New Faculty: Amilcar Velez
A&S Communications
Twenty new faculty have joined the College of Arts & Sciences this year, strengthening departments and programs with their wide-ranging expertise and filling numerous leadership roles for the College and university. And this election year, the College’s new faculty bring a breadth and depth of expertise on topics important to our democracy.
The economics department welcomes two new professors, including Christian Cox, who studies the effects of free-for-all partisan gerrymandering on electoral outcomes and political representation. He’s looking forward to teaching Political Economy to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Economist Amilcar Velez specializes in econometrics, the use of real-world data to test economic theories. His current project explores how to measure the trade-off between fairness and accuracy in computer algorithms when real-world data is missing or only available for a biased subset of people.
In the government department, Daniel de Kadt’s research interests include democracy, inequality, voting behavior, causal inference and data science. In his current project, how to make causal claims about "distance," he’s studying how physical, social or economic separation directly causes a specific change in an outcome.
Three of those joining the government department were hired in a previous cycle but delayed their arrival to complete postdoctoral positions: Kennia Coronado, Katherine Irajpanah and Dillon Laaker.
With a joint appointment in government and Latina/o studies, Coronado brings to the College a specialty in American politics that focuses on the political behavior, political communication and the political representation of underrepresented groups, particularly Latinxs. Her current project explores race, emotions and political engagement among women in the U.S.
Political scientist Irajpanah’s current book project examines the origins of military strategy, with an emphasis on the historical evolution of norms around the use of force. She’s excited to teach Elements of Security and explore questions like why war between states is more common today than at any time since 1945 and why modern wars seem to have no end in sight.
Laaker focuses on the international political economy and is currently examining how global firms have become drivers of the recent wave of protectionist policies, challenging the conventional wisdom that multinational businesses uniformly favor open markets. He’s looking forward to teaching The Politics of International Trade.
Melissa Sands is a professor in both the government department and in the Brooks School of Public Policy. She’s interested in how people's everyday experiences affect their political behavior and is currently working on a new project that explores narratives about economic inequality and political violence on TikTok.
The Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates has a new curator this year, Mal Ballinger in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She’s especially interested in the great mystery of hibernation: how animals enter, regulate and survive this extreme state and how this adaptation has evolved across mammals.
The Levinson Program in China and Asia-Pacific Studies has a new director, Diana Fu. She studies state control and popular contention in contemporary China. Her work has policy implications for understanding how and why domestic politics matters for deciphering Chinese politics beyond the headlines.
The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) also has a new director, Gabriella Carini. She joins Cornell with an appointment as professor of physics as well as professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering. Her research interests focus on the understanding of technologies’ building blocks and of how new technologies enable discovery and have societal impact.
The physics department also welcomes Yiming Chen, who spends his time in the world of quantum reality, researching quantum gravity, quantum chaos and quantum information. He’s interested in how macroscopic spacetime phenomena such as black hole horizons and expanding universes emerge from a more fundamental microscopic description.
Epistemology and Sanskrit philosophy are the focuses for Nilanjan Das, who joins the Sage School of Philosophy this year. Cornell is one of the few universities in the U.S. where graduate students can train in Sanskrit philosophy, and he’s excited about teaching and writing in this environment.
Mathematician Sanchit Chaturvedi focuses on partial differential equations in his research and is looking forward to teaching a special topics course for grad students this fall on wave equations. He’s found the math department “friendly and inviting” and is excited to explore the nature surrounding Ithaca.
In the classics department, Nicola Denzey Lewis is working through ancient Roman Christian funerary inscriptions from Rome’s catacombs to investigate how ordinary people negotiated religious change. She’s looking forward to teaching courses on Ancient Magic and on Death and the Afterlife in the Ancient World.
Historical archeologist Camille Louis researches the archaeology of resistance, liberation and marronage, the act of escaping slavery to live in freedom. He joins the Department of Anthropology and is excited about the collaboration opportunities and intellectual exchange at the Anthropology Collaboratory and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS).
South Asia's role in the humanities intrigues Kristina Rogahn, who studies South Asian literature and religion, specializing in Tamil. She joins the Asian studies department and is excited about teaching a course on the Arts of Hindu Devotion this spring, which will give students one-on- one encounters with verbal and visual arts, films and performances.
In the Department of Romance Studies, Ignacio Sánchez Prado works on the intersection of cultural sociology, intellectual theory and criticism in Latin American literature, cinema, food and culture, with a focus on Mexico. He’s excited about Cornell’s longstanding commitment to the humanities and “its famously wonderful students.”
Chemist Ciaran Seath targets disease-driving proteins long considered "undruggable," with the goal of finding new therapeutic leads. He’s looking forward to teaching Organic 2, which “is when you really start being able to understand how molecules are built and it changes how you see the world.”
Bonnie Teece adds to the Department of Astronomy’s strength in the expanding field of astrobiology. She’s working on projects about life detection on Mars and icy ocean worlds like Europa and Enceladus, while also looking at the chemistry of asteroids, chondrites and other planetary bodies in our solar system to understand the abiotic background.
Jesse Boring ’02, an associate teaching professor in the Department of Psychology, works on scalable online mental health programs for children and families. He’s working on the next phase of a research project to make future online mental health programs more engaging and more likely to be completed.
