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.

Thorsten Joachims

Assistant professor, computer science
College: Faculty of Computing and Information Science, Engineering
Academic focus: Machine learning and intelligent agents, with a focus on support vector machines and machine learning with text. Current projects include software that follows a user's choice of links while searching and surfing the web and offers intelligent guidance based on what it has learned.
Previous position: Postdoctoral research associate with the Knowledge Discovery Team of Fraunhofer Institute of Autonomous Intelligent Systems in Germany.
Academic background: Visiting scholar, 1994-96, Carnegie Mellon University; and B.S., 1997, and Ph.D., 2000, in computer science, both from the University of Dortmund, Germany.

David R. Just

Assistant professor, applied economics and management
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: Research interests focus on the use of information and how it affects decisions. Among the questions he addresses: Why do individuals and firms use the information they do? Do firms with greater informational resources take advantage of smaller firms? These concerns are important in agriculture, where firms of various sizes compete in risky markets. Other areas of interest include the use of information technology in marketing, product perception and the impact of family interactions on purchasing behavior.
Previous position: Doctoral student, University of California-Berkeley.
Academic background: B.A., economics, Brigham Young University, 1998; and M.S., 1999, and Ph.D., 2001, both in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California-Berkeley.

Paul D. Soloway

Associate professor, nutritional sciences
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: Using gene targeting in embryo
nic stem cells to generate novel strains of mutant mice with defined mutations. Two key areas of investigation focus on characterizing the in vivo functions of regulators of extracellular matrix remodeling and identifying mechanisms regulating genomic imprinting.
Previous position: Cancer Research Scientist, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, 1994-2002; postdoctoral fellow, Whitehead Institute, 1990-94; postdoctoral fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989-90.
Academic background: B.A., biochemistry, Cornell, 1979; Ph.D., molecular biology, Princeton University, 1989.

Kristin Taavola

Assistant professor, music theory
College: Arts and Sciences
Academic focus: Musical structures of 20th-century and non-Western musics, including repertoires from Bali, Japan and India. Special interest in mode in 20th-century music; musical grouping and segmentation in both tonal and atonal contexts; and the relationship between musical performance and musical analysis.
Previous position: Assistant professor (music theory, world music, flute and gamelan), Sarah Lawrence College, 1997-2002.
Academic background: B.M., music, University of Iowa, 1990; and M.A., 1993, and Ph.D., 2002, both in music theory from the Eastman School of Music.

Xiaoyan Zhang

Assistant professor, finance
College: Johnson Graduate School of Management
Academic focus: Research interests include international finance, empirical asset pricing and applied econometrics. Teaching interests are international finance, investments and derivatives. At Columbia Business School she received a Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance in 2001.
Previous position: Doctoral student, Columbia Business School, Columbia University.
Academic background: B.A., economics, School of Economics, Beijing University, China, 1997; Ph.D. with honors, finance, Columbia Business School, Columbia University, 2002.

October 24, 2002