New tenure-track faculty: 2012-2013
Katerine Bielaczyc, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Education; Director, Hiatt Center for Urban Education
Katerine Bielaczyz's research involves collaborating with students, teachers, and school
communities to investigate new approaches to teaching and learning. Her work focuses on
developing supportive technological and social infrastructures that enable participants to work
together as a knowledge-building community regarding personal, pedagogical, and systematic
transformation. Before coming to Clark, she was the deputy head of the Learning Sciences Lab
at the National Institute of Education in Singapore; assistant professor at Harvard University in
Teacher Education and Technology in Education; senior scientist at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman;
and director of the Learning Communities Research Group at Boston College. Bielaczyz has also
worked on educational technology projects in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, and with the
Harvard Institute for International Development on the evaluation of technology integration into
classrooms in the Bogota School District in Colombia. She received a B.Sc. Honours in computer
science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and a master's and Ph.D. in education
from the University of California-Berkeley.
Alex Gardner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Geography
Alex Gardner earned a B.Eng. in civil engineering from the University of Saskatchewan and a
Ph.D. in earth sciences from the University of Alberta. Prior to joining the Clark Graduate School
of Geography, he was a National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada research
fellow in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences at the University of
Michigan. Gardner studies the Earth's cryosphere (frozen Earth) with a particular focus on
glaciers and their impacts on sea level rise and water resources. He is interested in how glaciers
and ice sheets respond to natural and human-induced forcings, as well as how changes in the
reflectivity of snow and ice modify the Earth's climate. To answer such questions he integrates
remote sensing observations and Earth system modeling. Using this approach, Gardner recently
showed that glaciers in the Canadian Arctic have become the largest contributor to sea level
rise outside of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
Charles Jakobsche, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Carlson School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Charles Jakobsche, a Boston native, attended Williams College, where he conducted organic
chemistry research with Hodge Markgraf, sprinted on the track team, and played saxophone in
the jazz band. Continuing to focus on organic chemistry, he began graduate school at Boston
College, where he joined Scott Miller's laboratory, studied molecular catalysts, and developed
new chemical reactions. Midway through his graduate career, Jakobsche (and the Miller group)
moved to Yale University, where he completed his Ph.D. Having developed an interest in the
medicinal properties of organic molecules, he remained at Yale and became a postdoctoral fellow
in David Spiegel's laboratory, where he developed organic molecules that can direct components
of the normal human immune system to recognize and destroy human cancer cells. At Clark,
Jakobsche hopes to work with undergraduates and graduate students to use organic chemistry
to synthesize and study molecules that have interesting and useful medical properties.
Juan Pablo Rivera, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Foreign Languages and Literatures Department
Juan Pablo Rivera holds a Ph.D. in romance languages and literatures from Harvard University,
and a bachelor's degree from Yale. He joins the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
at Clark after teaching at American University in Washington, D.C., and at Westfield State
University in Westfield, Mass. In 2011, he and a colleague from Bowdoin College published the
book "Lección errante: Mayra Santos-Febres y el Caribe contemporáneo" ["Errant Lesson: Mayra
Santos-Febres and the Contemporary Caribbean"], a collection of critical essays about Latin
America's first Afra-Hispanic writer of great relevance. He has also published articles on Latin
American and U.S. Latino and Latina literature, and on gender and sexuality studies. Currently,
he is working on a book about gender, sexuality and non-monolingual linguistic practices in
contemporary Latin American literature.
Marc Rockmore, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Economics Department
Marc Rockmore graduated from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in applied economics and
management. His dissertation examines the effect of insecurity on livelihoods during conflicts,
with a focus on Northern Uganda and the pastoral lands on the Ethiopian-Kenyan border. His
upcoming project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant, and will examine how
exposing youths to violence and other traumas affects economic outcomes in Northern Uganda,
post-conflict. Prior to beginning his dissertation, Rockmore worked for five years at leading
public policy institutes focusing on both international and domestic issues. He also has an M.A.
in international development and economics from Yale University and a B.A. in economics with
honors from Swarthmore College.
Jie Tian, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, International Development, Community, and Environment Department
Jie Tian's research interests include geographic information science and systems, spatialtemporal
analysis, geocomputation, Web mapping and open source GIS, land use and land cover
classification, remote sensing and image processing, spatial epidemiology and environmental
health. He has studied air quality in Ontario through the integrative analysis of remotely sensed
data and ground-based data; the spatial-temporal pattern of the rate of low birth weight in
Georgia using GIS; and the impact of urban expansion on wetlands in Beijing. A native of North
China, Tian did his undergraduate study at Beijing University, with a major in earth science and
a minor in general science. Soon after, he pursued graduate degrees in GIS at the University of
Western Ontario (master's) and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (doctorate). Before
joining Clark he taught and conducted research at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
and Georgia Southern University.
Zhihong Wang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Management
Zhihong (Rita) Wang's research interests focus on behavioral experimentation in the field of
managerial accounting. Her current research projects investigate cross-cultural differences in
corporate budgeting practices and information disclosure decision-making processes. Her work
also addresses the issues faced by the culturally diverse accounting profession in international
accounting firms. Wang received her Ph.D. in accounting from Bentley University in May 2012.
She also holds an M.Phil. in accounting from Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and an M.B.A.
from Xi'an University of Technology in China. Wang has previously worked for ICI and Siemens
in various accounting and internal auditing functions.