vertebrate functional genomics. He holds a master's degree in animal genetics and breeding from Sichuan Agricultural University and a Ph.D. is in molecular genetics from the University of Edinburgh. He did postdoctoral research at the Medical College of Georgia and the Ottawa Health Research Institute and then worked as a research instructor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In his research he applies comparative genomics to the identification and functional characterization of novel genes involved in early development of the pancreas and other tissues.
Fouad Makki has been hired as an assistant professor of development sociology. He received a Ph.D. last year from Binghamton University. His research focuses on comparative colonial and developmental trajectories; the dynamics of nationalism and state formation; the making and unmaking of the developing world; and global socioeconomic restructurings.
Jason Mezey joined the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology in January. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he studied for his Ph.D. in genetics and evolutionary biology at Yale University as the recipient of a five-year National Institutes of Health Genetics Pre-Doctoral Training Grant. He also served as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biology, Florida State University, and at the Center for Population Biology and Section of Evolution and Ecology of the University of California, Davis. His expertise is in quantitative genetics and genomics, gene identification and mapping, and biological pathway modeling.
Troy Richardson, who was a visiting lecturer in CALS last year, was recently appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Education. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned an M.S.Ed. in philosophy of language, indigenous language education, and multicultural education. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Utah for his work in philosophy of education and Native American studies.
The Department of Plant Biology welcomed Michael Scanlon last spring as an associate professor of plant genetics. Before coming to Cornell, he served on the faculty of the University of Georgia and as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of California–Berkeley. He studies mechanisms of plant development and the evolution of plant morphology in maize, Arabidopsis, and tomato.
Adam Siepel has returned to his alma mater as an assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology. He graduated from CALS in 1994 with a B.S. in agricultural and biological engineering. He then worked for seven years as a software engineer in bioinformatics and earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of New Mexico and at the University of California–Santa Cruz, respectively. His current main focus is on developing computational methods for identifying functional elements, primarily in mammalian genomes, based on comparative sequence data.
Sofia Villenas joined the faculty last fall as an associate professor of education and Latino studies. She received a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California – Los Angeles, an M.S. from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she focused on educational anthropology and the social and cultural foundations of education.Her current areas of interest include Latino immigrant communities and family education; Latina mothers, race, ethnicity, and language in education; cultural studies; and Chicana/Latina feminism in education. She is co-editor of two books, including Chicana/Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology, which was recently published by SUNY Press.
Scott Williamson has been hired by the Department o f Biological Statistics and Computational Biology as an assistant professor after completing a postdoctoral fellowship there with Assistant Professor Carlos Bustamante. Williamson's research incorporates theoretical population genetics, statistical genomics, evolutionary theory, population genetics of human inherited diseases, and evolutionary dynamics of HIV populations.