MU-ADVANCE Welcomes New Female Faculty

MU-ADVANCE is pleased to welcome five new female tenure-track faculty in the STEM disciplines at Marshall. As part of our Faculty Development Initiative, MU-ADVANCE representatives met with each new faculty member to discuss how they are assimilating to campus and to identify challenges faced by new faculty. In addition, this initiative is currently piloting a mentoring program to foster the future development of a university-wide mentoring system for new faculty.

MU-ADVANCE hosted a networking lunch on September 10, 2007 to greet and introduce new faculty to campus. Twenty-one faculty representing 9 departments attended the luncheon, which focused on the challenges of concurrently establishing a research lab and maintaining teaching responsibilities at Marshall.

Dr. Maria Babiuc, a theoretical physicist, joins the Department of Physics and Physical Science. She has researched black holes and gravitational radiation, and is interested in developing research in numerical relativity at Marshall. Currently teaching Introduction to Modern Physics and Modern Physics Lab, she is involved in teaching physics at both the introductory and advanced levels.
 

Dr. Sarita Bassil will join the Art and Joan Weisberg Division of Engineering and Computer Science in January 2008. Dr. Bassil is a computer scientist with expertise in workflow technology and business process applications, including automated negotiations, transportation processes, medical processes, and implementation issues of information systems.

Dr. Piyali Dasgupta joins the Department of Pharmacology, Physiology and Toxicology in the School of Medicine. Her research examines the effects of nicotine (the active component of cigarettes) in regulating cellular responses such as programmed cell death and cell growth, in the context of lung cancer. She will be teaching Lung Physiology.

Dr. Wendy Trzyna has been hired as a microbiologist in the Department of Biological Sciences. Her research interests include investigating how Acanthamoeba, a single-celled eukaryotic microbe, sense and respond at the molecular level to stress in the environment. Of particular interest are specific genes and signaling pathways involved in stress responses, as well as whole genome analyses of amoebae from diverse environments. She is currently teaching Microbial Genetics.

Dr. Bin Wang joins the Chemistry Department as a biochemist and a specialist in nanobiotechnology. Her research focuses on RNA structure analysis, with interests including the fabrication of a micro-total analysis system to conduct RNA studies, the determination of RNA structure by single molecule approaches, and the engineering of RNA as cargo to deliver drugs to target positions within cells. She is currently involved with teaching Introduction to Analytical Chemistry laboratory.

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