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 each week during the semester.

Carlos D. Bustamante

Assistant professor, biological statistics and computational biology
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: Bustamante's research focuses on applying recent theoretical and computational advances in statistics to population genetics and molecular evolution. He has particular interest in developing statistical methods for estimating the strength of natural selection.
Previous position: Marshall-Sherfield fellow, Oxford University.
Academic background: B.A., biology, 1997; M.A., statistics, 2001; and Ph.D., biology, 2001, all from Harvard University.

Eric M. Eisenstein

Assistant professor, marketing
College: Johnson Graduate School of Management
Academic focus: Research interests are managerial and consumer decision making, decision-support systems and de-biasing methods and learning in complex environments. Teaching interests are marketing research, management models and strategy, new product development and consumer behavior. He has a book chapter, "Marketing Decision Support and Intelligent Systems," in the Handbook of Marketing (Sage Publications, 2002). He was an associate with Mercer Management Consulting in Washington, D.C., and a lecturer at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Previous position: Doctoral student, University of Pennsylvania.
Academic background: B.S., systems engineering/economics, School of Engineering and Applied Science/Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1993; and M.A., statistics, 2000, and Ph.D., managerial science and applied economics, 2002, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

María Fernández

Assistant professor, history of art
College: Arts and Sciences
Academic focus: New media and Latin American art, postcolonial and electronic media theory.
Previous position: Assistant professor of art history, California State University-Long Beach.
Academic background: B.A., psychology, Albertus Magnus College, 1978; and M.A., art history, 1982, M.Phil., 1986, and Ph.D., art history, 1993, all from Columbia University.

Richard Swedberg

Professor, sociology
College: Arts and Sciences
Academic focus: Study in economic sociology, such as its history, its general focus, entrepreneurship, capitalism and, recently, the role of law in economic life; classical sociological theory, especially Tocqueville, Weber and Schumpeter, and, most currently, arguing that sociologists should not only pay attention to social relations but should also take interests into account, as Weber, Simmel and other classics have done.
Previous position: Professor, sociology, Stockholm University, 1986-2002; fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, 2001-02.
Academic background: Juris kandidat (master of law), Stockholm University,1970; and Ph.D., sociology, Boston College, 1978.

Chris Xu

Assistant professor, applied and engineering physics
College: Engineering
Academic focus: His research centers on applying fundamental physical principles to optical systems to improve performance. The systems under study are photonics, ber optics and optical instrumentations. His focus is on the practical application of optics, creating new components and systems and/or enhancing the performance of existing techniques. His research includes both experimental and numerical simulations.
Previous position: Member of the technical staff, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, working on optical telecommunication systems, 1999 to 2002.
Academic background: B.S., physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, 1989; and M.S., 1993, and Ph.D., 1996, both in applied physics at Cornell.

October 31, 2002