Claremont McKenna College welcomed the following faculty to campus this fall:
Giorgi Areshidze is an assistant professor of government and is a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Texas at Austin. This spring he taught American Politics and the Presidency at Bowdoin College. Giorgi's research interests include Enlightenment liberalism, religion and constitutionalism in a comparative perspective.
Esther Chung-Kim is an assistant professor of religious studies and earned her Ph.D. in religion from Duke University. Esther joins us from the Claremont School of Theology, where she was an assistant professor of historical studies. Her teaching focuses on the history of world Christianity, particularly the transition from the late medieval to the early modern period and including subjects such as the European Reformation, women and gender in the early modern era, and Asian Christianity, among other topics. This year, Esther was selected for the Society Council of the American Society of Church History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association and her first book titled Inventing Authority on Reformation debates was just published by Baylor University Press.
Heather Ferguson is an assistant professor of history and earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Heather's teaching interests include the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and comparative early modern discourses of power. She has conducted research in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, and she joins the College after a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.
Ricardo Fernholz is an assistant professor of economics. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and he also had the opportunity to teach there as well. Ricardo's research and teaching interests include macroeconomics, international finance, and game theory.
Oana Hirakawa, an assistant professor of economics, recently earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego. Her teaching and research interests include international trade, entrepreneurship, and applied microeconomics. In graduate school, Oana (Wah-nah) was a teaching and research assistant for the economics department.
Ketan Mhatre, an assistant professor of psychology, joins the CMC faculty full time after serving as a visiting assistant professor of organizational psychology at the College since January 2010. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and his areas of focus include leadership, organizational behavior, and organizational psychology.
Deanna Needell, an assistant professor of mathematics, earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Davis. She joins CMC from Stanford University, where she was an instructor and a postdoctoral fellow in the statistics and mathematics departments. Deanna's research interests include compressed sensing, randomized algorithms, computational mathematics, and probability.
Andrew Schroeder is an assistant professor of philosophy and specializes in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of health measurement and economics. Andrew comes to CMC from the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health at the Harvard Medical School. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Aseema Sinha is the inaugural Wagener Family Associate Professor of Comparative Politics and George R. Roberts Fellow. She joins the College from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was an associate professor of political science. Aseema (A-seema) is also a former fellow from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She earned a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University.
Bryan Thines, an assistant professor of biology, comes to CMC from the UC Berkley Plant Gene Expression Center. His research focus is on understanding how the plant circadian clock regulates rhythmic gene expression and optimizes growth in different environments. Bryan will be teaching a new "genomics" course this spring. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular plant sciences from Washington State University.
Piercarlo Valdesolo is an assistant professor psychology. He comes to CMC from Harvard University, where he completed a fellowship in psychology, and from Amherst College, where he was a visiting assistant professor from 2008 to 2010. Piercarlo's (Pee-air-carlows) research interests include the influence of emotion on social judgment and moral decision making, and the psychological determinants of institutional corruption. He earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from Northeastern University.
Branwen Williams is an assistant professor of biology in the W.M. Keck Science Department. She earned her Ph.D. in geological sciences from Ohio State University and recently completed her postdoctoral fellowship in the department of chemical and physical sciences at the University of Toronto. Branwen's research focuses on extracting environmental records from the skeletons of marine organisms and using this information to answer questions regarding changes in oceans and climate.