Promotions Earned by 25 Charles River Campus Faculty

François Brochet, promoted to Questrom School of Business associate professor of accounting, studies the effects that corporate insiders and individual managers can have on capital markets. Photos by Jackie Ricciardi

François Brochet was working as an instructor in French at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill early in his career when a student asked what he thought of her paper.

“I said it was not bad,” Brochet recalls. “To a Frenchman, that’s a compliment. But the student was in tears: ‘What do you mean not bad?’ I had to learn to communicate in a more positive way.”

Brochet, who had just arrived in the United States, says he never forgot the student’s reaction. It turned out to be a defining moment that would influence his later research in accounting. Today, he studies the role of corporate insiders and individual managers in capital markets, including the ways an executive’s language skills and cultural background can affect the financial markets, at the Questrom School of Business.

Corporate executives regularly announce their companies’ results in scheduled calls with analysts and journalists, after which the stock may go up or down; Brochet used transcripts of thousands of such calls internationally in a study to determine whether the executives’ English language skills affected market reaction. “The more distant their native language is from English, the more they tend to use the passive voice and use longer sentences, longer words,” he says. He also applied Microsoft Word’s grammar check to thousands of calls to come up with a measure of grammatical errors.

Brochet and his collaborators correlated that information with trading data and found that, all else being equal, stock prices tend to move less for those executives less fluent in English. He is working on a similar study measuring the effect executives’ cultural background could have on financial markets.

“We are looking at people who stem from a background that is more individualistic, who tend to express themselves in a more optimistic way as well as a more self-referential tone—to say I rather than we—and whether that would affect the market reaction,” he says.

Brochet is among 21 faculty on the Charles River Campus promoted to associate professor with tenure. One faculty member has been promoted to full professor with tenure and three non-tenure-track faculty have been promoted to associate professor.

Among the latter is Dana Clancy (CFA’99), a newly appointed College of Fine Arts associate professor of painting. She was introduced to the power of art at the age of four, after seeing Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s A Girl with a Watering Can at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She already had a treasured postcard of the work, but seeing it in person was transformative, she says.

“I teach my seminars in museums in front of works of art, because I want students to experience the power of these amazing material objects,” says Clancy, who also teaches at Kilachand Honors College. “I just saw a Philip Guston show in New York, where I spent an hour just looking at a couple of paintings, because he made me look again. They’re just blobs. I was laughing with a friend, saying, ‘How does Philip Guston make a blob so meaningful?’ But he does. There’s magic in that, I think.”

Clancy was an accomplished painter when a visit to the Tate Modern in London a decade or so ago influenced her to focus on art that references real spaces and architectural models, including museums.

“I was captivated by looking down several floors at viewers looking at each other in artist Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, an installation of thousands of stacked white boxes,” she says. “I could see the painting of it in my mind’s eye.”

Since then, she has painted dozens of works, large and small, depicting places such as the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Some paintings show patrons in the context of the gallery space, others feature behind-the-scenes work such as the mounting of a large Dale Chihuly sculpture in the Shapiro Family Courtyard at the MFA. Her paintings explore the art and the space itself in relation to the viewer.

“It’s all about looking at looking. It’s meta-looking,” Clancy says with a laugh. “I’m interested in the most basic way in perception. What does it mean to see?”

Promoted to professor with tenure:

David Webber, School of Law professor of law

Webber specializes in civil procedure, focusing on diverse aspects of investment law, including shareholder activism, corporate governance, and shareholder litigation. He is considered among the top corporate law scholars, and his policy recommendations are regularly cited in high-profile cases, and in one recent instance, implemented by the Department of Labor. He is a founding member of the BU Center for Finance, Law & Policy.

Besides François Brochet, faculty promoted to associate professor with tenure are: 

Jonathan Appavoo, College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of computer science

Appavoo studies computer operating systems, with a focus on parallel computing. Internationally recognized as a leader in his field, he is widely cited for developing new system software and applications for future data-center scale systems and for work on hybrid “smart” computing systems. He has received grant support from the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER Award.

Kevin Black (CAS’05), CAS associate professor of physics

Black specializes in high-energy particle physics, focusing on the pursuit and understanding of some of nature’s most fundamental physical forces and particles. Selected as a US ATLAS Scholar in 2014 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, he has distinguished himself internationally in the recording and analysis of significant experimental results and as an organizational leader among LHC scientists in the United States. He has received funding from the NSF and the US Department of Energy to support his research.

Cynthia Bradham, CAS associate professor of biology

Bradham specializes in developmental biology, investigating how animals develop from single-celled zygotes into multicellular organisms with distinct tissues and cell structures. She is among the leading innovators in research on sea urchins and the integration of newer systems biology approaches to identify genes and signaling pathways and better understand skeletal patterning, information with potential relevance to a range of developmental diseases. Her work has been funded by the NSF.

Peter Buston, CAS associate professor of biology

Buston uses tropical reef fishes to address fundamental questions in evolutionary and behavioral ecology at his Buston Lab. He has earned widespread recognition for research on the connectivity of social animals and the patterns and consequences of larval fish dispersal, work that has been credited with having a significant impact on the study of marine evolutionary ecology and conservation management. His work is funded by two major NSF grants.

David Carballo, CAS associate professor of archaeolgoy   

Carballo studies urbanism, households, religion, political evolution, and ancient economies in Columbian Mesoamerica. He is among the top experts in human development from the earliest farming villages to the Aztec period and its transition to colonial New Spain, and has been supported in his work by two NSF grants. He is conducting research at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Teotihuacan.

Luis Carvalho, CAS associate professor of mathematics and statistics

Carvalho specializes in computational statistics, with a focus on discrete and high-dimensional inference problems reflective of the modern era. He is regarded as a leading Bayesian statistical modeler, applying his expertise to diverse subject areas, including bioinformatics, transportation modeling, geography and remote sensing, and social network analysis. A previous junior faculty fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, he has been funded by grants from NASA and the NSF.

Timothy Gardner, CAS associate professor of biology

Gardner uses songbirds as a model system for research in sensory-motor learning in his study of systems neuroscience. His translational innovations, which include new technology for recording neural activity in awake and behaving animals, have garnered numerous prizes, including an NIH BRAIN Initiative Grant and in 2014 the BU Innovation Career Development Professorship. His research is currently supported by four NIH grants.

Angela Ho, CAS associate professor of biology

Ho specializes in molecular neurobiology, using mouse models to help identify the genetic determinants of Alzheimer’s disease in her laboratory. She has earned national attention for discoveries of proteins and molecular mechanisms that underlie plaque formation and lead to the development of Alzheimer’s. A winner of the Alzheimer’s Association’s National Research Award and last year’s Patricia McLellan Leavitt Research Award from CAS, she has received funding from the NIH to support her work.

William Huntting Howell, CAS associate professor of English

Howell studies early American literature, with an emphasis on print history and material culture. His debut book, Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), has been acclaimed, as have his efforts as coeditor of a new edition of Frank Webb’s Civil War novel, The Garies and Their Friends (Broadview Press, 2016). He is a former junior faculty fellow with the BU Center for the Humanities.

Sean Mullen, CAS associate professor of biology  

Mullen melds ecological fieldwork with a host of analytical approaches—from genetic to genomic—to understand the evolution of biodiversity. His lab focuses on integrative evolutionary biology. His foundational research on speciation genomics and the adaptive evolution of butterfly wing color pattern and mimicry has received significant attention. He is the recipient of an NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity award.

Teena Purohit, CAS associate professor of religion

Purohit studies the history of Islam, focusing on conceptions of religion in modern Islam and the impact of colonialism on modern Muslim intellectual thought. Her first book, The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India (Harvard University Press, 2012), was critically acclaimed. An expert in Sanskrit and Urdu, she is currently working on a second book, Making Islam Modern.

Daniel Star, CAS associate professor of philosophy

Star studies ethics, metaethics, and epistemology, especially the dilemma of reconciling ordinary virtue and normative ethics. He is the author of Knowing Better: Virtue, Deliberation, and Normative Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2015) and is currently editing two anthologies, the Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity and History of Ethics: Essential Readings with Commentary.

James Uden, CAS associate professor of classical studies

Uden specializes in Latin poetry and prose of the Empire and Late Antiquity, the literary culture of Imperial Greece, and the transformation of Greek and Roman ideas in later periods. He is the author of The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford University Press, 2015). A former BU Peter Paul Career Development Professor, Uden currently is his department’s director of graduate admissions.

Min Ye, CAS associate professor of international relations and Pardee School of Global Studies associate professor of international studies

Ye, a leading Asian studies scholar, specializes in comparative political economy, China and India development, and Asian politics and security, with a recent emphasis on China’s outbound investment and Silk Road initiative. Her most recent book is Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Ye is credited with leading the design and launch of the BU Asian studies major.

Deborah Jaramillo, College of Communication associate professor of film and television

Jaramillo’s research is in television studies, focusing on the collision and coexistence of politics, culture, and aesthetics in media. Her first book, Ugly War, Pretty Package: How CNN and Fox News Made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept (Indiana University Press, 2009), approaches cable news coverage from the perspective of film and television studies; a forthcoming book explores the self-regulation of the television industry in the 1950s. She is a two-time Ford Foundation Fellow and a past winner of COM’s Becker Family Teacher of the Year Award.

Dustin Supa, COM associate professor of public relations

Supa specializes in media relations, researching the use of visually persuasive devices and the application of modern critical social theory to public relations. He has emerged as a major scholarly presence in his field and a leader within both the International Public Relations Research Conference and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Ajay Joshi, College of Engineering associate professor of electrical and computer engineering

Joshi’s research focuses on computer architecture and digital VLSI circuit design, with additional specialization on silicon photonics, Network-on-Chip (NoC) design, and hardware security. His writings on silicon photonic network architecture have earned him a reputation as an authority in the field. Joshi is conducting research identifying network Trojan viruses in digital circuits. He is an NSF CAREER Award winner and a past recipient of ENG’s Dean’s Catalyst Award and his department’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Stine Grodal, Questrom associate professor of strategy and innovation

Grodal studies the dual fields of sociology and management, exploring the social and cognitive dynamics behind industry emergence. Regarded among the top international scholars for research into dominant categories and industry life cycles, she has won several competitive prizes for her writing, including the 2015 Positive Organization Scholarship Best Paper Award and Questrom’s 2014 Broderick Award for Research Excellence. Grodal is the recipient of two NSF grants.

Cara Lewis, Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences associate professor of physical therapy and athletic training

Lewis specializes in musculoskeletal biomechanics, developing new therapies and technologies to better understand hip movement and prevent joint damage and pain. She is recognized as a leading expert and innovator in the application of movement science to health and wellness and has been funded extensively by the NIH and the American College of Rheumatology. She is a past BU Peter Paul Career Development Professor.

Jennifer Greif Green, School of Education associate professor of special education

Green’s research focuses on the treatment of children and young people with mental health challenges and the elimination of institutional barriers to mental health services in school districts. She is nationally prominent for her research into bullying as a mental health challenge, receiving a 2014 Alberti Center Early Career Award and cofounding the Social Adjustment & Bullying Prevention Laboratory at BU.

In addition to Dana Clancy, the non-tenure-track faculty promoted to associate professor are:

Kristen Coogan, CFA associate professor of visual arts

Coogan specializes in graphic design, with a focus on the growing field of business information design. She has produced information graphics for top multinational firms, among them Johnson & Johnson and Fidelity, to be used in translating market research and presenting business strategies to high-level executives. The author of numerous published essays and design projects, and a contributing writer to the fifth edition of Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Coogan has twice won the AIGA Best of New England Award.

Irena Vodenska (UNI’09), Metropolitan College associate professor of administrative sciences

Vodenska studies econophysics, a new field that blends physics and economics to better understand the dynamics of financial networks and predict market volatility. A trailblazer in this emerging interdisciplinary field, particularly for her exploration of the 2008 subprime credit crisis, she has been recognized for her far-reaching efforts in online course design and interactive virtual learning communities. She has received grants from the NSF and the European Union.