Arts & Sciences congratulates the 15 faculty members promoted to associate professor. The promotions will be effective July 1.
Paula Austin, History, specializes in African American history, urban history, and the history of racism, gender, childhood, and the social sciences. She has authored an acclaimed book, 2019’s Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life, and numerous articles in top journals, including The Black Scholar, examining the inner lives, intellectual insights, and political impulses of poor and working class young black people in Depression-era, racially segregated Washington, DC. She is a recent recipient of the history department’s Gitner Prize in Undergraduate Teaching, and this past year was a junior faculty fellow with the BU Center for the Humanities. She has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Andrew Bell, Earth & Environment, uses surveys and field experiments – drawing on geography, economics, and complex systems theory – to better understand decision-making around natural resource management, agricultural development, migration, and rural livelihoods. He is a lead or co-PI on several major grants from the NSF and the US Agency for International Development examining environmental governance and the drivers of change in land and water systems in Malawi, among other places. He is on the editorial boards of several field publications, including Ecology and Society, and has published two book chapters and over 60 articles in leading environmental journals, including Nature and Environmental Research Letters. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Anushya Chandran, Physics, is a condensed matter theorist whose research focuses on many-body theory, non-equilibrium systems, critical dynamics, and strongly correlated phases of matter. An NSF CAREER Award winner, she is recognized as a rising leader in the field of quantum science and engineering, with recent, federally funded work exploring the description of thermalization and localization in interacting quantum systems as well as the dynamics of periodically driven systems. She is regularly invited to present at conferences and has authored or co-authored 46 articles in leading physics publications. She has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Jerry Chen, Biology, is a neuroscientist whose research combines large-scale in vivo imaging with molecular and genetic toolsets in awake-behaving animals to better understand the central nervous system and the neural mechanisms underlying perception and abstraction. He is a past Stuart and Elizabeth Pratt Career Development Professor at BU and his research – which includes using the sensory input from the whiskers in mice – is supported by several major NIH grants. He has published a book chapter and over 20 articles in high impact scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and Nature Neuroscience. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Juan Fuxman Bass, Biology, is a molecular systems biologist who studies gene regulatory networks and how these networks are altered in human disease and by infection with pathogens. His NIH-funded research uses cutting-edge approaches, including metabolic modeling and massively-parallel reporter assays, to improve understanding of viral infection and human cancer. He is a recent recipient of the Keystone Symposia Early Career Investigator Award and the Milstein Young Investigator Award from the International Cytokine & Interferon Society and has published over 30 papers in premier scientific journals, including Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Genome Research. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Marc Gasser-Wingate, Philosophy, is a scholar of classical philosophy, specializing in the theoretical and practical philosophy of Aristotle. His work focuses extensively on the role Aristotle awards perception, both in the scientific understanding of knowledge and in virtue. He is a past recipient of CAS’s Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching, his department’s director of undergraduate studies, and has authored a monograph, 2021’s Aristotle’s Empiricism, alongside several articles in top philosophical publications, including Journal of the History of Philosophy. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Christopher Grant, Physics, is a particle physicist whose experimental research seeks to develop greater understanding of neutrinos – chargeless particles produced by radioactivity (including from nuclear reactors, cosmic rays, and fusion reactions in stars) that are considerably smaller than electrons and believed to carry secrets behind the existence of matter in the early universe. His research is supported by multiple grants from the NSF and the US Department of Energy (DOE), and he has published over 50 papers in leading physics journals, including Physics Review Letters and Journal of High Energy Physics. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Saida Grundy, Sociology, specializes in the sociologies of race and gender, focusing on formations and ideologies of gender and racialization within the black middle class – specifically men. Her work examines masculinity and social justice capitalism, racialized rape culture, and bridging hegemonic masculinity theories to improve public understanding of campus sexual assault. She is a past recipient of CAS’s Neu Family Award for Excellence in Teaching and has recently authored a book, Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (2022), along with a book chapter and numerous articles and essays in top field publications and magazines, including Social Problems and The Atlantic. She has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Noora Lori, International Relations, focuses on issues of citizenship, migration, and statelessness in the Middle East, East Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, specifically examining migration enforcement, citizenship regimes and naturalization policies, temporary migration schemes, and racial hierarchies. She has authored an acclaimed book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (2019), which won best book prizes from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association, in addition to three book chapters and articles in top international relations journals. Her research is supported by the Mellon Foundation, and she is a past recipient of CAS’s Gitner Prize for Faculty Excellence and the Templeton Award for Excellence in Student Advising. She has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Joseph McGuire, Psychological & Brain Sciences, is a neuroscientist whose research examines the cognitive mechanisms that enable people to make well-calibrated decisions in complex environments, including situations of delay, uncertainty, and volatility. His NIH- and Simons Foundation-supported work employs behavioral experiments, eye tracking, and computational models, as well as functional MRI to study how decision processes are implemented in the human brain. He has published four book chapters and over 20 peer-reviewed papers and articles in high-impact psychology journals, including Journal of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Robert Reinhart, Psychological & Brain Sciences, examines the breakdown of visual perception and cognition due to normal aging and neuropsychiatric diseases (including schizophrenia) to develop novel, drug-free interventions to help slow, stop, or reverse brain disorders. His NIH-supported research was recognized last year with the Science & PINS Prize for Neuromodulation from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also named to the Altmetric Top 100 in 2019, ranking in the top 0.007% of most discussed research articles that year. He has published 33 peer-reviewed articles in premier medical and neuroscience journals, including Nature Neuroscience and Nature Medicine. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Pascual Restrepo, Economics, is a macroeconomist whose research explores the implications of new technologies – such as automation – for labor markets, wages, inequality, the distribution of income, and growth. Recent NSF-sponsored empirical work has investigated the impact of industrial robots on US labor markets and how aging and shortages of labor induce firms to automate their production process. He is a faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research and has received several excellence-in-refereeing awards from top field publications, including American Economic Review. A frequent conference presenter, he has published 12 refereed journal articles in premier economics outlets, including Journal of Labor Economics and Review of Economic Studies. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Andrew Robichaud, History, is a scholar of US history, who specializes in studies of 19th century America, including urban, environmental, political, and animal history, as well as the history of Boston. He has authored an acclaimed book, Animal City: The Domestication of America (2019), with another forthcoming volume examining the history of ice and the ice trade in 19th century America. He is a past recipient of the Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History from the Urban History Association and has received a featured review in American Historical Review and been the subject of a dedicated forum on H-NET. He has additionally published two book chapters, four book reviews, and two articles in top journals, including Environmental History. He has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Merav Shohet, Anthropology, is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work focuses on medical, linguistic, and psychological topics among Vietnamese, North American, and Israeli populations. Recent work has examined end of life care in changing kibbutz communities as well as the COVID pandemic’s harmful effects on minority end-stage kidney disease patients in greater Boston. A regular conference presenter, she is the author of 2021’s Silence & Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam, along with three book chapters and seven articles in top-ranked anthropology publications, including American Ethnologist. Last year, she received the Carole H. Browner Undergraduate Student Mentorship Award from the Society of Medical Anthropology. She has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.
Zeba Wunderlich, Biology, is a biophysicist whose research focuses on the molecular mechanisms that govern gene expression control. Utilizing Drosophila fruit flies as model organisms, her NSF- and NIH-supported research seeks to better understand how a gene regulatory network’s tasks influence its architecture, robustness, and evolvability – from embryonic patterning to innate immune response. She is a frequent conference presenter and has published over 30 papers in high impact biology journals, including Nature Reviews Genetics, Molecular Cell, and Cell Reports. She has been promoted to associate professor, with tenure.