Yan Bai

Assistant Professor of Economics

Yan Bai is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Rochester. Yan completed her PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota, having completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China. Prior to coming to Rochester, Yan was a visiting scholar at Princeton University and an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Yan’s research focuses on international macroeconomics, and she has written a number of papers on the role that barriers to financial investment have on international capital flows and business cycles. Her most recent work examines the role of uncertainty in why employment drops so much during economic downturns—a key puzzle for the great recession and the disappointing recent recovery.

Corbett Bazler

Assistant Professor of Music

Corbett Bazler specializes in Italian Baroque opera, particularly the operas of Handel and his London contemporaries. His dissertation, titled “The Comedies of Opera Seria: Handel’s Post-Academy Operas, 1738–1743,” explores the relationship between Handel’s late operas, comic spoken theater, and other forms of British entertainment in mid-18th-century London. Other research interests include late 19th- and early 20th-century opera and issues surrounding operatic production and performance today.

Joel Burges

Assistant Professor of English

Joel Burges joins the faculty of English and film and media studies following a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature and Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Burges received his PhD from Stanford University in English and American Literature, and his BA from Yale University in American Studies. He is currently working on two book projects, a manuscript entitled Turning Back the Clock: Technological Obsolescence and Historical Time in Contemporary Culture and, as coeditor with Amy J. Elias, a collection entitled Contemporalities: Keywords for the Present. Working at the intersection of cultural studies, critical theory, and media studies in these projects, Burges is rethinking ideas about time and history that have dominated thought for the past 30 years; he is specifically interested in how that which we have rejected as obsolete, outdated, and old-fashioned figures centrally in the works of post-1980 novelists and filmmakers as a repository for alternative modernities and alternative temporalities, such that the past supersedes the future as the temporal horizon of art and politics alike in their work. Burges also periodically contributes short “blog-essays” to Arcade: A Digital Salon, and he is preparing forthcoming essays about description, time, and the poetics of world-building in contemporary television that may form the foundation of a later book provisionally entitled Fiction after TV. As both a scholar and teacher committed to the future of the humanities, Burges is extremely excited to be joining the University of Rochester.

Michael Caie

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Michael Caie is an assistant professor of philosophy. He completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at McGill University and did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. Michael’s work focuses on questions in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and epistemology. He is interested in the nature of linguistic representation and the norms governing the mental states of rational agents. He has written papers on the topic of vagueness in language and how this phenomenon should be accommodated in a theory of meaning. In his dissertation he explores how certain paradoxes, well known in philosophical logic, can be shown to have consequences for our understanding of rational norms and the mental states of rational agents. He has teaching interests in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and logic.

Regine Choe

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Regine Choe received her BS in physics from the Pohang University of Science & Technology in Korea, and her PhD degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania (2005). Her doctoral research was on the diffuse optical tomography and spectroscopy of breast cancer and fetal brain. Diffuse optical techniques (including tomography and spectroscopy) based on near-infrared light illumination have a great potential for detection and therapy monitoring of disease by providing information on several unique deep tissue hemodynamic and metabolic parameters. She continued her postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania and received the Howard Temin Pathway to Independence Award (K99/ R00) from NIH.

She joined the biomedical engineering department as an assistant professor in January 2011. Her current research focus is on the development, validation, and clinical translation of diffuse optical techniques for the breast cancer therapy monitoring. Her study incorporates various tools from disciplines such as physics, optics, engineering, computer science, biochemistry, biology, and medicine. She plans to expand the applications of diffuse optical techniques to other human diseases and organs in the future. In addition to her research, Regine loves to try new things. Among these, science fiction movies, international food, flying, and figure skating are her current favorites.

Jonathan D. Ellis

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Optics

Jonathan D. Ellis earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) in 2010. Prior to that, Jon studied at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he received both his MS and BS, also in mechanical engineering. Jon currently has a joint appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Rochester with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of Optics.

Ellis’s research is on designing and building novel instruments that allow the measurement of precision optical surfaces that have been manufactured in several different ways. Such measurements may improve the capabilities of precision manufacturing platforms. He is also interested in system integration for precision metrology tools onto existing precision systems or designing scratch-built systems for custom applications. Current research projects are in designing and developing smart optical sensors for compact, remote displacement sensing and for many degrees-of-freedom interferometry. In addition to those, Jon is interested in linear displacement interferometry and laser design and applications such as high-power gas laser frequency stabilization, and in refractometry, flexure systems for instrumentation and machining platforms, stage metrology, precision machine design, and capacitance sensor design.

Srihari Govindan

Professor of Economics

Srihari Govindan is professor of economics at the University of Rochester. Hari joins the department in Rochester after having served as professor of economics at the University of Iowa, where he was also the director of graduate studies. Govindan has previously held appointments at the University of Western Ontario and Northwestern University. He holds the PhD in economics from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Hari is a leader in the fields of game theory and mathematical economics, with his work establishing a basis for research in game theory. Hari is currently working on auction theory, connecting that field to innovations in game theory.

Margarita Guillory

Assistant Professor of Religion

Margarita Guillory earned her BA in chemistry from Emory University. She became an award-winning high school science teacher prior to developing an interest in the academic study of religion. She earned an MTS from the University of St. Thomas (Houston) and then entered the PhD program at Rice University. At Rice, she specialized in American religious history and wrote a dissertation on the African-American spiritualist churches of New Orleans, under the direction of Anthony Pinn. Margarita brings a socialscientific approach to the study of religion, using the methods of sociology of religion, psychology of religion, and ritual studies to explore the meaning of ritual for African Americans. While working on turning her dissertation into a book, Margarita has already begun a new research project on African-American spiritualists in Upstate New York.

Benjamin Hayden

Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Benjamin Hayden is a neuroscientist who studies brain mechanisms of economic choice and self-control. He also studies diseases that hijack these brain systems, especially addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He is particularly interested in how high-level processing centers in the brain, such as prefrontal and cingulate cortex, contribute to making decisions under a variety of conditions. To tackle these problems, Hayden’s research combines traditional approaches rooted in psychology and neurobiology with ideas from control theory, learning theory, economics, and foraging theory. He obtained his PhD from the University of California Berkeley where he studied the role of visual cortex in high-level cognitive processes, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University where he studied the neural basis of decision making under uncertainty.

Asen Kochov

Assistant Professor of Economics

Asen Kochov is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Rochester. Asen completed his PhD in economics at the University of Rochester, and has been a visiting scholar at Boston University and an assistant professor at Bonn University. Asen’s research interests are in the fields of economic theory with a particular focus on decision theory. His current research addresses the problem of modeling unforeseen contingencies, a problem that has not been adequately analyzed in the profession. Asen’s approach has provided important insights into this difficult problem. Asen will be teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses at Rochester. To relax, Asen enjoys a good game of chess or a rigorous table tennis game.

Jennifer W. Kyker

Assistant Professor of Music

Jennifer Kyker earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has explored issues of audience reception in postcolonial Zimbabwean popular music. She has studied the mbira dzavadzimu, an instrument played at various ritual events within Zimbabwe. Other research interests include how women navigate expectations of gender in mbira performance, and the evolution of neotraditional musical styles, such as the contemporary Zimbabwean marimba.

As an undergraduate, Kyker received a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research on musical performance at the kurova guva ceremony. Subsequently she became deeply involved in HIV/AIDS research, activism, and upon returning to the United States, founded the nonprofit organization Tariro, working to educate and empower teenage girls in Zimbabwean communities affected by HIV/AIDS (www.tariro.org). In recognition of her work on HIV/AIDS, she has been honored with several fellowships and awards, including a Leboy-Davies Fellowship in Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and an alumnae fellowship from Mount Holyoke College.

Working with musicians from Zimbabwe, Professor Kyker has produced several albums featuring music in a variety of genres. Her interviews with Zimbabwean artists have additionally received national exposure through their inclusion on the radio program Afropop Worldwide.

Jiebo Luo

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Jiebo Luo joins the University of Rochester after 16 years at Kodak Research Laboratories, where he was a senior principal scientist leading research and advanced development. He has been involved in numerous technical conferences, including serving as the program cochair of ACM Multimedia 2010 and IEEE CVPR 2012. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Multimedia, and has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Pattern Recognition, Machine Vision and Applications, and Journal of Electronic Imaging. He is a fellow of the SPIE, IEEE, and IAPR.

His research spans image processing, computer vision, machine learning, data mining, medical imaging, and ubiquitous computing. He has been an advocate for contextual inference in semantic understanding of visual data, and continues to push the frontiers in this area by incorporating geolocation context and social context. A recent research thrust focuses on exploiting social media for machine learning, data mining, and human computer interaction, for example, mining the wisdom of crowds for social, political, and economic prediction and forecasting. He has published extensively with over 180 papers and 60 US patents.

Brad Mahon

Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and of Neurosurgery

Brad Mahon is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how concepts of common objects are organized and represented in the brain. His research uses functional MRI and behavioral analysis to study disruption and recovery of neural systems after brain damage. The types of brain-damaged patients studied in his research include patients with brain tumors and stroke patients. The particular focus of his research is on how concepts are retrieved from vision and how concepts are mapped onto language. Brad Mahon received his PhD from Harvard University (2009) where he studied the organization of knowledge in the brains of congenitally blind adults.

Hitomi Mukaibo

Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering

Hitomi Mukaibo joined the department of chemical engineering at the University of Rochester in July 2011. She earned her degrees in engineering from Waseda University, PhD (2006), ME (2004), and BS (2002). In Waseda University, her research focus was in the development of novel materials for high-energy lithium-ion batteries. After obtaining her PhD, she decided to expand the horizon of her expertise and to pursue her interest in the biology-related fields. She changed her research focus from batteries to biosensors and bio/nanoscience. She moved to Florida and worked as a postdoctoral researcher for Charles R. Martin at the University of Florida, where she studied nanopore materials to detect proteins. She also developed nanostructured platforms to deliver foreign genes to algal cells for gene transformation. Based on this training, her current research interests include materials science, electrochemistry, biosensors, bio/nanoscience, bioanalytical chemistry, energy, and chemistry at interfaces.

Michael Neidig

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Michael Neidig received his BA in chemistry from Colgate University in 1999. Following studies at the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar, leading to an MPhil degree in chemistry, he moved to Stanford University where he received his PhD in chemistry in 2007. At Stanford, Michael became interested in the use of physical-inorganic spectroscopic methods to understand transition metal catalytic systems in biological systems. Desiring to study applied transition metal catalysis, he moved to Dow Chemical after receiving his PhD and focused on catalyst development research for large scale, practical implementation of both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis. Motivated to return to a more independent research career in academics, he moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory as a director’s postdoctoral fellow. In 2009, Michael joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester as an assistant professor. His research at Rochester focuses on the generation of new fundamental insight into structure, bonding, and mechanism in homogeneous, heterogeneous, and biological nonprecious metal catalysts.

Cary Peppermint

Assistant Professor of Studio Arts

Cary Peppermint is an assistant professor of art. He is a practicing artist whose studio production explores the convergence of ecological, cultural, and digital networks. His postdisciplinary practice maintains strong ties to Internet and performance art. Since co-founding ecoarttech.com with Leila Nadir in 2005, Cary’s art has turned toward the imagination of the environment as a convergent network of biological, cultural, and digital spaces. His works are in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, Computer Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Cary’s curatorial work has focused on digital, back-country, off-the-grid exhibitions such as Wild Info Net, a solar-powered sound-art installation in the Catskill Mountains, and Nature 2.0, one of the first exhibitions of eco-art engaging new media technologies. Peppermint has held previous appointments at Cornell University, Colgate University, and the Pratt Institute.

Vasilii Petrenko

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Vasilii Petrenko received his BA in chemistry from UNH in 1997. He then became an educator, teaching middle school and high school science, first at the International School of Dusseldorf and later, at the Rivers School near Boston. Vasilii received a master’s degree in education from Harvard University in 2000. While at Harvard, he took some courses in earth science that sparked his interest in this field in general, and in the area of past climate change in particular. Vasilii went on to get his PhD in earth sciences (2008) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (part of UC, San Diego). Vasilii’s research at Scripps focused on making the first measurements of carbon-14 in past atmospheric methane recovered from ice cores in order to understand how natural wetlands and marine methane hydrates respond to climate warming events. After leaving Scripps, Vasilii continued his ice core research at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (part of the University of Colorado, Boulder).

Vasilii uses ancient ice and air preserved in the polar ice caps to study past atmospheric composition, chemistry, and climate. One ongoing direction of research is understanding past natural variations in methane (an important greenhouse gas), particularly in response to climate change. Another research direction explores past changes in atmospheric carbon monoxide and links to the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere. Vasilii is also interested in using carbon-14 produced in polar ice by cosmic rays to understand past changes in the cosmic ray flux.

Ezra Tawil

Associate Professor of English

Ezra Tawil received his PhD from Brown University. His research has focused on American literature in English between the middle of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century. His work is shaped by the objectives of “literary history” in the strong sense of that term: at once the history of literary forms and an accounting of the contribution those forms made to broader historical processes. The point is not to blend literary questions and historical ones indiscriminately, but in fact to register what is particular about literary writing—the specific kinds of pleasure it offers, and the specific kinds of cultural power that distinguish it from other forms of discourse. His first book, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge, 2006), showed how the period between 1750 and 1850 oversaw a decisive shift in the cultural understanding of racial difference, and argued that a particular literary genre played an important and unacknowledged role there. In a similar spirit, but with a different emphasis, his current book project takes up the origins of a specifically literary version of American exceptionalism at the end of the 18th century, during the period of transition from British- American colonies to the U.S. nation. It was an idea that would have made little sense earlier in the colonial period, and yet it would be entirely taken for granted a century later. When did it first make sense to speak of an “American literature” as a distinct tradition, and in precisely what terms did the writers themselves do so?

Nick Vamivakas

Assistant Professor of Optics

Nick Vamivakas studied electrical engineering at Boston University receiving his PhD in 2007. During this time, he developed high-resolution microscopy and spectroscopy techniques to study the electro-optic properties of individual nanostructures. Following his PhD, he was a postdoc from 2007–2011 in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Nick joined the Institute of Optics in 2011 and currently is an assistant professor.

Nick’s main research interests are in how quantum mechanical effects manifest themselves in optics experiments. He currently investigates new features that arise in traditional quantum optics experiments when the material system, typically an atom, is replaced by an artificial atom such as a semiconductor nanostructure. This will provide a new avenue to understand the basic features of how light interacts with matter. In parallel he is also developing nanoscale optical sensors. By exploiting aspects of quantum physics, he plans to realize a new generation of sensors capable of measuring sample properties on length scales not accessible with a conventional optical microscope.

Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam received his BTech degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2004. He attended Cornell University, where he worked with Rafael Pass receiving his PhD in computer science in 2010. Before arriving at Rochester, he spent a year at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (NYU) as a postdoctoral researcher supported by the Computing Innovation Fellowship. His research is in cryptography and its interplay with complexity theory, in particular: understanding secure composition of cryptographic protocols, minimal assumptions required for efficient constructions, intrinsic complexity of cryptographic primitives, and basing cryptography on NP-hardness. As part of his dissertation, he proposed a unified framework to efficiently realize any secure multiparty computation task with concurrent security; some examples of such tasks include anonymous electronic elections, privacy-preserving auctions, and faulttolerant distributed computing.