The following appointments were presented to the Cornell Board of Trustees at its November meeting.
Alyssa B. Apsel, assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was appointed the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering for a five-year term, effective July 1, 2002.
The chair is named for the playwright, journalist, U.S. ambassador to Italy and the first woman elected to Congress from Connecticut. Luce, who died in 1987, established the chair through a bequest, administered by the Henry Luce Foundation, "to encourage women to enter, study, graduate and teach" in the sciences (including mathematics) and engineering. Henry Luce was the founder of Time, Life and Fortune magazines.
Apsel is an expert on high-speed, silicon-on-sapphire CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) circuits for optoelectronics. Her research focuses on merging these circuits with micro-optics to build high-performance electronics. Interconnect problems currently are a bottleneck in the advancement of high-speed and high-performance CMOS microelectronics. She approaches this problem by using optical interfaces to connect electronic subsystems. This fusion of optics and electronics on a sapphire substrate avoids difficulties of conventional high-speed electronic interfaces. This work includes the design of electronic interface circuitry and the hybridization of electronic and optical elements.
She recently completed her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her B.S. degree in engineering at Swarthmore College in 1995 and her M.S. in electrical and computer engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 1996.
Marianella Casasola, assistant professor in the Department of Human Development, was appointed the first Lois and Mel Tukman Assistant Professor, for a term effective Nov. 1, 2002, through June 30, 2005.
The professorship, named for Lois Tukman '62 and her husband Mel, who graduated from Hunter College and has an MBA from Harvard, is awarded to a junior faculty member who exhibits scientific excellence, creativity and academic promise in human ecology.
Casasola joined the Cornell faculty in 2000 after serving as a research assistant in psychology and an assistant instructor in child development at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her B.A. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1992 and her M.A. and Ph.D., in 1995 and 2000, respectively, from the University of Texas at Austin.
Casasola's research focuses on infant cognitive development and early word learning and, in particular, the interaction between cognition and early language learning. With colleagues, she has examined infants' understanding of object solidity and infant perception of physical causality. In the realm of language development, she has investigated infants' ability to comprehend novel words for objects as well as their ability to comprehend novel words for action events.
Her more recent work explores the relationship between infant spatial cognition and infant language, that is, how infants process the spatial relationships between objects and their ability to group these events into the spatial categories used by different languages. She also is exploring whether language can influence the manner in which infants attend to and group spatial events into spatial categories. Her goal is to document developmental changes in infant cognitive development, explore how these abilities are recruited to acquire language and examine whether language can influence how infants process and organize their world.
Jere D. Haas, professor and director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences, was reappointed the Nancy Schegel Meinig Professor in Maternal and Child Nutrition for a second five-year term, effective Nov. 1.
The professorship, named for Nancy Schlegel Meinig '62, whose husband, Peter '61, is chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees, was established in 1995 in recognition of the important work being done by the Division of Nutritional Sciences in maternal and child nutrition and its preeminence internationally.
Haas earned his B.A. in anthropology from Franklin and Marshall College in 1967 and his M.A. in anthropology, in 1970, and Ph.D. in biological anthropology, in 1973, both from Pennsylvania State University.
Haas came to Cornell in 1975 as an assistant professor after teaching anthropology for two years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. At Cornell, he was appointed associate professor in 1980 and full professor in 1987 in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. Haas holds appointments in the graduate faculties of nutrition, anthropology, Latin American studies, epidemiology and international development. He also serves as the director of the Human Biology Program and was the co-director of the Program in International Nutrition before his appointment as director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences in 1998.
The author of more than 200 scientific papers and reports, Haas studies the long-term consequences of protein energy malnutrition in early life, especially related to subsequent growth and physical performance. He also conducts research on the effects of moderate iron deficiency on various aspects of physical performance in young women and how measures of performance relate to everyday productivity and social and economic well-being in Bolivia and Mexico. His research interests also include nutrition and adaptation to high altitudes and maternal nutrition related to adverse pregnancy outcomes.
Wendi L. Adair, assistant professor of management and organizations, was appointed a Clifford H. Whitcomb Faculty Fellow for a one-year term effective Nov. 1. The fellowship was established by Clifford Whitcomb '43, MBA '48, an active alumnus and longtime supporter of the Johnson School and Cornell.
Adair's research focuses on negotiation and conflict management skills. She investigates the role of culture and communication in the behavior of individuals and groups in organizations. She has examined transactional negotiations in more than eight national cultures. Adair's research has helped define characteristic strategies for negotiators from the United States and Japan and the impact of reciprocity on outcome in cross-cultural negotiations. Other areas of research include trust and social value orientation in negotiation. She is the co-author, with J.M. Brett, of "Culture and Negotiation Processes," in the book Culture and Negotiation: Integrative Approaches to Theory and Research (Stanford University Press, 2002). She won the American Psychiatric Association's Best Dissertation Award for 2001. Her research has been published in Negotiation Journal and the Journal of Applied Psychology. Her teaching interests include negotiations, cross-cultural negotiations, management and organizations and teams. She earned her Ph.D. from the Kellogg School, Northwestern University, in 2001.
Robert J. Bloomfield, associate professor of accounting, was appointed a Clifford H. Whitcomb Faculty Fellow for a one-year term effective Nov. 1.
Bloomfield is the Johnson School's director of Graduate Studies as well as the director of the school's Debra Paget and Jeffrey Berg Business Simulation Laboratory. He creates mathematical models to examine the effects of financial market regulations on investor welfare and to explore how psychological forces can alter the behavior of financial markets. The recipient of an "Innovation in Teaching" grant from Cornell Information Technologies, he is using the grant to develop a new simulation-based course that will allow students to trade securities in financial markets in the laboratory. He has taught classes in Managerial Accounting, Security Valuation, Taxation, and Experimental Research and has published and reviewed articles in the fields of accounting, finance, psychology and economics. His research has been cited in The New York Times, Smart Money, on CNBC and elsewhere. He serves on the editorial boards of The Accounting Review and Accounting, Organizations and Society. Bloomfield was a tax accountant with KPMG Peat Marwick before earning his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1992.
Jerome E. Hass, professor of finance and business strategy, was reappointed as the Krause Faculty Fellow in Real Estate for a one-year term effective July 1, 2002. The fellowship was established by Alan M. Krause '52, MBA '53, president of the Mid-America Management Corp. and a longtime supporter of the Johnson School and Cornell.
Hass' interests are corporate and capital-market finance, business strategy, and the economics of energy and regulation. His publications have dealt with transfer pricing, capital budgeting, the pricing of natural gas and electricity, financing the energy industry, natural-resource allocation, and merger and acquisition decisions. He was chief of the division of economic studies at the Federal Power Commission in 1976-77 and has been a consultant to the Executive Office of the President of the United States, the Department of Energy, the state of Alaska, the New York State Public Service Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and numerous corporations. He has taught courses in Austria, Belgium, Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia and Turkey. He is a special consultant for National Economic Research Associates, a faculty member at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Zurich, and a member of the board of directors of Selected Funds, a family of mutual funds. He earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 1969.
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