Faculty News
For information about a faculty member, select the first initial of the last name:
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M |
| N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Important: Using any e-mail address from these faculty
pages for solicitation, political mailing, or any commercial use is strictly
prohibited and constitutes misappropriation of University property. This
directory has been created for individual communication of a personal nature.
Clark Announces Endowed Chairs
Clark University Provost Davis Baird has announced the appointment of the next holders of four endowed chairs. More >>
Salute to Faculty Scholarship
Each April the Clark community comes together to celebrate the scholarly publications and creative projects authored by Clark faculty over the previous year. Read about the recent work of Clark faculty and learn more about faculty research at Clark.
Meet our new tenure-track faculty: 2011-2012
Norman Apter, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Norman Apter received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from UCLA in June. His dissertation topic was
"The Historical Evolution of Child Welfare in Contemporary China," which investigated the practices
and conceptual underpinnings of the project to nurture, educate, train and discipline dependent
children (abandoned infants, orphans, child refugees and street urchins) in China from the early 20th
century to the present. His subfields are late Imperial and modern China, modern Japan, and modern
Russia, and his research interests include state-society relations, the history of social relief, the
history of children and childhood, and urban development in modern China.
Apter earned an M.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Virginia in 1999 and a B.A. in history from The College of William and Mary in 1995.
Michael C. Boyer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor; Department of Physics
Michael Boyer's research interests are in atomic-scale investigations of physical and chemical
systems. He uses scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), which allows for the imaging and
spectroscopic characterization of materials on an atom-by-atom or molecule-by-molecule basis. At
Clark, Boyer plans to use STM to investigate electronic phase transitions in correlated electron
systems, as well as to image, manipulate, and spectroscopically characterize single molecules and
molecular interactions on substrates.
Boyer comes to Clark after three years at Wellesley College, where he was nominated for the Pinanski Teaching Prize in 2010. For the past year, Boyer has been a research scientist in a physical chemistry laboratory at Wellesley.
Boyer received a B.A. in physics, astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College, an M.A. in physics from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Nicola Curtin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology
Nicola Curtin received her Ph.D. in psychology and women's studies from the University of Michigan.
Her primary line of research examines the role of social identity and individual differences in
commitments to creating social change, with a particular interest in ally and coalitional activism. In a
secondary line of research, she has examined graduate student socialization to the academy,
focusing on working-class students, as well as comparisons of domestic and international students in
the U.S., and factors affecting graduate students' social change career goals. Dr. Curtin's research website.
While at Michigan, Curtin was involved with two international collaborations: The Global Feminisms Project, aimed at creating a publicly-available archive of interviews with women's rights activists from China, India, Poland and the United States; and The International LGBT Psychology Institute.
Curtin received her M.S. in psychology and women's studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a B.A. in psychology from Smith College.
Eric DeMeulenaere, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education
Eric DeMeulenaere comes to Clark from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has been involved in
urban education since 1991. He taught middle and high school social studies and English in Oakland
and San Francisco for eight years. He has also worked as a consultant with urban schools, and a cofounder
and director of an innovative small high school in East Oakland focused on social justice.
DeMeulenaere's current research includes the influence of high school sports participation on student performance, the relationship of the culture of adult learning in schools to the overall change in student performance, and teacher quality in urban schools. He earned his M.A. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) in the Social and Cultural Studies Program at U. C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Education.
Jude Fernando, Ph.D.
Associate Professor,
International Development, Community and Environment Department
Jude Fernando has taught at Clark since 2004. He is currently completing a book, Political Economy of
NGOs: Modernizing Post-modernity, which examines the controversial social roles of microcredit
nongovernmental organizations in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and their links to the state, based
on his long-term fieldwork in the 1990s. He was principal investigator for the project, "Sustainable
Development and Civic Society," funded by the Office of Sustainable Development and
Intergovernmental Affairs of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Fernando has consulted for the Asia Foundation, IFAD and the World Bank. In Sri Lanka he worked in conflict zones for World Vision. He previously taught at the Department of Geography and Regional Development and the International College at the University of Arizona; Dordt College, Iowa; and was a visiting lecturer at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka.
James McCarthy, Ph.D.
Professor, Graduate School of Geography
James McCarthy's research and teaching interests span the nature-society and human geography
areas of the discipline.
His research centers on environmental governance, and particularly on the relationships between
political-economic structures and dynamics, and environmental transformations and outcomes, in
capitalist societies. He draws from and contributes to a range of social science approaches to
environmental issues, with a particular emphasis on the political economy of natural resources,
issues of scale and property relations in environmental management, institutional and social
movement theory, and the history of American and international environmental politics and
regulation.
McCarthy comes to Clark from Pennsylvania State University, where he has taught since 2000. He received a B.A. in English/Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the Association of American Geographers.
Néva P. Meyer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
Néva Meyer's research focuses on understanding how nervous systems evolved by studying the
cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying central nervous system (brain and nerve cord)
development. Her current research addresses this broad question by examining central nervous
system development in a phylogenetically important and understudied group of animals, the annelids.
Meyer earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington by examining how different types of neurons develop in the chick spinal cord, research that was funded by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellowship. As a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Elaine Seaver's lab at Kewalo Marine Lab, University of Hawaii, Meyer began to address the broader question of how nervous systems evolved.
She received a B.S. in molecular and cellular biology from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Washington.
Sitikantha Parida, M.Sc.
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Management
Sitikantha (Siti) Parida comes from the London School of Economics, where he is a Ph.D. candidate in
finance. His current research interests lie in the areas of empirical asset pricing, mutual funds and
behavioral finance. He studies strategic trading behavior of sophisticated agents such as hedge funds
and its implications for other market participants (mutual funds, retail investors, etc.).
Parida has been a research scholar at the Financial Markets Group at the LSE for the past two years and a teaching fellow at the Department of Finance during the last academic year.
He received an M.Sc., with distinction, in accounting and finance from LSE; an M.Tech. in management and systems from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi; and a B.E. in mechanical engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India.
Dominik Reinhold, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Dominik Reinhold's current research interests are, broadly speaking, in stochastic processes and their
applications. During his doctoral studies, he analyzed certain asymptotic properties of near critical
branching process models. He has also worked on stochastic modeling and statistical analysis of cell
growth and migration as part of the EFRI-CBE project "Emerging Frontiers in 3-D Breast Cancer
Tissue Test Systems." Reinhold received a diploma in mathematics from the University of Cologne,
Germany, and an M.S. in statistics and a Ph.D. in statistics and operations research from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dessislava Slavtcheva, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics
Dessislava Slavtcheva's primary research interests are in the areas of open economy
macroeconomics and monetary economics. Her current research studies how the interaction
between a country's exchange rate regime and its level of financial development affects its
macroeconomic performance and productivity growth in both the short and long run.
Slavtcheva received a B.A. from the American University in Bulgaria, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Boston College. She spent a summer as an intern at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C., while working on her Ph.D. dissertation.
Ora Szekely, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Ora Szekely comes to Clark from McGill University in Montreal, where she completed a Ph.D. in
political science, and taught courses on international relations and post-conflict peace-building.
Her research examines the consequences of the domestic and foreign policy decisions made by nonstate military actors in the Middle East. Specifically, she focuses on the outcomes of the resource acquisition strategies employed by Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO. Szekely's work is based on both academic fieldwork and several years of professional experience as a development worker in the region.
In addition to her Ph.D. from McGill, Szekely holds an M.A. in the social sciences from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in history and religious studies from Cornell University.
Joseph Tang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Carlson School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Joseph Tang's research interests are focused on energy conservation and metabolism of
photosynthetic organisms. His current research involves interdisciplinary fields from chemical
biology, microbiology, bioanalytical/biophysical chemistry, system biology and bionanotechnology.
He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers in highly respected and high-impact journals
and book chapters, with 23 first-authored.
Tang comes to Clark from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., where he was a research scientist in the Department of Biology and the Department of Chemistry. He was an adviser to the University's iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) team in 2009-10, and participated in the Prokaryotes Genome Annotation Workshop. Prior to his time at Washington University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Genomic Research Center at Academia Sinica and Ohio State University, and a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Tang received a B.S. from Tamkang University and an M.S. from National Taiwan University in Taiwan, and a Ph.D. with a major in biochemistry and minor in pharmacy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Guillaume Weisang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Management
Guillaume Weisang's formal training and personal interests lie in the overlap between business
(especially finance), applied mathematics (including statistics) and computer science. A 2011
graduate of Bentley University's doctoral program in business, his research interests include: Bayesian
statistics and Bayesian econometrics, times series, hedge fund performance evaluation and
replication, and hedge fund systemic risk. While at Bentley, Weisang received the Best Ph.D. Student
in Business Award, 2007-2008.
A native of Paris, Weisang also holds an M.Sc. (2005) in computer science and applied mathematics from the National Polytechnic Institute of Engineering in Electrotechnology, Electronics, Computer Science, Hydraulics and Telecommunications in France, as well as an M.S. (2005) in financial engineering and modeling from Toulouse Business School, the National Engineering School in Aeronautics and the National Institute in Advanced Sciences of Toulouse.
Weisang previously worked for Société Générale Asset Management Alternative Investments on quantitative strategies and structured products.