Introducing New Members of the Faculty

To help introduce to the Cornell community the new members of the university's faculty, the Cornell Chronicle will be publishing a series of brief, new-faculty profiles each week during the semester.

Jed DeVaro

Assistant professor, labor economics
College: Industrial and Labor Relations
Academic focus: Labor economics and applied econometrics. He conducts research on the economics of personnel, in particular the behavior of employers concerning their decisions to recruit, screen, and hire job applicants, and the analysis of labor market policies that affect those decisions.
Previous position: Doctoral student, 1996-2001; research assistant, Stanford University, 1997-1999; assistant economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Richmond, Va., 1994-96.
Academic background: B.A., economics, Swarthmore College, 1994; M.A., economics, Stanford University, 1998; and Ph.D., economics, Stanford, expected 2001.

Hod Lipson

Professor, Faculty of Computing and Information and mechanical and aerospace engineering
College: Engineering and Faculty of Computing and Information
Academic focus: Computational synthesis, at the intersection of artificial intelligence, engineering design and evolutionary biology. He studies self-organization processes that allow complexity to arise from elementary building blocks and tries to harness these ideas for design automation. He led the GOLEM project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics) in which simple electro-mechanical systems evolved from scratch to yield physical locomoting machines that were robotically fabricated
Previous position: Postdoctoral fellow, Dynamical and Evolutionary Machine Organization (DEMO) Lab, computer science department, Volen Center of Complex Systems, Brandeis University; also lecturer and visiting scholar, mechanical engineering department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Academic background: B.S., mechanical engineering, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, 1989; and Ph.D., mechanical engineering, Technion, 1998.

Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen

Assistant professor, linguistics
College: Arts and Sciences
Academic focus: Phonetics, phonetics-phonology interface, Khoesan languages
Previous position: Instructor, Ohio State University, 1998-2000; teaching assistant, Ohio State, 1993-94.
Academic background: B.A., linguistics, minor: education, University of New Hampshire, 1989; M.A., linguistics, University of Illinois, 1996; and Ph.D., linguistics, Ohio State University, 2001.

Ping Wang

Assistant professor, entomology
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: Wang's research focuses on the physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology of insects. He has conducted extensive study on insect digestive systems and the insect mechanisms that resist pathogens and pesticides.
Previous position: Postdoctoral researcher, Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, 1998-2001.
Academic background: B.Sc., biology, 1983, and M.Sc., insect virology, 1986, both at Fudan University, China; and Ph.D., entomology, Cornell, 1996.

November 1, 2001