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.

Bradford S. Bell

Assistant professor, human resource studies
College: School of Industrial and Labor Relations
Academic focus: Learning systems that enhance individual, team and organization effectiveness; design of technologically based learning systems; influence of both technology and training on critical team processes; impact of expectations of organizational justice on employees' attitudes and behaviors; and the influence of culture on organizational learning and change.
Previous position: Doctoral student; consulted, evaluated and ran training and development programs for a number of public- and private-sector organizations; and was an instructor at Michigan State University's Department of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
Academic background: B.A., psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, 1997; and M.A., industrial and organizational psychology, 1999, and Ph.D., industrial and organizational psychology, 2002, both at Michigan State University.

Lance Collins

Professor, mechanical and aerospace engineering
College: Engineering
Academic focus: Turbulent combustion: His group's work is aimed at understanding the interplay between turbulence and chemical reactions in flames using a combination of simulation, theory and experiment. Aerosol coagulation: Weather and climate forecasting requires the prediction of the evolution of cloud droplets from their inception until they initiate rain. His group is studying how turbulence inuences the coalescence rate. Droplets in a turbulent flow field do not remain uniformly distributed, but cluster outside of regions of strongly rotating vortices due to a centrifugal effect. This clustering can dramatically increase the rate of coalescence and speed up the evolution of the cloud, potentially answering a decades-old question concerning how clouds are able to develop as quickly as they do.
Previous position: Professor of chemical engineering and mechanical engineering, Pennsylvania State University, 1990 to 2001.
Academic background: B.S.E., chemical engineering, Princeton University, 1981; and M.S., 1983, and Ph.D., 1987, both in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Brian A. Nault

Assistant professor, entomology
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: At the university's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., Nault is working in the areas of landscape ecology and vegetable entomology. He expects the research will lead to the development of practical, economical and environmentally sound pest management programs.
Previous position: Assistant professor, entomology, Eastern Shore Agricultural Research and Extension Center, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Painter, Va.
Academic background: B.S., entomology, Ohio State University, 1988; M.S., entomology, University of Georgia, 1990; and Ph.D., entomology, North Carolina State University, 1994.

Masha Raskolnikov

Assistant professor, English
College: Arts and Sciences
Academic Focus: Middle English literature, allegory, medieval rhetoric and philosophy, contemporary critical theories, and feminist and queer studies.
Previous position: Dissertation-year fellow at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at University of California-Berkeley, 2001-02.
Academic Background: B.A., College of Letters, Wesleyan University, 1995; and M.A., 1996, and Ph.D., 2002, University of California-Berkeley.

David Weinbaum

Assistant professor, finance
College: Johnson Graduate School of Management
Academic focus: Primary research interests are asset pricing, derivatives and portfolio allocation. He is the winner of the 2001 Finance Management Association's Competitive Paper Award for the best paper in the area of investments, for "Investor Heterogeneity and the Demand for Options in a Dynamic General Equilibrium."
Previous position: Doctoral student, finance instructor, New York University (NYU); trader, Banque Nationale de Paris.
Academic background: B.A., economics and finance, ESCP-EAP European School of Management, 1996; MSc., finance, Management School, Lancaster University (U.K.), 1997; and Ph.D., finance, Stern School of Business, NYU, 2002.

November 21, 2002