Diverse New Faculty Enhance University: Nearly 100 join Pitt faculty this fall

The 2002-2003 academic year brings a number of new faces to campus, including nearly 100 new full-time faculty members.

Some of the faculty joining Pitt are established scholars, others talented individuals accepting their first academic appointments. All are drawn to the University’s strong reputation for cutting-edge research and multidisciplinary teamwork.

“The University of Pittsburgh has an outstanding faculty,” said Provost James V. Maher, the University’s chief academic officer. “We are attracting a diverse group of top scholars from competitive universities, and our University community is becoming stronger and more vibrant every year.”

Below are highlights of several of the many superb new faculty members joining Pitt this fall.

• Robin Means Coleman, Department of Communication, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Coleman comes to Pitt from New York University but already is well known to the University community because of her two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Pitt.

A Pitt associate professor of communication, Coleman focuses on media in her research: racial representations in the media and their reception, identity formation and the media, and the role of media activism in affecting media industry change.

Her work blends cultural studies and ethnographic approaches, and she is particularly well known for her pioneering work on African American responses to black situation comedies on television.

Her widely acclaimed book, African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor, includes a cultural and historical analysis of the origins of the genre that contextualizes an ethnographic study of audience.

• Peyman Givi, School of Engineering.

Givi joins Pitt as a professor of mechanical engineering from SUNY Buffalo, where he was a full professor of mechanical engineering. His honors include the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator, the Presidential Young Investigator, and the Presidential Faculty Fellow.

Givi’s expertise is in the area of simulation of turbulent reacting flows. The U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, ONR, and the American Chemical Society have funded Givi’s work through 26 grants worth approximately $3 million.

Givi is also an outstanding mentor: he has placed six of his 10 Ph.D. students on the faculties of major universities. Four of these six have won young investigator awards.

• Tom Hales, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Hales, most recently a full professor at the University of Michigan, joins the University of Pittsburgh as the Andrew Mellon Professor of Mathematics. As a graduate student, he held a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship at Princeton and Cambridge universities.

Hales is a “pure” mathematician, a discrete geometer who has made contributions to the mathematics of automorphic forms, to three-dimensional Euclidean geometry, and to the use of extremely large computer programs to prove mathematical theorems.

He is best known for solving a problem, the Kepler Conjecture, which had stymied scholars for four centuries.

• Jonathan Scott, Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Scott comes to Pitt from the University of Cambridge, where he was elected to a Newton Trust Fellowship. He will serve at the University of Pittsburgh as the Carroll Amundson Professor of British History.

A published poet, Scott is known for his scholarship in 17th Century British history, particularly the political and ideological upheavals in which a series of revolutions (English Civil War, Restoration, and the Great and Glorious Revolution) completely reworked English politics and British government.

Scott’s most recent book, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge University Press, 2000), challenges the current orthodoxy of the field, presenting a provocative analysis of the Williamite revolution that argues that these events must be understood as part of a much more general European process of change and not as a series of unrelated, local struggles for power.

England’s Troubles will be the subject of a session at the American Historical Association’s 2002 meeting.

• Terence Smith, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Smith, whose most recent position was at the University of Sydney (Australia), is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art. He is a leading figure in the new generation of art historians who have transformed art history into a comprehensive cultural study, in which works of art are examined in relation to the social and economic, as well as the aesthetic, contexts in which they were created.

His acclaimed book, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, examines the emergence of modern art in the first half of the 20th Century against a backdrop of revolutionary changes in industrial production, mass consumption, advertising, and design.

• Vanitha Swaminathan, Katz Graduate School of Business.

Swaminathan joins Pitt as an assistant professor of marketing from the University of Massachusetts, where she taught product strategy at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Swaminathan’s paper, The Impact of Brand Extension Introduction on Choice (Journal of Marketing, 2001), has won the Lehmann Award for best dissertation-based article appearing in the Journal of Marketing or the Journal of Marketing Research in the years 2000 and 2001.

Her dissertation work on brand extensions also won her a Procter & Gamble Innovation Research Fund Award.

• Ted Temzelides, Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Temzelides, a Pitt associate professor of economics, most recently served at the University of Iowa. As an economist bridging micro- and macroeconomics, he works on money, banking, and the stability of banking systems and is acclaimed by colleagues for attacking the fundamental elements of a problem.
He is a noted contributor to the development of Walrasian models that require money and to the exploration of what boundary conditions these models place on the role of money and banks in the economy.

In his latest work on the microeconomic foundations of monetary exchange, Temzelides asks two key questions: What are the necessary conditions—and what are the sufficient conditions—for money to improve the functioning of an economic model?

• Heidi Warriner, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Warriner, an assistant professor of chemistry at Pitt and most recently from the University of California at Santa Barbara, is a biophysical chemist. Prior to her time at the University of California, Warriner was a postdoctoral research associate at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Her work with biomaterials focuses on the mechanism of artificial surfactant buckling and provides excellent opportunities for collaborative research. Using fluorescence microscopy, Langmuir trough, and x-ray diffraction methods, she has as her goal the development of alternative lung surfactant compositions that are able to respread at elevated surface pressures.