Introducing New Members of the Faculty

To help introduce to the Cornell community the new members of the university's faculty, the Cornell Chronicle is publishing brief new-faculty profiles through December.

Agrawal

Bogan

Phipps Morgan

Rusmevichientong

Wang

Anurag Agrawal

Assistant professor, ecology and evolutionary biology
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic Focus: Agrawal studies the ecology and evolution of the interactions between insects and plants. Considering that insects and plants account for 75 percent of the world's biodiversity, he aims to understand the factors that resulted in their adaptations, how those communities are organized and how natural selection shapes the plant-insect associations.
Previous position: Assistant professor of botany, University of Toronto, 2000-04.
Academic background: B.A., magna cum laude, biology, University of Pennsylvania, 1994; M.A., conservation biology, University of Pennsylvania, 1994; and Ph.D., population biology, University of California-Davis, 1999.
Last book read: Diary of a Mad Mom-to-Be by Laura Wolf.

Vicki L. Bogan

Assistant professor, applied economics and management
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: Bogan's research focuses on issues involving rationality in financial markets. Specifically, she has looked at stock market participation and the Internet, as well as the Internet bubble. She has also studied credit card debt and other behavioral economics issues. This fall she is teaching an undergraduate course, Contemporary Topics in Applied Finance.
Previous position: Doctoral candidate, Brown University, 2004.
Academic background: Sc.B., applied mathematics and economics, Brown University, 1991; MBA, finance and strategic management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1995; A.M., economics, 2000, and Ph.D., economics, 2004, both from Brown University.
Last book read: Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Jason Phipps Morgan

Professor, earth and atmospheric sciences
College: Engineering
Academic focus: Phipps Morgan's current research focuses on melting, the role of plumes and the asthenosphere in mantle convection, the strength of continental lithosphere, the origin of kimberlites and effects of serpentinization on subducting slabs. In addition, he is pursuing simple lab and computational experiments that help teach mantle dynamics while simultaneously exploring the physics of asthenosphere entrainment by subducting slabs.
Previous position: Professor and head of the Department of Marine Geodynamics, GEOMAR Research Center, Kiel University, Germany, 1999-2004.
Academic background: B.S., physics, Brown University, 1981; Ph.D., geophysics, Brown University, 1985.
Last book read: The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block.

Paat Rusmevichientong

Assistant professor, operations research and industrial engineering
College: Engineering
Academic focus: Data mining, probabilistic inference and decentralized decision-making.
Previous position: Software engineer, Amazon.com, 2003-04.
Academic background: B.A., mathematics, University of California-Berkeley, 1997; M.S., operations research, Stanford University, 1999; Ph.D., operations research, Stanford, 2003.
Last book read: Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton.

Albert Wang

Assistant professor, applied economics and management
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: Financial economics and how information is incorporated into price. He has general interests in asymmetric information, financial institutions and market microstructure. He examines empirical implications resulting from trading and information transfer between different groups of investors; and he will teach undergraduate investment analysis this fall.
Previous position: Doctoral candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.
Academic background: B.S., economics, and B.A.S., systems engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 1999; Ph.D., financial economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.
Last book read: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

October 14, 2004