“We grow stronger each year through the contributions of our faculty,” notes Pitt Provost James V. Maher. While there are never enough column inches to personally introduce all of the distinguished senior and promising junior faculty members joining the University in a given academic year, the following sampling will provide some sense of the range and depth of excellence of new colleagues this fall.
Jonathan Arac, Department of English, School of Arts and Sciences.
Arac, formerly the Harriman Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, returns to Pitt in his former position as Andrew W.Mellon Professor of English. Arac received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has served on the faculties of Princeton, Duke, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also has been the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of American Literature at Oxford University and the Avalon Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University.
Arac’s scholarly expertise is in English and American Studies. His writings have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, and Japanese. He has served extensively in the leadership of the Modern Language Association and has been on the editorial board of Comparative Literature since 1989.
Donald Burke, Graduate School of Public Health.
Burke, recruited from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also is professor of epidemiology and dean of Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health. He is also professor of medicine in the School of Medicine and will direct the University’s new Center for Vaccine Research. In addition, Burke will serve as associate vice chancellor for global health, a newly created position within the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences, and he is the first UPMC-Jonas Salk Chair in Global Health.
Burke has more than two decades of active-duty service with the U.S. Army Medical Corps, leading research, vaccine development, and prevention programs focused on HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, tropical diseases, and emerging infectious diseases. He was associate director for emerging threats and biotechnology at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and founder and director of the U.S. Military HIV/AIDS Laboratory Complex.
Much of Burke’s research on epidemiology of infectious diseases is conducted in the field. He established and directs a project on cross-species transmission of infectious diseases in rain-forest populations in Cameroon, and he is principal investigator of a multicenter effort that is developing computational simulations and predictive models of infectious disease epidemiology and evolution, focusing on influenza, dengue fever, measles, and bioterrorist attacks. In addition, Burke is coprincipal investigator of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for Biodefense.
Lance Davidson, Department of Bioengineer-ing, School of Engineering.
Davidson, whose Ph.D. in biophysics is from the University of California at Berkeley, works on the interfaces between engineering, physics, and biology. Joining the Pitt bioengineering faculty as an assistant professor in the new Biomedical Science Tower 3 (BST3) building will allow him to work even more closely with engineers and biologists to integrate molecular genetic details of morphogenesis with cellular and tissue mechanics, with the aim of helping design better artificial tissues and identifying the mechanical sources of birth defects.
Juan Duchesne-Winter, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, School of Arts and Sciences.
Former professor and chair of the Department of Spanish at the University of Puerto Rico, Duchesne-Winter joins Pitt as professor of Hispanic languages and literatures. A scholar addressing contemporary Hispanophone American literatures from the perspective of comparative literature, post modern literary theory, and cultural studies, he received his Ph.D. in Hispanic languages and literatures from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Duchesne-Winter is a founding member and codirector of three independent journals of theory, cultural criticism, and literature: Postdata (1989-1994), Nómada (1995-2000), and the newly established Hotel Abismo. He writes for a cultural bulletin delivered to professional, business, and academic communities, and he collaborates with a television series on film criticism that is currently transmitted on public television in Puerto Rico.
Barry Gold, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Pharmacy.
Gold is professor and chair of pharmaceutical sciences in Pitt’s School of Pharmacy. Before coming here, Gold was the principal investigator on a National Cancer Institute training grant in cancer biology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. During his time in Nebraska, he also served as associate director of that medical center’s Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and as associate director for basic research in the medical center’s National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center.
Gold’s research focuses on chemical carcinogenesis, DNA structure and repair, and cancer biology, and his work has furthered the development of DNA-specific polymeric materials as well as molecules that deliver damage to DNA. This work has aided the development of anticancer agents. He received his doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Toronto’s chemistry department.
David Earl, Department of Chemistry, School of Arts and Sciences.
Prior to accepting an appointment as assistant professor of chemistry in Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences, Earl was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. He received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Durham, also in the United Kingdom. His research specialization is in computational and theoretical studies of complex materials. Earl’s research interests include intelligent design of catalytical materials, protein evolution and implications for drug resistance, immune system dynamics, vaccine design and protocol, computer simulation methodology, and coarse-graining techniques.
Xu Liang, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering.
Liang, a new Pitt associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, received her Ph.D. in hydrology and water resources from the University of Washington, Seattle. After doing postdoctoral research work at Princeton University, she took a research scientist position at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, NASA/University of Maryland.
Liang seeks to discover and reveal fundamental laws that govern water and energy cycles, and to investigate how the water and energy cycles affect the health of environment and ecological systems—and how they influence the transport and cycling of nutrients and pollutants at different scales, such as at local, regional, continental, and global scales.
Lisa Maillart, Department of Industrial Engineering, School of Engineering.
Maillart received her Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. An assistant professor of industrial engineering at Pitt, Maillart primarily studies decision-making under uncertainty; she applies Markov decision processes or stochastic processes to problems in maintenance optimization, medical decision making, sports, and entrepreneurship. Her ongoing research projects address problems in areas ranging from dynamic breast cancer screening policies to optimal pit stop policies.
Patrick Manning, Department of History, School of Arts and Sciences.
Manning, a former professor of history at Northeastern University, has been appointed Pitt’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History and is also expected to be a key contributor to the University Center for International Studies. A historian of African and world history, Manning received his Ph.D. in African history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and has held visiting appointments at such institutions as Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, and Macquarie University in Australia.
Manning’s scholarly works have been published by a number of key academic presses, including those at Princeton and Cambridge; another book, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2007. In addition to his books, monographs, chapters, and journal articles, he has directed comprehensive Web sites on world history, with funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Beth Roman, Department of Biological Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences.
Roman, assistant professor of biological sciences, has a unique background in toxicology and developmental biology. Her research uses zebra fish as a model experimental system to dissect the molecular pathways that guide blood vessel formation; her work will enable biological sciences to take full advantage of the broader campus initiative in this important area of developmental biology. Roman received her Ph.D. in environmental toxicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health.
Steven Shapiro, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine.
Shapiro joins Pitt as professor and chair of the Department of Medicine after serving in the Harvard Medical School as the Parker B. Francis Professor of Medicine and as chief of the division of pulmonary and critical care in the medicine department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he was applauded for his work as mentor and teacher to both physicians in training and young researchers.
Shapiro’s research focuses on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), lung development, and repair mechanisms in the lung; it has attracted the interest of pharmaceutical companies working to develop a new class of drugs for COPD. The excellence of Shapiro’s work has been recognized through the Edward Livingston Trudeau Scholar Award of the American Lung Association, the Career Investigator Award of the American Lung Association, and the American Thoracic Society’s Scientific Achievement Award. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology and serves on several editorial boards.
Barbara Warnick, Department of Communication, School of Arts and Sciences.
Warnick, professor and chair in Pitt’s Department of Communication, is a rhetorical theorist who applies her analytical skills to both historical and contemporary topics. She comes to Pitt from the University of Washington, where she was a full professor and former chair of the Department of Speech and Communication. She received her Ph.D. in speech, with an emphasis on rhetorical theory and criticism, from the University of Michigan.
During the first half of her career, Warnick worked on the history of rhetorical theory and argument theory, beginning with French rhetorical theory and practice during the early modern and enlightenment periods from 1650 until 1789. In the mid-1990s, Warnick changed her focus to become one of the first rhetoricians to grapple with the phenomenon of the Internet and to explore new forms of rhetoric and customs of rhetoric being developed in forums such as the magazine Wired.
Henry Zeringue, Department of Bioengineering, School of Engineering.
Zeringue, a new Pitt assistant professor of bioengineering, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin; his biomedical engineering work there developing microfluidic devices for assisted reproductive procedures is now being commercialized. His postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explored the function of postsynaptic proteins of the rodent visual system utilizing RNA interference technology.
Zeringue’s neural microengineering laboratory is developing hybrid microfluidic/microelectronic devices for the precise “training” of in vitro neuronal cultures. By controlling in vitro environmental cues, these devices will be able to set up a more consistent background upon which to perform in vitro neurobiological experimentation, yielding more relevant experimental results.
