The distinction of CMC’s world-class faculty can be witnessed in the wealth of outstanding accomplishments and awards in their fields. Whether for inspired teaching, original research, prestigious leadership roles, or other exceptional teacher-scholar work, their public recognition showcases the dedication, creativity, and expertise that define CMC’s intellectual vitality and academic excellence.
We invite you to learn about the impressive accomplishments of CMC’s distinguished faculty below.
To view the previous academic year’s faculty achievements, click here for a comprehensive list of CMC Faculty Publications and Grants, as well as the 2024-25 CMC Faculty Award Winners.
We encourage faculty to tell us about your significant accomplishments. Notify CMC’s Strategic Communications & Marketing team about your grant awards, research achievements, notable publications and talks, exhibitions and conferences, major media mentions, or any other notable achievement.
Fall 2025
Mark Costanzo
Mark Costanzo, Professor of Psychological Science, published the fifth edition of Forensic and Legal Psychology (Macmillan Learning, pub.), co-authored with Daniel Krauss, Crown Professor of Psychology and George R. Roberts Fellow.
Rachel Fenning
Under the leadership of Rachel Fenning, Professor of Psychological Science and Director of the Claremont Autism Center, the Center has been granted official status as a regional center vendor for social-skills services for clients ages 6-21. “This is a huge milestone for us and will enhance our ability to support children and families in our local community,” Fenning said. The Claremont Autism Center (CAC) is a clinical, research, and training program dedicated to promoting well-being in autistic individuals and their families. CMC students engage in clinical training and experiential learning through the CAC, with opportunities to work with clients, conduct research, and publish and present academic papers.
Daniel Krauss
Published within a few weeks of each other, Daniel Krauss, Crown Professor of Psychology and George R. Roberts Fellow, has co-authored two new books and a journal article. The first, Forensic and Legal Psychology, fifth edition (Macmillan Learning, pub.), was co-authored with Mark Costanzo, CMC Professor of Psychological Science. Next, published by Oxford University Press, Krauss co-authored Forensic Mental Health Practice and the Law: A Primer for Clinicians, Researchers, and Consultants. Finally, Krauss’s co-authored article, “Professional practice guidelines for operational psychology: An executive summary,” was published in the journal American Psychologist.
Dustin Locke
Professor of Philosophy Dustin Locke was recognized with the 2024 Anthony J. Lisska Prize for Excellence in Research and Teaching at Small Liberal Arts Colleges. The prize, sponsored by Denison University in partnership with the American Philosophical Association, honors the legacy of Dr. Anthony J. Lisska (1940-2022), who taught at Denison for 52 years. It is awarded in recognition of exemplary contributions to the scholarly mission of small liberal arts colleges through accomplishment in both philosophical research and pedagogical achievement.
Colin Rathbun
Colin Rathbun, Assistant Professor of Integrated Sciences: Chemistry, received a research grant from the National Science Foundation for a collaborative project with the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Rathbun and his Missouri S&T associate are developing methods, using engineered enzymes, to eliminate environmentally harmful chemicals, specifically PFAS, from soil and groundwater. Human-made PFAS, used in common products such nonstick cookware, food packaging, and electronics, can accumulate in the human body and pose problems to human health. This grant will enable academic exchange between CMC students and those at a doctoral-granting, top-tier research university.
Steven Zhou
Assistant Professor of Psychological Science Steven Zhou published his first book, From First Job to Career: Research and Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The book weaves together first-job stories from people across diverse industries and backgrounds, giving career seekers of all ages the chance to connect with relatable experiences and learn from the many paths people take in shaping their careers and the wisdom they gained along the way. The narratives are paired with a comprehensive review of research in vocational psychology and career counseling to distill key principles and offer actionable strategies for navigating the job search and building a meaningful career.
Steven Zhou
Steven Zhou, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science, has received multiple awards for his dissertation on shared leadership using computational modeling. For his outstanding contribution to the field of leadership, Zhou was honored with the 2025 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Dissertation Award by the Center for Leadership at Florida International University in collaboration with the Network of Leadership Scholars and the Academy of Management. Zhou also received the International Leadership Association’s Fredric M. Jablin Doctoral Dissertation Award, which recognizes a top dissertation from the past year, across global institutions, for advancing the study of leadership.
Spring 2025
Lisa Cody
Professor Lisa Cody was awarded the Peggy Renner Award for Teaching and Curricular Innovation, Honorable Mention, Western Association of Women Historians (2024), for her new course, “The History of Reproduction in the Atlantic World, 1500 to Today.” She also received the James L. Clifford Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2024) for the top article in any field related to eighteenth-century studies for “‘Marriage is no protection for crime’: Coverture, Sex, and Marital Rape in Eighteenth-Century England.”
Jessica Laser
Visiting Literature Professor Jessica Laser has been named a finalist for the for 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize. Laser’s The Goner School (University of Iowa Press, 2024) was one of more than 500 books submitted for the prize. The winner will be named on June 4 at the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings in Toronto.
Ran Libeskind-Hadas
Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas is a co-principal investigator a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot (NAIRR). The grant is with a principal investigator at Grinnell College and other co-principal investigators at Swarthmore College, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and the Computing Research Association. The grant supports meetings of Computer Science and AI faculty to develop and share AI-related resources to support undergraduate education.
Fall 2024
Sarah Cannon
Mathematical Sciences Professors Sarah Cannon and Evan Rosenman received a $100,000 planning grant from the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation through its new Governance & Democracy Initiative. In partnership with local advocacy groups, Cannon and Rosenman will study redistricting reform proposals for the Los Angeles City Council that will enable deeper insights and higher confidence than current methods.
David Day
David Day, Professor of Psychological Science & Leadership, has received the 2024 International Leadership Association’s (ILA) Lifetime Achievement Award. “It’s a tremendous honor to be recognized by this global leadership association for my lifetime contributions to the scholarship of leadership and leadership development. Going forward, my focus is putting theory and evidence-based research into action to help CMC students develop as responsible leaders for their times.” The ILA’s mission is to connect people globally to advance the practice and study of leadership for a just and thriving future.
Devin Fergus
Devin Fergus, Professor of History and Public Affairs, was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
Heather Ferguson
History Professor Heather Ferguson has been appointed co-editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES ) with Professor Lara Deeb of Scripps College. “For me, this appointment represents the capstone in over a decade of professional service within the field of academic publishing,” Ferguson said. “The appointment is further notable for the number of ‘firsts’ embodied: the first time IJMES will have co-editors; the first time professors from liberal arts colleges will serve in this role; and, finally, the first time our editorship will demonstrate interdisciplinary knowledge practices.”
Paul Nerenberg
Professors Paul Nerenberg, Shibu Yooseph, and Angela Vossmeyer received a major research instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation. The award will enable the College to purchase a high-performance computing cluster to increase CMC’s computational research capacity. This new equipment will serve 10+ distinct research programs across the natural, mathematical, and social sciences and foster important new research collaborations. Nerenberg and Yooseph are Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences professors and Vossmeyer is the Rothacker Family Associate Professor of Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow.
Evan Rosenman
Mathematical Sciences Professors Evan Rosenman and Sarah Cannon received a $100,000 planning grant from the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation through its new Governance & Democracy Initiative. In partnership with local advocacy groups, Rosenman and Cannon will study redistricting reform proposals for the Los Angeles City Council that will enable deeper insights and higher confidence than current methods.
Angela Vossmeyer
Professors Angela Vossmeyer, Shibu Yooseph, and Paul Nerenberg received a major research instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation. The award will enable the College to purchase a high-performance computing cluster to increase CMC’s computational research capacity. This new equipment will serve 10+ distinct research programs across the natural, mathematical, and social sciences and foster important new research collaborations. Vossmeyer is the Rothacker Family Associate Professor of Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow and Yooseph and Nerenberg are Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences professors.
Shibu Yooseph
Professors Shibu Yooseph, Paul Nerenberg, and Angela Vossmeyer received a major research instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation. The award will enable the College to purchase a high-performance computing cluster to increase CMC’s computational research capacity. This new equipment will serve 10+ distinct research programs across the natural, mathematical, and social sciences and foster important new research collaborations. Yooseph and Nerenberg are Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences professors and Vossmeyer is the Rothacker Family Associate Professor of Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow.
Rima Basu
Philosophy Professor Rima Basu was selected to participate in a 2024 NEH Summer Institute on moral psychology held at Cornell University. The summer institutes are designed to bring together faculty from across the nation to deepen their understanding of significant topics in the humanities to enrich their capacity for effective scholarship and teaching.
Jordan Branch
Government Professor Jordan Branch was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Dangers and Opportunities of Technology program. He is among only 13% of applicants who were selected for support this year. He will use the award to complete work on a new book on “Virtual Territories: War and the State in a Digital Age.”
Lisa Cody
Professor Lisa Cody has been awarded the 2024 James L. Clifford Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). The Clifford Prize is awarded annually to an article that "presents an outstanding study of some aspect of eighteenth-century culture, interesting to any eighteenth-century specialist, regardless of discipline." Cody, an Associate Professor of History at CMC, earned the distinction for, 'Marriage is No Protection for Crime': Coverture, Sex, and Marital Rape in Eighteenth-Century England, published in the Journal of British Studies, 61.
Mark Costanzo
Prof. Mark Costanzo has been elected President of the Western Psychological Association (WPA). Costanzo, a psychological science professor, will serve a three-year term as President-Elect in 2024, President in 2025, and Past-President in 2026. WPA was founded more than a century ago and represents California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, and Hawaii. WPA facilitates the exchange of ideas between psychological researchers, mentors, and students interested in psychological science and practice.
Daniel Firoozi
Economics Professor Daniel Firoozi and collaborators received a grant from the Ascendium Research Group, Inc. to conduct a study of noncredit workforce training programs and the impact such programs have on the job market.
Jeff Flory
Economics Professor Jeff Flory and several collaborators have received a new grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to conduct research exploring the impact of remote work on diversity.
Minju Kim
Professor of Korean Minju Kim has been named president of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics. As its 25th president, Kim is the first president from a liberal arts college. The International Circle of Korean Linguistics is the most prestigious international scholarly association of Korean linguistics, bringing together fields as diverse as pragmatics, phonology, and formal linguistics.
Lisa Koch
International Relations Professor Lisa Koch’s book Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press 2023) has been named winner of the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award for 2023.
Nita Kumar
Professor Emeritus Nita Kumar was named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation received nearly 3,000 applications this year and only about 6% of applicants received the honor. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Kumar will combine archival, oral history, and ethnographic research to craft a century-long social history of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh through a gendered lens, the life of a woman called Suniti.
Esther Chung-Kim
Religious Studies Professor Esther Chung-Kim was awarded a 2024 National Library of Medicine (NLM) Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine for her research project, “Democratization of Medicine—Access to Health Care in Early Modern Europe.”
Sharda Umanath
Prof. Sharda Umanath was awarded the 2023 Mentorship Award in Aging winner by the American Psychological Association’s Division 20 – Adult Development and Aging. She was selected in part thanks to the efforts of eight former CMC and Scripps students led by Madeline Valdez ’21. Umanath also received an Honorable Mention for the J. Don Read Early Career Award from the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.
Branwen Williams
Prof. Branwen Williams was awarded the National Science Foundation’s Mid-Career Advancement Award. This is the second year of a new NSF program that supports mid-career faculty. The distinction will enable Williams to launch her research program at CMC’s new Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences. It will also connect the Roberts Environmental Center, which Williams directs, with collaborators at UC Irvine to learn new techniques that will further enhance our understanding of climate science.
Lisa Cody
Prof. Lisa Cody was honored by the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies for best article, “Marriage is No Protection for Crime”: Coverture, Sex, and Marital Rape in Eighteenth-Century England.” Cody is a cultural historian of Britain and Northern Europe. Her teaching specializes in the history of the human body, including abortion, reproduction, sexuality, gender, and violence across the Atlantic and Northern European worlds.
David Day
Prof. David Day was invited to join the inaugural National Advisory Committee for the Carnegie Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose. As a committee member, his key responsibilities are to act as ambassador, and advise on framework revisions, the review process and reviewer qualifications, and policies and programming as requested.
Stacey Doan
Prof. Stacey Doan was recently awarded two major grants to support her research on resilience in youth, including $250,000 from the Ho Foundation and 3.5 million from the National Institute of Mental Health. Project PRISM will support Claremont College students in testing and evaluating the effectiveness of a resilience intervention in local high schools, aiding CMC to apply its principles of responsible leadership and community engagement. The project will impact hundreds of adolescents in the LA and San Bernardino communities.
Ran Libeskind-Hadas
Prof. Ran Libeskind-Hadas has been elected vice chair of the Computing Research Association, which represents the computer science research community in North America, and more than 250 universities, colleges, industrial research labs, and other organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Libeskind-Hadas, who is the inaugural chair for the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences, is the first faculty member from an undergraduate institution to serve on the executive council of the board.
Esther Chung-Kim
Prof. Esther Chung-Kim has been elected as the incoming President of the American Society of Church History, the oldest academic society in the field of religion. Chung-Kim is chair of the Religious Studies Department, and specializes in the history of world Christianity, including the European Reformations. Her research examines religious conflict, history of poverty, and the impact of religion on politics, economics, and society. Her vision for the Society and higher education is to promote scholarship and teaching that moves the conversation from "what we know best" to "what do others need to learn?"
Amy Kind
Prof. Amy Kind was recently elected to a three-year leadership term of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA). The APA promotes the discipline and profession of philosophy. Kind will be serving one year as vice-president, one year as president, and one year as past-president.
Jeho Park
Prof. Jeho Park been elected as the Vice President of the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (KSEA) for the 52nd term (2023-2024). The KSEA is one of the largest and oldest professional societies outside South Korea. Its mission is to provide and promote international cooperation, career development, and community service in science, technology, and entrepreneurship.
Sharda Umanath
Prof. Sharda Umanath is a recipient of the Psychonomic Society 2023 Early Career Award. The Psychonomic Society, the preeminent society for the experimental study of cognition, confers scientific awards each year upon young scientists who have made excellent research contributions to the field of cognitive psychology early in their careers. She is the first awardee from a small liberal arts college in the history of the award.
Chelsea Wang
Prof. Chelsea Wang, a historian of late imperial China, won a prestigious early career fellowship through the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Program in China Studies. This grant will enable Wang to complete her first book, “Logistics of Empire: Governance and Spatial Friction in Ming China, 1368-1644.” Through this work, Wang hopes to answer longstanding questions about the seemingly counterintuitive bureaucratic practices of this vast and powerful imperial dynasty.
Minxin Pei
The Smith Richardson Foundation awarded a grant to Prof. Minxin Pei to support his research.
Ahona Panda
Prof. Ahona Panda, assistant professor of History, received the Sardar Patel Dissertation Award, a national prize for the best doctoral dissertation on any aspect of modern India - social sciences, humanities, education and fine arts by the Center for India and South Asia at UCLA.
Emily Pears
Prof. Emily Pears’ book, “Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History” was awarded Best in American Political Thought from the American Political Science Association. Her book investigates "efforts by the founding generation's leadership to construct and strengthen political attachments in and among the citizens of the new republic.