Biology
Louis-Marie Bobay
Dr. Bobay’s lab focuses on the evolution of microbial genomes and populations. They apply and develop computational approaches to elucidate the forces that shape the architecture and gene repertoire of microbial genomes. The lab is particularly interested in understanding the impact of population dynamics on microbial evolution. They are working on the evolution of gene flow across bacterial populations and on the processes leading to microbial speciation.
Sally Koerner
Dr. Koerner’s lab focuses on community ecology and biodiversity – what is biodiversity, how is it created and maintained, how does it influence ecosystem function, and how is global change altering it? This research program is field-based and hypothesis-driven and utilizes plant and animal communities in North America (e.g., tallgrass prairie, shortgrass steppe) and Africa (e.g., savannas, tropical forests). They employ a combination of observational studies and both short- and long-term experimental manipulations in order to permit robust conclusions about fundamental ecological processes that maintain and control biodiversity and ecosystem function as well as how various anthropogenic factors alter these relationships. In addition, the research uses data synthesis and meta-analysis techniques to provide global scale inferences about biodiversity.
Kasie Raymann
As an evolutionary biologist, Dr. Raymann’s broad interest is in understanding how microbes evolve and adapt as populations and communities. Her research has addressed microbial evolution both at the broad-scale (e.g. ancient evolutionary relationships) and fine-scale (e.g. microbial community response to perturbation). Currently, her lab uses the honeybee, an important agricultural and environmental pollinator, as a model system to study the evolution and dynamics of host-associated microbial communities.
English
Heather Brook Adams
Heather Brook Adams (M.A., English, Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; M.A., Communication, University of Maryland; Ph.D., English, Pennsylvania State University) is relocating to Greensboro from Alaska, where she has been an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Heather’s research performs feminist historiography of the recent past and investigates rhetorics of unwed pregnancy, reproduction, and motherhood. Her book project “Shame, Secrets, and Silences: The Rhetorical Legacy of Unwed Pregnancy in the United States Since 1960,” explores rhetorical shaming and blaming practices, both private and public, that have shaped—and that continue to shape—discussions of women’s reproduction and sexual wellbeing.
Heather has taught a variety of courses including Feminist and Gender Rhetorics; History of Rhetoric; Research Writing; Advanced Composition; Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice; Professional Writing; and Technical Writing. She has overseen UAA’s Professional Writing Internship and has served as a mentor for various undergraduate researchers. Her recent and forthcoming publications reflect both her research on reproduction (e.g., Women’s Studies in Communication; College English) as well as her feminist approaches to teaching and service work (e.g., Peitho; Alaska Native Studies Journal).
Aaron Beveridge
Aaron Beveridge’s research intersects writing and rhetorical theory with data science tools and methods. With a focus on programming, natural language processing, and data visualization, he is excited to contribute to the ongoing expansion of data-intensive research methods in rhetoric and writing studies. Grounded primarily in the study of digital content and social network trends, Aaron’s research and teaching interests also include technical communication, the rhetoric of science, media ecology, and maker culture. He has publications in print and forthcoming with Digital Humanities Quarterly, Computers and Composition Online, Composition Forum, Kairos, and The Journal of Open Source Software, and he is currently revising a monograph for publication, titled: Writing Macroscopes: Data Science, Digital Rhetoric, and the Future of the Internet.
Jennifer Park
Jennifer Park joins the Department of English at UNC Greensboro as assistant professor of English, specializing in early modern drama. She received her Ph.D. in English from UNC Chapel Hill and her B.A. from Yale University. Her current work focuses on the intersections of gender, science, visual culture, and performance in early modern England. She is working on a book manuscript on Vital Preservation which examines the gendering of materials that harnessed preservative power—sugar, mummy, milk, blood—and how they manifested in metaphor and on stage. Her second project explores technologies of word and image in early modern science, magic, mathematics, and game play and their implications for studies in early modern performance. Her research has been published in Studies in Philology and Renaissance and Reformation.
Emilia Phillips
Emilia Phillips is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, most recently Groundspeed(2016), and three chapbooks including Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). Her poems and lyric essays appear in Agni, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, and elsewhere. She received StoryQuarterly‘s 2015 Nonfiction Prize and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. Phillips is at work on two books: The Seconds Between Lightning and Thunder, her fourth poetry collection, and Wound Revisions, a collection of lyric essays. In addition to her creative work, Phillips contributes monthly craft essays to the Ploughshares blog and continues to develop a poetry broadside digitization project. Prior to UNCG, Phillips has taught previously at Centenary University, the College of William & Mary, and Gettysburg College, and at Virginia Commonwealth University where she received her MFA in Poetry.
Interior Architecture
Khoi Vo
Professor Vo comes to UNCG and IARc following 12 years as a faculty member at the Savannah College of Art and Design and previously at California State University Long Beach. During the past 7 years, Professor Vo has taught and served as the Chair of the Department of Interior Design at SCAD. In addition to these responsibilities, Professor Vo maintains an active design practice. While serving as the Chair of Interior Design at SCAD, Professor Vo led the department to its No. 1 ranking by DesignIntelligence of both the undergraduate (2012-2016) and graduate (2012-2014, 2016) programs. He played a key administrative role in raising nearly $275,000 to support interdisciplinary collaborative studios with corporate partners including United Colors of Benetton and Disney. Among his many other accomplishments are a 150k grant from the Angelo Donghia Foundation and 100% placement of students in graduate schools of their choice or in practice with design firms such as Gensler and HOK. Professor Vo will be the 6th department head of interiors in its history at UNCG and he is perfectly placed to take IARc into its next chapter. We are so pleased that Professor Vo, his wife Kristen Raizada and their son Caleb, are joining our IARc community.
Mathematics and Statistics
Yu-Min Chung
Yu-Min Chung received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Indiana University Bloomington in 2013 specializing in computational mathematics. His main research focuses are computational topology and applications to data analysis, called Topological Data Analysis. He has been collaborating with researchers from different scientific disciplines, including those from Dartmouth College to investigate ice at the Arctic, and those from Harvard Medical School to study human red blood cells. Chung’s other research interest is computational dynamical systems. He and his group developed one of the first algorithms to compute inertial manifolds, an object from dynamical systems. Prior to UNCG, Chung taught previously at the College of William & Mary, University of Kansas, and Indiana University. Chung has also advised undergraduate honor research students, and REU students, and his students have presented their research work in local and national conferences.
Yi Zhang
Yi Zhang received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the Louisiana State University, his M.S. in Applied Mathematics as well as his B.S. in Mathematics from Wuhan University, China. Prior to joining the faculty at UNCG, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the University of Notre Dame. He has taught a variety of mathematics courses, including several advanced computational/numerical mathematics courses. His research interests include numerical solutions of deterministic and stochastic partial differential equations, finite element methods, variational inequalities, PDE-constrained optimization and numerical optimization.
Political Science
Hunter Bacot
Professor Hunter Bacot joins the UNCG Political Science Department after serving for five years as the Director of the Institute of Government at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. Professor Bacot had previously been a faculty member at both UNC-Charlotte and Elon University, where he directed the Elon University Poll. His research focuses on public administration, local governance, and public policy. An active scholar of collaborative and community-engaged research, he is currently completing a study of comparative state environmental policy and politics, entitled, “Developing Regulatory Performance Indices to Assess Devolution of Environmental Policies in the U.S. States.” He will be assuming the position of Political Science Department Graduate Director in the fall of 2018, directing the MPA program and the two graduate certificate programs–nonprofit management and urban and economic development.
Sociology
David Kauzlarich
Professor Kauzlarich comes to the UNCG Sociology Department Head position after 20 years (six as Department Chair) in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at Western Michigan University in 1994. Dave has published seven books and over three dozen scholarly articles and essays ranging in subjects from victimology, sociological and criminological theory, state and corporate crime, crimes of the powerful, and social justice. His is currently working on a project examining music as resistance to the crimes of the powerful using both autoethnographic and interview methodology. Dave is in his fifth year as Editor-in-Chief of Critical Criminology: An International Journal and has served in a number of leadership positions for the Critical Criminology Division of the American Society of Criminology. He enjoys teaching a variety of courses but especially those in criminology and sociological theory. Dr. Kauzlarich invites anyone interested in Sociology at UNCG to contact him at dakauzla@uncg.
Tad Skotnicki
Professor Tad Skotnicki came to UNCG last year as Visiting Professor of Sociology and this year joins the faculty on the tenure track as an Assistant Professor. Tad received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California San Diego in 2015 and has a masters degree from the University of Chicago. His major areas of academic interests relate to the comparative and historical study of consumption, ethics, and social movements. He is currently completing a comparative historical study of turn-of-the-twentieth century consumer activists in the United States and Great Britain. This work reveals how the anonymity of mass-produced commodities elicited moral questions for consumers and shaped activists’ efforts to mobilize ethical purchasing. He is also studying how early consumer activists and late twentieth-century environmental justice activists dealt with the problems of representing unseen suffering. Tad has already published several journal articles and a book chapter on topics such as consumerism, branding, social movements, and theoretical issues in sociology. Tad enjoys teaching courses in social theory. He hosts a radio show on WUAG titled The Old Songs and each week he plays a range of popular and folk music, especially from the 1960s onward
