Willams Awards Eight Faculty Members With Tenure
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Following the recommendation of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, the Williams College Board of Trustees has promoted eight faculty to the position of associate professor with tenure.The promotion of will take effect July 1, 2012, for Amie Ashley Hane, psychology; Brent Heeringa, computer science; Morgan McGuire, computer science; Steven J. Miller, mathematics and statistics; Steven E. Nafziger, economics; Anne Reinhardt, history; Dorothy J. Wang, American studies, and Li Yu, Asian studies.
Hane's research in developmental psychology explores the social regulation of reactivity to stress and novelty. Her two particular areas of focus are the relationship between early-occurring maternal care-giving behavior and stress physiology, and the importance of the quality of caregiver-child interactions and child temperament in shaping the development of risk and resilience. She has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Journal of Family Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Psychological Science.
Since her arrival in 2006, Hane has taught both introductory classes on developmental psychology as well as more advanced classes on risk, resilience, and early experience in infant development. She is also a member of the faculty of the program in neuroscience and has served on committees focused on the college’s center for children as well as the College and Community Advisory Committee. She received her bachelor's and doctorate degrees rom the University of Maryland.
Heeringa is interested in approximation algorithms, computational complexity, data structures and computability. He has been published in the journal Algorithmica and has presented at numerous peer-reviewed conferences. His research is supported financially by the National Science Foundation. During his time as a graduate student he helped several other computer scientists in founding Adverplex, a company that works with pay-per-click advertising.
Heeringa was a visiting professor in 2003 during a break in his graduate studies. Since his return, he has become faculty adviser for the women's tennis team. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota at Morris and his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
McGuire's research interests are computer graphics and high-throughput computing, with emphasis on special effects for film and video games. In addition to numerous award-winning papers he has written, McGuire is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Graphics Tools, the lead author of Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology, and a visiting professor at NVIDIA Research.
He has also contributed to numerous commercial products, including the E-Ink display for the Amazon Kindle, the PeakStream high-performance computing infrastructure (which was acquired by Google), and games, including Titan Quest (THQ/Windows) and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (Activision|Blizzard/Xbox360). He is currently working on a new game with Vicarious Visions and continues to teach classes on game design and computer graphics in the art and computer science departments at Williams, where he has been working since 2006. He received his bachelor of science and master of engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his master of science and doctorate from Brown University.
Miller focuses on analytic number theory, random matrix theory, probability theory, sabermetrics, and Benford's Law in his research. He has an extensive publishing history, including his book "An Invitation to Modern Number Theory" and papers in accounting, computer science, economics, geology, marketing, and physics, in addition to mathematics and statistics.
He has been teaching at Williams since 2008, and has lead classes on cryptography, sabermetrics, and number theory, as well as more introductory calculus courses. He is very involved with the college community, serving on committees and in organizations relating to dorm programming, student dining, academic advising, and recruiting. He also maintains a website of math riddles. His bachelor of science is from Yale University and his doctorate from Princeton University.
Nafziger specializes in economic history and development economics, with research focusing on tsarist Russia, and his work has been published in numerous journals, including Explorations in Economic History and The Journal of Economic History. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Since 2006, he has been teaching classes on microeconomics and economic history at Williams. In 2009, he was named a Class of 1945 World Fellow and a Hellman Fellow by Williams College. He received his bachelor's from Northwestern University and his doctorate from Yale University.
Reinhardt's research has focused on imperialism, technology, and social change in 19th- and 20th-century China. Her book, "Navigating Semi-colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860-1911," will be published by the Harvard University Asia Center. She is working on a new book on histories of capitalism in China and India.
Since her arrival in 2005, she has been teaching courses on Chinese history that range from earliest times to the present day. She received her bachelor's degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from Princeton University.
Wang specializes in contemporary poetry in English, with a focus on experimental minority poetry; she also works on avant-garde poetry and poetics, Asian American literature, and Anglophone Chinese diasporic literature. She has published essays in The Journal of Asian American Studies and in the book "Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australia." Her book, "Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry," is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
At Williams since 2006, Wang has served on the Faculty Lecture Series Committee and contributed to the comparative literature program and American studies program. She has been teaching Asian-American literature, American minority avant-garde writing, and introductory American studies courses. From 2009-2010, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She received her bachelor's degree from Duke University, a master of public administration in international affairs from Princeton University, a master's in writing from Johns Hopkins University, and a doctorate in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley.
Yu's research fields include Chinese language pedagogy and the history of reading in late Imperial China. She has been published in journals including The Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, for which she is book review editor, and Studies on Asia. She held a fellowship from the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows," a part of the Excellence Initiative by the German federal and state governments, at University of Heidelberg in Germany in 2009-10.
At Williams since 2005, Yu teaches courses in Chinese language at all levels, Chinese pop culture, and ethnic minority cultures. She received her bachelor's degree from East China Normal University in Shanghai and her master's and doctorate from Ohio State University.
