SDSU Marketing & Communications-SDSU Back-to-School Resources for the Media

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SDSU Back-to-School Resources for Media

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New Faculty — Fall 2007

Accountancy

Damon M. Fleming, Ph.D. (Virginia Tech 2006) Professor Fleming’s primary teaching interests are in the financial and management accounting areas at both the undergraduate and MBA level. On the research dimension, his activities span many areas of accounting, including financial accounting, accounting education, taxation, and management accounting and controls. Professor Fleming earned his B.S. and M.S.A. from San Diego State University, is a Certified Management Accountant (CMA), and is an active member of the American Accounting Association, California Society of CPAs, and the Institute of Management Accountants. Prior to entering academia, Professor Fleming was a principal at a venture capital firm in southern California.
Steven L. Gill, Ph.D. (University of Massachusetts, 2007) Steven Gill will be an assistant professor in SDSU's School of Accountancy. He received a BS in Accounting from the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL) and a MS in Taxation from Northeastern University (Boston, MA). Prior to entering academia, Professor Gill worked twelve years in the field of accounting including roles in public accounting, internal audit, corporate accounting and ultimately, vice president of finance. Professor Gill’s research interests include a concentration in taxation including mutual funds and college savings (“529”) plans and wider interests in corporate internal control structure and weaknesses, management overconfidence and earnings quality. Professor Gill has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and his teaching interests include taxation and financial accounting.

Anthropology

Frederick Conway, Ph.D. (American, 1978) Dr. Conway is a cultural anthropologist with a focus on applied anthropology, environmental anthropology, and religion. After his dissertation research on religion and health in Haiti, he conducted research on agroforestry there. He managed a large agroforestry project in Haiti, and has consulted on natural resource projects for the United Nations, Peace Corps, USAID, and various non-governmental organizations. His current research interests include a study of three oasis communities in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and forest-community relations in southern Chile, focusing on the market for firewood, the chief source of energy in the region.
Matthew Lauer,Ph.D. (UCSB, 2005) Dr. Lauer is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in environmental, population, indigenous rights, and sustainability issues in Latin America and Oceania. He explores these topics through various perspectives including human ecology, political ecology, geo-spatial science, and applied anthropology. Dr. Lauer gained his first experience in community-based development and environmental research as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. At present, he has two active research initiatives underway: one in Lowland South America among the Ye’kwana people of southern Venezuela and another multidisciplinary effort in Western Province, Solomon Islands, where GIS, remote sensing, and ethnographic methods are being used to study human resource use and develop sustainable coastal zone management programs.

Art, Design & Art History

Matthew Hebert, MFA (California College of the Arts and Crafts, 2001) Mr. Hebert is an artist engaged in the development of sculptural works of furniture. His interests include interactivity, relational forms, and the integration technology into his sculptures. His sculptural furniture pieces create possibilities for new forms of interaction with objects, the environment, and other people. His work is concerned with the technologization of the built environment and its impact on our culture and our personal experiences. Currently, he is creating a body of work that incorporates simple solar powered mechanisms and robotics and deals with the conception of craft in our digital times.

Biology

Rulon Clark, Ph.D.(Cornell University, 2004) Dr. Clark has broad interests in animal behavior and ecology, and often works at the interface of the two disciplines. Past projects have focused on foraging behavior, dietary ecology, predator-prey interactions, and conservation biology. His current interests include predator-prey communication, sociality and mating systems in reptiles, and examining interactions between behavior and population genetic structure in fragmented habitats.
Kelly Doran, Ph.D. (UCSD, 1998) Dr. Doran is a microbiologist specializing in host-pathogen interactions. Her principle area of interest includes the pathogenesis of Group B Streptococcal meningitis. Specifically she studies interactions between Group B Streptococcus (GBS) and brain microvascular endothelial cells (BMEC) that comprise the human blood-brain barrier. Her research seeks to identify GBS genes and gene products responsible for BMEC cellular invasion and to characterize the innate immune response of the blood-brain barrier to bacterial pathogens.
Roberta A. Gottlieb, M.D. (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 1984) Dr. Gottlieb is the Director of the SDSU BioScience Center, which is focused on the role of infection and inflammation in cardiovascular disease. Her research interest is in the cell biology of the cardiomyocyte after ischemia/reperfusion injury. She studies programmed cell death, mitochondrial dysfunction, and autophagy in the heart, using cell culture and animal models of heart disease. As director of the BSC she is initiating new programs including a study directed at determining if periodontal disease causes atherosclerosis.

Chemistry and BioChemistry

Miriam Bennett,Ph.D. (Yale, 2004) Dr. Bennett is an inorganic chemist who specializes in developing syntheses of transition-metal clusters and complexes at or approaching the nano-size regime. Her interests include materials, nano-chemistry, coordination chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, and applying these fields to sustainable energy practices and biological imaging. Her current research targets the rational synthesis of nano-sized transition-metal clusters which can be used to develop highly efficient photovoltaics, imaging agents, and catalysts.
Christopher Harrison, Ph.D. (Yale, 2004) Dr. Harrison is an analytical chemist experienced in liquid chromatography, capillary electrophoresis and microfluidics. His area of focus is on the development of new techniques and devices for the analysis of biological samples. A primary interest is the analysis of biological samples for the detection of performance enhancing agents in athletes, with a focus on compounds capable of enhancing the oxygen carrying capacity of endurance athletes which to date have proved difficult to identify from their native analogs. CE separations will be utilized to analyze blood characteristics to identify the use of illicit agents. The ultimate goal is the development of a portable, rapid, testing device for sporting events. Other research interests include the development of two-dimensional separation techniques capable of integrating liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis.

Classics & Humanities

Maria Rybakova, Ph.D. (Yale, 2004) engages classical antiquity both as a classical scholar and as a writer of fiction. Her dissertation focused on ancient beliefs concerning night-time fears, and her current research interests lay in the philosophy of Simone Weil. She is author of two novels and several short stories in Russian; her work has been translated into German, Spanish and French. Her pursuits of her academic and literary passions have taken her from Moscow to Berlin to New Haven, with stops along the way in Switzerland, Northern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Hudson River Valley, and, most exotically, Long Beach.

Communication

Robert Edwards, Ph.D. (Sussex, 1994) Dr. Edwards expertise is in the application of computational resources to answer biologically motivated questions, with a particular emphasis on microbial bioinformatics. Dr. Edwards has sequenced and analyzed many microbial genomes, and has been at the forefront of a new area called metagenomics, sequencing DNA from environmental samples. The computational challenges for these analyses are enormous, and Dr. Edwards has developed software tools to provide access to high performance computing like the Teragrid for researchers with high throughput bioinformatics problems.

Computer Science

William B. Snavely, Ph.D. (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1977)
Dr. Snavely is a social scientist specializing in the fields of communication and organizational behavior. His areas of interest include behavioral and communication style, organizational communication competence, leadership, and intercultural issues, particularly focused on Europe and Russia. His most recent empirical study (to be published this academic year) examines two popular models of communication or behavioral style and proposes a convergence and new model. He is the new director of the School of Communication.

Economics

Phacharaphot Nuntramas, Ph.D. (University of Michigan, 2007) Dr. Nuntramas is an economist specializing in macroeconomic aspects of international trade and finance. His areas of interest include the transmission of business cycles across borders, growth in trade and changes in its composition, central banking and monetary policy, financial crisis, the roles of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the deepening of financial markets in South East Asia, and the emergence of China. He is presently researching the transmission of business cycles when aggregate expenditures include goods with different degrees of tradability and durability.
Quazi Shahriar, Ph.D. (University of Arizona 2007) Dr. Shahriar specializes in Applied Microeconomics, Industrial Organization and Experimental Economics. His areas of interest include topics in Industrial Organization from the perspectives of theory, empirical analysis and experimental methods. His current research focuses on online auctions such as those on eBay in which the seller can list his item with a “buy price” (known as the “Buy It Now” auctions). In his research, Dr. Shahriar models these auctions with the goal of analyzing and explaining the popularity of these auctions. He has collected data both from the field and the lab in order to test theoretical predictions under alternative modeling assumptions. His future research topics cover other types of online auctions and also some interesting issues in game theory.

Education

Beverly Booker, Ph.D. (University of Louisville, 2003) Dr. Booker is a counselor educator specializing in school counseling. Her areas of interest include collaboration in schools, teaching constructs of power to K-12 students, and equity and access of students in relation to academic achievement. She is presently researching perceptions and outcomes of collaboration of school counselors and administrators in schools to impact student achievement. She is also researching impacts of teaching students the constructs of power and empowerment on their postsecondary choices. Booker will teach in the deparment of counseling and school psychology.
Joel Brown, Ph.D. (UCSB, 1991) Dr. Brown is a researcher/practitioner with more than 15 years experience in mixed methods evaluation and risk/resilience research in educational leadership and related systems. He integrates this research with professional development and training. Prior to joining SDSU, he was tenured and promoted to Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Brown currently maintains Executive Directorship of the Center for Educational Research and Development (www.cerd.org), a not for profit organization committed to the development of resilience-based research, policies and programs. Among others, his work has been cited by the National Academy of Sciences, with commentary being solicited in myriad media outlets, including CNN and the New York Times. Brown will teach in the department of educational leadership.
Luke Duesbery, Ph.D. (University of Oregon, 2007) Dr. Duesbery specializes in educational technologies and measurement. His areas of interest include item response theory, test accommodations, the visual display of quantitative information, data driven decision making, teacher and administrator training, and the assessment of graphical literacy. He is currently researching the impact of graphical specifiers on student and test performance within the federally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress. He will teach in the department of special education.
Frank Harris III, Ed.D. (University of Southern California, 2006) Dr. Harris’ research and scholarship focuses on college men and masculinities, gendered trends in postsecondary learning environments, and equity in educational outcomes for historically underrepresented and underserved students. He earned national dissertation of the year awards from the American Educational Research Association and the Association of Student Judicial Affairs for his study, The Meanings College Men Make of Masculinities and Contextual Influences on Behaviors, Outcomes, and Gendered Environmental Norms: A Grounded Theory Study. Dr. Harris employs qualitative methods in his research, relying primarily on the grounded theory, case study, and action research traditions. Beginning in Fall 2007, he will engage in a national study to field test his theoretical model of college men’s identity development at five U.S. postsecondary institutions. Harris will teach in SDSU's department of administration, rehabilitation and post-secondary education.
Cheryl James-Ward, Ed.D. (University of Southern California, 1997) Dr. James-Ward is an assistant professor whose research interest is centered on identifying the characteristics and traits of principals of high performing schools in under-performing districts. Before coming to SDSU, Cheryl served in various administrative capacities including site principal, director of program improvement schools, and district/school administrator coach. Her diverse work experience spans from low socioeconomic areas to affluent ones in Pasadena, Long Beach, West Contra Costa and Encinitas. James-Ward believes that the knowledge and skill sets maverick principals embrace must be adopted by all educational leaders if we are to create districts and schools that lend themselves to the development of cultures and educational systems that result in high levels of academic achievement for all students. She will teach in SDSU's department of educational leadership.
Frank Nguyen, Ph.D. (Arizona State University, 2007) Dr. Nguyen is an educational technologist specializing in performance support and the use of technology in corporate training. His areas of interest include the analysis and design of corporate learning strategies, design and development of eLearning content, implementation of learning and performance systems, evidence-based practices in human performance technology, and the implications of cognitive load theory on instructional design and other performance interventions. He is currently researching how to best combine performance support and training to improve human performance. Nguyen has managed the design, development, and deployment of learning and performance solutions for various companies including American Express, Intel, and MicroAge. Nguyen will teach in the deparment of educational technology.
Fernando Rodríguez-Valls, Ph.D. (Claremont Graduate University 2007) In 1992 after receiving his degree in education at the University of Barcelona, Rodriguez-Valls began to work in the Moroccan immigrant areas of Barcelona. In 1996, he arrived in California and began work as a teacher in South Los Angeles. From 2002 to 2007, he created award-winning literacy circles to empower first generation Latino students and families who live in the Los Angeles inner city. His research is focused on literacy programs that utilize the funds of knowledge in communities as a force to generate equity, as well as facilitates their members to access mainstream culture.

Engineering

Ashkan Ashrafi, Ph.D. (University in Alabama-Huntsville, 2006) Dr. Ashrafi is an electrical engineer specializing in Digital Signal Processing and Wireless Communications. His areas of research include direct digital frequency synthesizers, application of sliding mode feedback in discrete time oscillators and integrated fingerprint verification systems. He will teach in the department of electrical and computer engineering.
Temesgen Garoma, Ph.D. (SDSU/UCSD, 2004) Dr. Garoma is an engineer specializing in environmental engineering. Dr. Garoma’s research interests are focused on the removal of environmental pollutants from contaminated water, soil, and air using chemical oxidation, advanced oxidation, and biological treatment processes. His current research areas include understanding the fate of “emerging” contaminants and developing effective treatment methods, developing treatment technologies for destruction of groundwater contaminants, and investigation of irrigation water quality issues and developing treatment methods.
Morteza Monte Mehrabadi, Ph.D. (Tulane, 1979) Dr. Mehrabadi’s teaching and research interests are multidisciplinary in nature and span the general field of analytical and computational modeling of the mechanical behavior of materials. His special areas of interest include consideration of microstructure in modeling the anisotropic behavior of bulk materials and biological tissues. The effects of porosity and its distribution on the strength of cancellous bone (and other porous materials) is the subject of his most recent publication. In other publications, Dr. Mehrabadi and his co-workers have studied problems in liquid phase sintering, bulk materials handling, and geomechanics. Prior to joining SDSU as the Mechanical Engineering Professor and Chair, he held the position of Professor and Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dr. Mehrabadi is a Fellow of the ASME and a member of SES, AAM, and ASEE and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal Mechanics of Materials and the International Journal of Plasticity.
Fletcher Miller, Ph.D. (U.C. Berkeley, 1988) Dr. Miller has broad interests spanning the thermal sciences and sustainable energy. For sixteen years he worked at NASA Glenn Research Center conducting microgravity combustion research in the areas of flame spread over liquids and solids, solid particle combustion, flammability of non-homogeneous gas mixtures, and catalyzed microcombustion. He has significant combustion diagnostic experience including PIV and optical techniques such as interferometry and rainbow schlieren. Prior to joining SDSU he led a NASA team evaluating new test methods for material flammability tests for spacecraft, and is interested in fire prevention, detection, and suppression in ground-based facilities as well. Outside of work, he helped found a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting sustainable energy that is now one of the largest in the country. He is especially interested in developing solar thermal applications in the southwest and California.
Jingang Yi, Ph.D. (U.C. Berkeley, 2002). Dr. Yi joined the Mechanical Engineering Department in January 2007. His research interests include intelligent and autonomous robotic systems, dynamic systems and controls, intelligent sensing and actuation systems, mechatronics, automation science and engineering with applications to semiconductor manufacturing and intelligent transportation systems. From May 2002 to January 2005, Dr. Yi was with Lam Research Corporation, Fremont, CA, as a member of technical staffs. From January 2005 to December 2006, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. Dr. Yi is a member of IEEE and American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME). He was the recipient of the Kayamori Best Paper Award of the 2005 IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). He will teach in the mechanical engineering department.

English & Comparative Literature

Catherine Field, Ph.D. (University of Maryland, 2006) Dr. Field is a feminist literary historian specializing in the study of manuscripts and women’s writing in early modern England. She has published on the role of the female practitioner (and her use of a medicinal recipe) in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, and she has also written about how the recipe was an early, significant form of autobiographical writing by British and European women in the Renaissance. She is currently revising her dissertation, "'Many Hands': Early Modern Englishwomen's Recipe Books and the Writing of Food, Politics, and the Self" into a book manuscript. Field will teach in SDSU's Department of English and Comparative Literature.
Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. (Wayne State, 2007) is SDSU's English Department's newest children's literature specialist. A poet and scholar, Joseph is author of Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry and the forthcoming Strong Measures, a book of poetry (Make Now P). He has published essays in Style, Children's Literature, The Hornbook Magazine, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, Studies in the Novel, and Reconstruction, among other places. His book on Shel Silverstein: “The Devil's favorite pet”: Shel Silverstein, an American Iconoclast is a work in progress. Thomas will be part of SDSU's National Center for the Study of Children's Literature.

Exercise and Nutritional Sciences

Mee Young Hong, Ph.D. (Texas A&M University, 1999) Dr. Hong is a nutritional scientist and her research is focused on the roles of dietary factors on carcinogenesis and chemoprevention with a particular interest in lipids, fiber and phytochemicals. Her research goal is to determine the mechanisms that fish oil is protective against carcinogenesis in the aspect of genomic response and molecular signaling. Another goal is to investigate why cancer susceptibility is very different between small and large intestines, although both are lined with similar morphology in gastrointestinal tract. She is also fascinated to work on the effect of phytochemicals in cancer chemoprevention using human cancer cell lines and a xenograft model.
Charles F. Morgan, Ph.D. (Arizona State University 2004) Dr. Morgan recently joined the school of exercise and nutritional sciences in the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts as an assistant professor in physical education pedagogy. The majority of his work includes the study of physical activity levels and the factors that influence physical activity in youth. He has numerous peer reviewed publications and coauthored the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) Physical Activity Guidelines for Children. Dr. Morgan has given more than 20 research and professional presentations at national and regional meetings.

Finance

Xudong An, Ph.D.(University of Southern California, 2007) Dr. An’s research interests are in the areas of real estate finance and economics, credit risk and applied econometrics. His current research topics include theoretical and empirical models of commercial mortgage default risk, subordination and credit risk in structured financing, real estate development decisions and housing market dynamics. Xudong’s research on mortgage prepayment and default risks, and Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s roles in US mortgage and housing markets has been published or is forthcoming in academic journals such as Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics and Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs. Dr. An received research grants and fellowships from various sources including Real Estate Research Institute, Pension Real Estate Association, Urban Land Institute and the Haynes Foundation. He also has taught graduate courses at the University of Southern California.

Geography

Trent Biggs, Ph.D. (UCSB, 2003) Trent is a geographer specializing in hydrology, biogeochemistry, and land use change. His areas of interest include the effect of regional land cover transformations on water quality and quantity, the use of remote sensing for characterizing landscape properties, and the application of human geographic theory for regional water resources analysis. He is presently researching the effect of irrigation development on basin-scale water balances and hydroclimate of southern India.
Pascale Joassart Marcelli, Ph.D. (University of Southern California, 1999) Her dissertation focused on informal employment among recent Latina immigrants in Los Angeles. From 1999 to 2001, she studied poverty concentration and its fiscal implications for the Los Angeles region as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research associate in the department of Geography at USC, where she also taught urban geography and spatial statistics. Her research focuses primarily on urban poverty. She is specifically interested in local labor markets and issues of accessibility to public and nonprofit resources (i.e., affordable housing, employment services, antipoverty voluntary organizations, parks and recreation facilities) among low-income populations. She will be part of the faculty of SDSU's Department of Geography.

History

Edward J. Blum, Ph.D. (University of Kentucky, 2003) is a historian of race and religion in the United States. He is the author of Reforging the White Republic (2005), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and co-editor of Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. For these works, Blum was awarded the Peter Seaborg Award in Civil War Studies, the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, and was nominated for the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize (biography). He has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the classroom, Blum is interested in helping students engage the past in a variety of ways, whether through music and images or role-playing and historical simulations. His courses include Jacksonian America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, religion in the United States, and African American history. Currently, Blum is co-editing (with Paul Harvey) the Columbia Guide to American Religious History and writing a book on race and depictions of Jesus Christ in American culture, society, and politics, titled Jesus in Red, White, and Black.
Walter Penrose, Ph.D. (City University of New York, 2006) specializes in the history of gender and sexuality in Ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and South Asian contexts. His forthcoming book, Amazons, Ethnicity, and the Ideology of Courage in Ancient Greek and Asian Cultures, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Other publications include “Hidden in History: Female Homoeroticism and Women of a Third Nature in the South Asian Past,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10:1 (2001), and “Colliding Cultures: Masculinity and Homoeroticism in Mughal and Early Colonial South Asia,” in Queer Masculinities 1550 to 1800: Siting Same Sex Love in the Early Modern World, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Professor Penrose also has research and teaching interests in disability studies, the history of ancient religions, the ancient near east and Scythia, Greek and Sanskrit literature, and world history.

Journalism & Media Studies

Noah Arceneaux,Ph.D., (University of Georgia, 2007) Dr. Arceneaux has substantial professional experience in major markets with new media informational systems, interactive television, and other advanced systems in corporate and entertainment settings. His area of research interest is the relationship between technology and culture. Specifically, he studies the social history of electronic communication, from early radio to the movement of various forms of content into wireless delivery, such as that found on cellular phones. He has published his research in several top peer-reviewed journals, establishing himself as an expert in new technologies. As such, he was invited by Quinnipiac University to develop and teach an online course in producing content for mobile media. At the University of Georgia, he was named the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant in 2005. He will teach in SDSU's new School of Journalism and Media Studies.

Marketing

Paula Caterina Peter, Ph.D. (Virginia Tech, 2007) Paula C. Peter graduated with summa cum laude from Universita della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland) in 2002 with a four years B.S. in Corporate and Institutional Communication. In January 2003, she embarked in the MS program offered by the Marketing Department at Virginia Tech. She received her Master in 2004 and she continued her academic pursuit as a doctoral student under the guidance of Dr. David Brinberg. She was selected as the recipient of the 2007 Pamplin College Outstanding Graduate Student Award. Her research interests are related to social marketing and the application of psychological constructs and marketing techniques to issues related to consumer welfare.

Mathematics and Statistics

Jianwei Chen, Ph.D. (CUHK, 1999) Dr. Chen obtained his Ph.D. in statistics from Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong). He has some postdoctoral years in Department of Biostatistics at UNC, Harvard and University of Rochester before he joined SDSU. His areas of research interest include statistical methods in medical/public health research, viral dynamic modeling and simulation, statistical inference for nonlinear differential equations with applications to HIV infectious and bio-defined immune modeling, nonparametric and semi-parametric regressions with missing data and measurement errors, mixed effect models in functional data and longitudinal data analysis, outcome dependent sampling designs, quality control and sampling plans, Bayesian methods, MCMC and computational statistics, and hedging models. He has published over twenty research papers in the major journals in the field of the statistics and operations research.

Music and Dance

Donna M. Conaty, M.M. (Yale University, 1984) Donna Conaty is Director of the School of Music and Dance and professor of oboe. She comes to SDSU from Ohio University where she was Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts. With a performance background ranging from orchestral and chamber ensemble to solo and recital appearances throughout the United States and Europe, she is currently principal oboe of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Columbus. Other performance credits include the Lancaster Festival Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Bach Aria Festival, Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Breckenridge Music Institute Orchestra, as well as performing or presenting master classes for numerous professional conferences, international conferences, and university audiences. Donna’s students have gone on to pursue advanced oboe study at prestigious conservatory and university music programs, participated in top selective summer festivals, and are active as performers, university faculty, teachers, and arts professionals throughout the world. Conaty has served as a faculty member at the prestigious Interlochen Arts camp and is active as a grants panelist for the Ohio Arts Council.

Nursing

Diane Hatton, RN, DNSc (UCSF, 1989) Dr. Hatton is a nurse scientist whose areas of interest are community/public health nursing, global health, and health policy. Her research includes funded projects on access to health care among women and children who are homeless as well as health, health services, and health care justice for incarcerated women. She is presently conducting a funded community-based participatory research project exploring the impact of co-payments on women prisoners’ access to healthcare. With support from a Rockefeller Foundation award, she is also co-editing a book on women’s incarceration and its alternatives in Australia, Canada, the UK, and US.
Linda Robinson, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania, 1997) Dr. Robinson is a nurse specializing in care for people with HIV/AIDS and community health nursing. Her areas of interest include living well with HIV, methamphetamine use, end-of-life care and nursing work. Dr. Robinson is presently researching the intersection between the methamphetamine and HIV epidemics.
Susan Yount, Ph.D., CNM, RN, (University of Arizona 2006) Dr. Yount is a Certified Nurse Midwife and Nursing Researcher who specializes in women’s health. She has focused on providing care for women throughout her healthcare career; advocating for choices in childbearing experiences. Her areas of interest include midwifery, border Hispanic women, alternative therapies in women’s health, herbal treatments, complimentary medicine, health along the U.S.-Mexico border, cultural and health literacy, vulnerable populations and rural health. Dr. Yount is presently researching health literacy skills among rural women in West Texas.

Physics

Usha Sinha, Ph.D. (IISc, Bangalore, India, 1985) Dr. Sinha is a Medical and Imaging Physicist specializing in magnetic resonance imaging and informatics. Her areas of interest include development of novel techniques for quantitative imaging including diffusion and relaxivity imaging, creation of quantitative brain and musculoskeletal atlases capturing structure and function, and application of atlases of normal populations to explore subtle differences in diseased conditions. She is presently focused on segmentation of brain tumors and cartilage, characterization of brain tumors for decision support, creation of cartilage atlases with application to early detection of structural changes in osteoarthritis, and white matter brain atlases to explore age related changes and dementia.

Psychology

Melody Sadler, Ph.D. (University of Colorado, 2002). Dr. Sadler is a Social Psychology with strengths in quantitative methods. Her areas of interest include category differentiation and inter-group evaluative bias, the formation of stereotyping and prejudice in groups and the implications for information processing. She has studied emotions, attributions and policy endorsement in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Her current research involves investigation of cognitive control and unconscious racial biases in decision-making in police officers. Sadler will teach in SDSU's Department of Psychology.

Public Affairs

Shawn Flanigan,Ph.D.(University at Albany - SUNY, 2007) Dr. Flanigan recently received her Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy, specializing in comparative public policy and administration, and nonprofit organizations as policy actors and service providers. Her research focuses on the role nonprofit organizations play in meeting the health and social service needs of minorities and marginalized groups, with a specific interest in the developing world and low-income populations in the United States. She also studies health and social service provision by terrorist and insurgent organizations. She has conducted field research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Romania, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Her future research interests include the adaptation of nonprofits and local governments to growing Latino immigrant communities in the US South.
Paul J. Kaplan, Ph.D. (UC, Irvine, 2007) Dr. Kaplan is a sociolegal scholar and criminologist specializing in capital punishment, wrongful conviction, police culture, and qualitative methods. Dr. Kaplan’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, and his publications include articles in Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, Theoretical Criminology, Contemporary Sociology: a Journal of Reviews, and Criminal Justice Review. Dr. Kaplan was born in Philadelphia, grew up in San Diego, and lived in San Francisco working as a mitigation investigator prior to graduate school. His current research focuses on the role of ideology in storytelling in capital trials.
Kimberly Collins, Ph.D. (El Colef, 2006) Dr. Collins has been the Director of the California Center for Border and Regional Economic Studies (CCBRES) since 1999. CCBRES is located at the San Diego State University-Imperial Valley Campus. The mission of the center is to provide current information on the Imperial-Mexicali valleys. Dr. Collins’ research interests are focused on U.S.-Mexican border policy. Within this region, Kimberly has been working on issues related to quality of life; urban and rural planning and development; local governance and federalism in the United States and Mexico; environmental policy at the federal, state, and local level; and environmental behavior of residents in the border region.

Religious Studies

Wilburn Hansen, Ph.D. (Stanford, 2006) Dr. Hansen is a historian of religions specializing in modern Japanese traditions. His areas of interest include Buddhism, Shinto, New Religious Movements, as well as Asian-American religions. He has published on modern Japanese folklore, ethnography and healing; and expects his monograph on nineteenth century Japanese spiritualism to be published next year by the University of Hawaii Press. He is presently working on one project examining the relationship between Buddhism and Shinto in medieval Japan, and also on another that examines the claim that Japan had a native writing system before it officially adopted Chinese orthography. Hansen will teach in SDSU's Department of Religious Studies.

Sociology

Kyra R. Greene, Ph.D. (Stanford University, 2007) Professor Greene is a scholar of social inequality and political sociology. She is interested in the myriad forms of social inequality and uses an array of quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to further understand the origins, implications and political solutions to this important sociological problem. Her dissertation research focused on the American disability rights movement and the role of cultural frames and institutional activism in the successes of the movement. She is currently working on two projects. The first examines the death penalty moratorium movement in the United States. The second studies how people understand and apply the socio-legal definitions of disability.
Enrico Marcelli, Ph.D. (University of Southern California, 1997) Dr. Marcelli is a social demographer whose work focuses mainly on immigration and health. Specifically, employing a community-based probability sampling methodology, he estimates the number, characteristics, and socioeconomic consequences of unauthorized immigrants residing in various metropolitan areas; and how individual characteristics and behaviors (e.g., age, legal status, substance abuse) and socioeconomic context (e.g., income inequality, residential segregation, neighborhood context, food prices) influence various health outcomes. He offers courses on demographic methods as well as on health, immigration, and urban economic development. Marcelli will teach in SDSU's Department of Sociology.

Public Health (Graduate School)

Zohir Chowdhury, Ph.D. (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004) Dr. Chowdhury’s areas of research and expertise include: air pollution and its effects on health, air pollution issues in developing countries, air pollution instrumentation, aerosol science, and atmospheric chemistry. His recent work includes a project funded by the World Bank to source apportion and characterize fine particles in the ambient aerosol in Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata, India. Dr. Chowdhury is also active in the arena of environmental justice. Before joining the faculty at SDSU's Graduate School of Public Health, Dr. Chowdhury was a post-doctoral researcher with the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Tracy Finlayson, Ph.D.(University of Michigan, 2005) Dr. Finlayson’s areas of research and expertise include: oral health, mental health, social determinants of health and health disparities, access to care, and health policy/program evaluation. Her recent work involved an analysis of data from the California Behavioral Risk Factor Survey and California Health Interview Survey to assess state dental needs and access to care issues. Before joining the faculty at SDSU's Graduate School of Public Health, Dr. Finlayson was a post-doctoral scholar with Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the Nicholas C. Petris Center, a part of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Hector Lemus, Dr.PH (UCLA, 2006) Dr. Lemus is a biostatistician with extensive teaching experience at the graduate and undergraduate levels. His expertise and research interest lies in the area of biomedical data modeling. Dr. Lemus’ recent projects include an AIDS training grant from the National Institutes of Health. Before joining the faculty at the Graduate School of Public Health, Dr. Lemus was a post-doctoral researcher with the Department of Biostatistics at UCLA.
Suzanne Lindsay, Ph.D. (SDSU/UCSD, 1998) Dr. Lindsay’s primary area of research interest involves the study of interpersonal violence including family violence, spousal abuse, child abuse, and sexual assault. Her expertise includes extensive experience in the development of multi-site research and evaluation management information systems, data collection protocols, data quality assurance, research and evaluation training, and electronic mechanisms for confidential data entry and transfer. Dr. Lindsay recently completed a three-year historical prospective study of 1,228 cases of sexual assault reported to the San Diego Police Department between 1994-1996. The study analyzed the context and character of reported sexual assaults, and investigated the factors most highly associated with the charging of an identified suspect. Lindsay will teach in SDSU's Graduate School of Public Health.
Carleen H. Stoskopf, Sc.D. (Johns Hopkins, 1989) Dr. Stoskopf's is the new director of SDSU's Graduate School of Public Health. Her area of expertise is in health care policy and health services management. Dr. Stoskopf's area of research is in providing health services to vulnerable populations: those with HIV/AIDS, mental illness, uninsured, and the poor and disenfranchised. Her research specifically examines access to health care, utilization of health services, and health outcomes. She has also been involved extensively with studies in health disparities, specifically between African-Americans and Whites living in the southern U.S. She served in the U.S. Navy for five years as an Environmental Health Officer with the Third Marine Aircraft Wing at El Toro, CA and as Chief of the Preventive Medicine Service at the Navy Regional Medical Center in Okinawa, Japan.

Spanish & Portuguese

Iñigo Yanguas, Ph.D. (Georgetown University, 2007). Dr. Yañguas is an applied linguist specializing in Spanish as a second language and Spanish in the U.S. His main areas of interest include instructed second language acquisition (SLA), Spanish as a heritage language in the U.S. and the use of technology in the foreign language classroom. He is presently researching the motivations of Hispanic heritage speakers to improve their Spanish in college using SLA theory and methodology. He is, therefore, investigating the possible applications that the field of SLA can have in the newer field of Spanish as a heritage language in the U.S. Yanguas will teach in SDSU's Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature.

College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts

Noah Arceneaux, Ph.D., (University of Georgia, 2007) Dr. Arceneaux has substantial professional experience in major markets with new media informational systems, interactive television, and other advanced systems in corporate and entertainment settings. His area of research interest is the relationship between technology and culture. Specifically, he studies the social history of electronic communication, from early radio to the movement of various forms of content into wireless delivery, such as that found on cellular phones. He has published his research in several top peer-reviewed journals, establishing himself as an expert in new technologies. As such, he was invited by Quinnipiac University to develop and teach an online course in producing content for mobile media. At the University of Georgia, he was named the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant in 2005. Arceneaux will teach in SDSU's new School of Journalism and Media Studies.

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San Diego State University is the oldest and largest higher education institution in the San Diego region. Since it was founded in 1897, the university has grown to offer bachelor's degrees in 81 areas, master's degrees in 73 areas and doctorates in 16 areas. SDSU's more than 34,000 students participate in an academic curriculum distinguished by direct contact with faculty and an increasing international emphasis that prepares them for a global future. For more information, visit www.sdsu.edu.

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