These faculty and staff members are the most recent to join our 'bale' of Terrapins. They all bring considerable knowledge, skills, dedication and enthusiams to their work at the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Individual faculty and staff members are organized by the department, center or office in which they work. Welcome to BSOS!
Anthropology
(ANTH) Laura Jen Shaffer graduated cum laude from
Cornell University in 1994 with B.S. in Biology (Ecology &
Systematics). She received a M.S. in
Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon in 1999, and completed her
Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Georgia in 2009. Her dissertation research was funded by both
a U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship and an NSF Doctoral Dissertation
Improvement Grant in Cultural Anthropology.
In-between degrees, she worked as a marine/freshwater ecology lab
technician, served as a environmental education consultant to the Territorial
Energy Office in American Samoa, taught biology/environmental science in
Houston ISD and Houston Community College, and traveled.
(ANTH) Thurka Sangaramoorthy has 10 years of experience
working in the field of sexual health and STD/HIV prevention with vulnerable
and at-risk populations in international non-profits, state and local health
departments, academic institutions and governmental agencies. She is a current
recipient of the NIH Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Program. She is
also a past recipient of multi-year grants from the National Institutes of
Health, the Association of Prevention Teaching and Research, the Oak Ridge
Institute for Science and Education, the Foreign Language and Area Studies
Program, and the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Sangaramoorthy received her BA from
Barnard College in 1998, her MPH from Columbia University in 2002, and her PhD
from the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley in 2008
Criminology & Criminal Justice
(CCJS) Brendan Dooley is a recent graduate (2011) of the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Prior to pursuing a doctoral degree he held positions at the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority and the University of Chicago. His dissertation and research agenda address the question of criminology's paradigm. He currently serves as Project Director of the Oral History in Criminology Project.
(CCJS) Wendy Povitsky Stickle is the Program Director for UMCP’s Criminology and Criminal Justice Program at the Universities at Shady Grove. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2009. Prior to returning to UMD she worked as a research analyst at Westat. Dr. Stickle's primary research interests include the predictors of juvenile delinquency, program evaluation, and survey development.
Economics
(ECON) Ethan Kaplan joined the department as an Assistant Professor in 2011. He is also associate editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association. He had previously been an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University. He has also visited UC Berkeley and Columbia University. He obtained his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2005. His main area of research is empirical political economy and applied micro-econometrics. His research has focused on media economics, the determination and persistence of political preferences, interest group behavior, and the political economy of U.S. intervention. More recently, in addition to his research on political economy, he has started a sequence of projects using applied micro-econometric techniques to investigate macroeconomic questions including estimating the fiscal multiplier using spatial variation, estimating the impact of unemployment insurance on employment during a recession and estimating the impact of unions on employment during the Great Depression.
Geography
(GEOG) Klaus Hubacek
(GEOG) Jim Kellner
(GEOG) Matt Hansen
(GEOG) Paul Torrens
(GEOG) Kuishuang Feng
(GEOG) Naiara Pinto
(GEOG) Jacqueline Rosette
(GEOG) Peter Potapov
Government & Politics
(GVPT) David Karol is an Associate
Professor in American Politics, who studies parties, interest groups, political
institutions and American political development. David Karol's current research concerns the
role of elite opinion in American politics, showing how it produces durable
policy disagreements between Congresses and Presidents
(GVPT) Todd Allee is an Assistant
Professor in International Relations whose research focuses on international
organizations, international trade, the World Trade Organization, foreign
direct investment, international law, and dispute settlement.
(GVPT) David Cunningham is an
Assistant Professor in International Relations. His research, focusing on civil
war, international conflict, conflict resolution, and Africa.
(GVPT) Kathleen Gallagher
Cunningham is an Assistant Professor in International Relations. Her research focus includes civil conflict,
self-determination and nationalism, ethnicity, and state-building in the
contemporary international system.
(GVPT) Jennifer Hadden is an
Assistant Professor in International Relations.
Her research and teaching interests include climate change and
environmental politics, social movements, European politics and
integration, transnational politics,
social network analysis and qualitative research methods.
(GVPT) Kristina Miler is Assistant
Professor in American Politics. Her
research focuses on the U.S. Congress, specifically constituency representation,
legislative behavior, and the role of organized interests in legislative
politics.
(GVPT) Patrick Wohlfarth is
Assistant Professor in American Politics.
His research interests include American politics and quantitative
methodology with a specific focus on judicial politics, interinstitutional
politics, and time series analysis.
(GVPT) Andrea Wise is our new
Manager in the Center for International Development and Conflict Management,
CIDCM. She manages the administrative
operations of the center, including overseeing our administrative office and
support staff, managing budget development and fiscal reporting, coordinating
grant and proposal development, and managing the website and facilities.
(GVPT) Christine Bussey is a new GVPT Academic Advisor
who provides services to our undergraduate students.
(GVPT) Jacqueline Johnson is a new
GVPT Academic Advisor who provides services to our undergraduate students.
Hearing and Speech Sciences
(HESP) Matt Goupell received his PhD in Physics from Michigan State University in 2005. His dissertation was on the perception of sound differences between the two ears. After graduation, he became a post-doc in Vienna, Austria to research sound localization with cochlear implants. He later received a K99/R00 NIH grant to research understanding speech in noise with cochlear implants at University of Wisconsin - Madison. He plans to continue his research on cochlear implants, speech understanding, and sound localization at the University of Maryland in the Hearing and Speech Sciences Department.
(HESP) Yi Ting Huang received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Harvard University in 2009 and has most recently spent her time as a post-doctoral fellow in Cognitive Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Huang is interested in many topics within language acquisition but the bulk of her work focuses on how young language learners acquire the ability to coordinate linguistic representations during real-time comprehension. She explores this question by using eye-tracking methods to examine how the moment-to-moment changes that occur during processing influence the year-to-year changes that emerge during development. She has applied this approach to examine a variety of topics including word recognition, application of grammatical knowledge, and the generation of pragmatic inferences. Other questions that Dr. Huang has studied include the relationship between language and concepts, comprehension and production, and oral language development and literacy.
Psychology
(PSYC) Susanne Jaeggi received her Ph.D.s in Psychology and Neuroscience from
the University of Bern, Switzerland, and she was a post-doc in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. Her interest lies in the investigation of working memory and executive processes. She examines whether and how working memory can be trained, and whether improvements in working memory have generalizing effects to other cognitive domains. She currently teaches 'Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience' for undergraduates, as well as a graduate course on higher cognitive functions, and she welcomes undergraduate and graduate students to join her lab to investigate the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of cognitive training.
(PSYC) Jonathan Beier received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University and completed his postdoctoral work in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. His research investigates the origins of social cognition, through studies with infants, toddlers, and young children. In particular, his work focuses on early reasoning about intentional agency, social interactions, communication, and social relationships. He will begin his appointment in the department in January 2012, teaching a graduate seminar on early social cognition that semester. He will lead both undergraduate and graduate courses on related topics in subsequent years and looks forward to mentoring students in his research lab.
(PSYC) Luiz Pessoa received a
B.Sc. in Computer Science (1989) and a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering (1990)
from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and a Ph.D. in Computational
Neuroscience from Boston University (1996). Prior to joining UMD he was an
Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences,
University of Indiana, Bloomington. His research uses behavioral and
neuroimaging methods, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, to
understand cognitive-emotional interactions. His graduate and undergraduate
teaching and mentoring revolves around these topics as well.
(PSYC) Elizabeth Redcay received
her Ph.D. in Psychology and Cognitive Science from the University of California
San Diego and completed her postdoctoral work in the Department of Brain and
Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research
examines the development and neural bases of social-communicative behaviors
(e.g. joint attention, theory of mind, language) in typical and atypical
development, with a focus on individuals with autism spectrum disorder. She
currently teaches an undergraduate and graduate course on developmental social
and cognitive neuroscience and serves as a mentor for undergraduate and
graduate students in her developmental social cognitive neuroscience lab.
(PSYC) Erica Glasper received her
BA in Psychology from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. She then earned a
Masters in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Psychobiology and Behavioral Neuroscience
from The Ohio State University. Dr. Glasper comes to us after completing a
postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. Her teaching interests are in Behavioral
Neuroscience and Behavioral Endocrinology.
Dr. Glasper's laboratory investigates structural plasticity in the aging
adult brain, as affected by experiences and hormones, with a view toward understanding
the functional relevance of changes in hippocampal structure. Specifically, Dr.
Glasper's research focuses on the interactions among rewarding experiences,
hippocampal structural plasticity, and hippocampal function.
(PSYC) L. Robert Slevc earned his
Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego and spent three years as an
NRSA postdoc at Rice University before coming to the University of
Maryland. Bob directs the language and
music cognition lab; his research focuses especially on language production and
on the relationship between the processing of language and music. Bob is currently teaching an undergraduate
course on the psychology of language and a graduate seminar on language and
cognition.
(PSYC) Scott Roberts completed his
B.A. in psychology at Denison University in 2000 with an honors thesis study of
symbolic language acquisition at the Ohio State Chimpanzee Center. He spent three years working as a dolphin
trainer and research associate at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Lab in
Honolulu before coming to the University of Maryland for graduate study in
social psychology. He completed his
doctorate in 2008 with research on deception detection and worked as a Research
Psychologist for the Federal Government before returning to Maryland in 2011 as
the Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. In addition to his administrative role, Scott
teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in psychology, social psychology,
persuasion, pedagogy and the psychology of evil. His research in the scholarship of teaching
and learning focuses on the psychology of student engagement, active learning
and program evaluation.
(PSYC) Steven Young completed his B.A. in psychology
from Lebanon Valley College in 1991. He earned his Master of Education in
Student Affairs in Higher Education from Kutztown University in 1996. He has
over 15 years of experience in higher education having served in the functional
areas of residence life, admissions, and most recently as an Academic Advisor
with DeSales University. Steve specializes in higher education humor and has
presented numerous workshops on this topic at state, regional, and national
conferences.
(PSYC) Kevin McGann received a B.A. in psychology from
Loyola University Maryland, where he conducted independent research in the area
of social cognition. In 2010, he received his Ph.D. in counseling psychology
from the University of Maryland, College Park. Before returning to work in the
Department of Psychology at Maryland, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he provided psychological
assessment for students with ADHD, and received advanced training in
social-emotional and vocational counseling. As an advisor and educator, he is
particularly interested in improving students’ academic progress, professional
development experiences, graduate school prospects, and job placements. He has
a special interest in helping students to develop strategies for addressing and
overcoming barriers to their personal and academic development.
Sociology
(SOCY) Dana Fisher, Associate
Professor of Sociology, researches the ways that social actors engage in
decision-making processes and the successes and failures of such efforts,
studying environmental policy, civic participation and activism more broadly.
She is currently researching the climate policy network in the United States as
part of the US National Science Foundation-funded Comparing Climate Change
Policy Networks (COMPON) project. Fisher is also the Lead Investigator of
"Understanding the Dynamic Connections Among Stewardship, Land Cover, and
Ecosystem Services in New York City's Urban Forest," which is funded by
the US National Science Foundation. This project aims to understand the
relationship between civic stewardship and re-greening efforts in New York
City. Fisher is directing the new Program for Society and the Environment at
the University of Maryland, which includes the Environmental Stewardship
Project. Her first book, National Governance and the Global Climate Change
Regime, was published by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers in summer 2004. Her
second book, Activism, Inc. focuses on activism in America. It was published by
Stanford University Press in September 2006.
(SOCY) Christina Prell, Assistant
Professor of Sociology, comes to Maryland from the University of Sheffield’s
Sociological Studies Department. She teaches research methods on the
undergraduate level and social network analysis at the graduate level. Her
research interests lie in the role of social networks and network theories. She
is currently leading a project on how social capital can inform a computer
simulation model exploring network evolution. She is also involved in two
research projects investigating how social networks influence sustainable
environmental practice. Recently, she has joined an interdisciplinary research collaboration
on pro-environmental behaviour, where she is making use of social network
analysis as a means for evaluating how teams learn and mutually influence one
another. Dr. Prell is completing two books on social networks and network
analysis; the first is sole-authored book Social Network Analysis: Methodology,
Theory, and Practice (Sage), and she is co-editor for a book on Social Networks
and Resource Management (Cambridge University Press).
(SOCY) Michael Rendall, Professor
of Sociology, joined the University of Maryland in the fall of 2011, moving
from the non-profit RAND Corporation where he was Senior Social Scientist,
Director of the Population Research Center and Postdoctoral Program in
Population Studies, and Associate Director of the Labor and Population
Division. His methodological work has included evaluation of data quality in
fertility, family structure, and international migration; elderly poverty
measurement; new statistical methods for combining survey and population data;
and new methods for the simulation of cohort lifetimes and population dynamics.
His theoretical work has included exploration of relationships of
socio-economic inequality and social policy to fertility, household structure,
and migration. His current research topics include migration between Mexico and
the United States over the 1990s and 2000s, migration and social-demographic
outcomes of New Orleanians following Hurricane Katrina, and modeling the
development of obesity across U.S. childhoods.
National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
(START) Jessica Stark Rivinius, Assistant Director for External Relations
The Office of the Dean
(BSOS) Troy Lewis graduated from Florida A&M University with an undergraduate degree in Business Administration. As an undergraduate, he gained a passion for working with students through education. Over time, Troy has worked with national scholarship programs training and supporting students for successful college matriculation as well as through his civic engagement. He came on board to College Park in the spring of 2011.
(BSOS) Bailey Kier is an administrative coordinator for the college supporting daily operations of the advising center. Bailey received a BA in anthropology from Western Washington University and is finishing a PhD in American studies at UMD. Bailey's administrative interests and goals include; relational databases, research aiding recruitment and retention of traditionally underrepresented students, and utilizing technology to streamline and standardize records, information, and procedures.
(BSOS) Rebecca Hunsaker
(BSOS) Ellen Fitzsimmons Marth
(BSOS) Chaz Bolden
(BSOS) Andrew Roberts
(BSOS) Frances Woods-Suku
