New members of the faculty

Introducing New Members of the Faculty

To help introduce to the Cornell community the new members of the university's faculty -- almost 60 new tenured or tenure-track faculty members have joined Cornell since July 1 -- the Cornell Chronicle will publish brief, new-faculty profiles each week for the rest of the semester.

Esther Rita Angert

Assistant professor, microbiology
College:Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic Focus:Research is aimed at sequencing the genome of epilopicium, which is a large, half-millimeter-long bacterium. She is studying its unusual reproduction ability by learning how it produces multiple offspring inside itself. Understanding this large bacterium, which can be seen with the naked eye, could lead to a way to better fight bacterial infections, she says.
Previous position:Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research postdoctoral fellow, department of molecular and cellular biology, Harvard University.
Academic background:B.S., biology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (Pa.), 1984; and Ph.D., molecular biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., 1995.

Johannes Gehrke

Assistant professor, computer science
College:Engineering, Arts and Sciences
Academic focus:Research focuses on database systems, especially "data mining" from very large databases, such as marketing data from department stores or collections of medical records, searching for common elements such as many customers who buy the same combinations of items, or common experiences of persons with a particular disease. The goal is to find such "interesting" correlations without knowing in advance what they might be and without making an economically impractical number of passes through a vast amount of data.
Previous position:Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1999.
Academic background:University of Karlsruhe, Germany, 1993 (while working for Siemens Corp.); M.Sc., University of Texas at Austin, 1994, as a Fulbright Scholar.

Brent A. Gloy

Assistant professor, agricultural finance
College:Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus:Concerned with firm-level finance and management problems in the agriculture industry. Of particular interest are economic problems related to risk management, choice under uncertainty, coordination and control, organizational structure and strategic positioning. A current research project evaluates criteria that simplify a farm producer's choice among alternative risk-management strategies.
Previous position:U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Needs Fellow, Purdue University.
Academic background: B.S., agribusi-ness, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1994; M.S., agricultural economics, Purdue University, 1996; and Ph.D., agricultural economics, Purdue, 1999.

Kathie T. Hodge

Assistant professor, plant pathology/plant biology
College:Agriculture and Life Sciences
Research focus:Research focuses on understanding the ecology and evolutionary relationships of fungi that attack insects. In particular, she studies the biodiversity of insect pathogens and the application of fungi as biological controls of insect pests. She also will serve as the director of the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, which is one of the largest fungal specimen collections in the country.
Previous position:Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University at Corvallis.
Education:B.Sc., biology, University of Toronto, 1990; M.S., plant pathology, Cornell, 1993; and Ph.D., plant pathology, Cornell, 1998.

Pankaj Kumar

Assistant professor, marketing
College:Johnson Graduate School of Management
Academic focus:His research focuses on mathematical modeling and analysis of scanner panel and store level data. He is particularly interested in brand choice, repurchase behavior, customer satisfaction, brand competition and analysis of marketing-mix variables.
Previous position:Assistant professor of marketing, Baruch College, CUNY.
Academic background:BME, Maharaja Sayajirao University, India, 1990; and Ph.D., marketing, SUNY-Buffalo, 1997.

José Edmundo Paz-Soldán

Assistant professor, Romance studies
College:Arts and Sciences
Academic focus:Andean literature, modern and contemporary Latin American narrative, and the relationship between mass media and literature.
Previous position:Visiting assistant professor of Hispanic literatures, Cornell.
Academic background:B.A., political science, University of Alabama, 1991; M.A., Hispanic languages and literature, University of California at Berkeley, 1993; and Ph.D., Hispanic languages and literature, University of California at Berkeley, 1997.

September 30, 1999