New to the Faculty
New faculty joining USC College include those with expertise ranging from international relations, economics and sociology to the cross-disciplinary fields of computational physics, genomics and neuroscience. Each new faculty member brings academic reputation and promise that will help provide students with a rich and diverse learning experience.
“We are very pleased with the world-class reputation of faculty who recently joined the College,” says Beth Meyerowitz, dean of faculty in USC College. “Their individual expertise will add to the diverse and dynamic College community and strengthen scholarship at all levels as we accomplish our strategic plan.”
New faces include:
Gerardo Luis Munck, whose research of Latin-American politics is widely published,
is a new associate professor in the College’s School of International Relations.
His areas of expertise include Latin-American comparative politics, regimes
and democratization. He comes to USC from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
where he was an associate professor of political science. Munck has received
numerous grants for his research of international politics, and has published
many books, journal articles and chapters that explore democracy and development
in Latin America. He has a Ph.D. in political science from UC San Diego and
was recently a visiting professor of Latin-American politics at UC Berkeley.
Michael Quick, a widely published scientist, joined the biology department as an associate professor in neuroscience. He has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Emory University, and was previously an associate professor in the neurobiology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he taught medical neuroscience and other courses. Quick completed his postdoctoral research fellowship at Caltech, and has more than 10 years of teaching and research experience. Quick brings numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health with him to the College to study topics such as GABA Transporters—molecules of the brain that help regulate pleasure and pain.
Carol Wise is a new associate professor in the College’s School of International Relations. She has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and was previously an associate professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Her fields of expertise include comparative politics and international political economy, with a regional emphasis on Latin-American politics and emerging-market economies. Wise has published numerous books and journal articles on the economic and political issues affecting Latin American countries, and has earned several grants and fellowships for her scholarly work and research.
Known for his keen eye for art, Insoo Cho is a new assistant professor in the art history department. Cho’s doctoral studies at the University of Kansas focused on Korean and Asian art history. For the past 15 years, he has held curatorial positions—including chief curator—at the Ho-Am Art Museum in Yong-yin, South Korea. He was recently a visiting curator at the Seoul National University museum. He has curated numerous special exhibitions, and has published several catalogues and reviews.
Stephen Finlay, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an assistant professor in the College’s School of Philosophy. His areas of expertise include meta-ethics, ethics and value theory. He is also interested in the study of Kant, 19th-century continental, existential and early analytical philosophy. Finlay has a master’s degree from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Gabriel Giorgi, who has a master’s degree in semiotics from the National University of Cordoba, Spain, joined the College as assistant professor of Spanish, Portuguese and comparative literature. He has taught all levels of the Spanish language at New York University, where his doctoral studies focused on the Spanish and Portuguese culture.
Neil Gross arrived at the sociology department as an assistant professor with an interest in sociological theory and social organization. Before pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he worked as a researcher for W.W. Norton & Company. His short essays on globalization appeared in the textbook “Introduction to Sociology,” by Anthony Giddens and Mitchell Duneier.
Yong Kim joined the economics department as an assistant professor, specializing in macroeconomics. Kim has teaching and research experience in macroeconomics, international trade and technological change. A tutorial fellow at the London School of Economics, Kim recently published research papers on technology diffusion and unemployment models.
Lei Li has joined the biology and math departments as an assistant professor of computational biology. Li was previously an assistant professor of statistics and genomics at Florida State University. He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkley, where he also taught statistics. Li has a grant from the National Science Foundation to estimate parameters in spike-convolution models and mixture models.
Peter Qin is an assistant professor of biophysics in the chemistry and biology
departments. He has a Ph.D. in biophysics from Columbia University, and completed
a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, where he studied the structure of ribonucleic
acid and its reaction with protein. Qin has published numerous interdisciplinary
research articles in the fields of biophysics and biochemistry.
Achipai Shipper holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his dissertation explored five hypotheses to explain why the Japanese have established support groups to help illegal foreign immigrants. He joined the political science department and the College’s School of International Relations as an assistant professor. He completed his postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard University, where he was also an advanced research fellow in Harvard’s program on U.S.-Japanese Relations. Shipper’s major field of interest is South Asian studies and U.S.-Japanese relations. |
