New Faculty AY09/10
Department of Biology and Biotechnology
Dr. Luis Vidali, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. Basic Biomedical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico -- 1993
Physiology Course (Summer), Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole -- 1994
Ph.D. Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst -- 1999
Dr. Vidali joins WPI with considerable research experience, having served as a postdoctoral research associate in the Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1999-01); a research fellow in medicine in the Division of Hematology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School (2001-05); a scientist at New World Laboratories (Total ReCord Inc.) in Worcester (2005-06); and a research associate at UMass Amherst (2006-09).
His research focuses on the molecular mechanisms underlying plant cell growth. His model system is the moss Physcomitrella patens, a dynamic and practical system for the study of functional genetics. Using this model, he explores the mechanisms that cause polarized growth and, in particular, the participation of the actin cytoskeleton in this process. He has developed a rapid system that employs RNA interference to silence complete gene families. His novel methodologies have enabled him to discover important functional information that has been difficult to obtain using other plant model systems. Dr. Vidali recently received a $200,000 award from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "RIG: Analysis of the Role of Myosin XI in Plant Cell Polarized Growth."
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Ki H. Chon, Professor and Department Head
Education: B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Connecticut -- 1985
M.S. Biomedical Engineering, University of Iowa -- 1988
M.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California -- 1991
Ph.D. Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California -- 1993
Dr. Chon joins WPI from SUNY Stony Brook, where he was a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He had been a faculty member at SUNY Stony Brook since 2002. Prior to that he had held faculty posts at City College of New York (1998-2001) and Brown University (1997-98) and completed a postdoctoral appointment in health science and technology at MIT and Harvard University (1994-97). He also spent a year as an electrical engineer at Otis Elevator in Farmington, Conn. Since 2004, he has been president of Ki Hi-Tech, LLC. Dr. Chon holds seven patents for devices and methodologies for regenerating skin tissue, monitoring arrhythmia, and detecting autonomic system imbalance, among other discoveries.
With a research focus on biosignal processing and medical instrumentation, Dr. Chon is currently pursuing work in three major areas: developing a monitoring device that will provide an early diagnosis of decompression sickness in divers; pioneering a novel method for assessing diabetic cardiac autonomic neuropathy, one of the most overlooked serious complications of diabetes; and the development of a new algorithm to detect the presence of atrial fibrillation, one of the most common clinical arrhythmias, from either pulse pressure or ECG signals. He has received more than $3 million in external awards for his work and has published more than 65 peer-reviewed journal articles, nearly 30 book chapters, and more than 30 peer-reviewed abstracts. He is currently associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering Letters, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, and the International Journal of Bioelectromagnetism.
Department of Chemical Engineering
Dr. N. Aaron Deskins, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. Chemistry, University of Utah -- 2001
B.S. Chemical Engineering, University of Utah -- 2001
Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, Purdue University -- 2006
Dr. Deskins arrives at WPI having completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., where his research focused on modeling photocatalytic reactions on TiO2, a common photocatalyst. Through the use of molecular modeling methods, including density functional theory and molecular dynamics, he works to solve fundamental catalysis and materials problems relevant to energy production and environmental control. These techniques yield fundamental insight that may be difficult to obtain experimentally or otherwise.
In future work, Dr. Deskins plans to apply his methodologies towards making scientific advances in the areas of solar energy and biomass conversion. In particular, he will seek to increase the photoreactivity of TiO2 nanomaterials, which may lead to optimal solar energy conversion, and will explore methods for removing organic contaminants that hinder the use of gasified biomass. To date, Dr. Deskins' research has produced more than 20 refereed journal publications and conference presentations.
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Robert E. Dempski, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. Cell Biology and Biochemistry, Bucknell University -- 1997
Ph.D. Chemistry, MIT -- 2003
Dr. Dempski joins WPI after six years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany. In his research, he has used a variety of experimental techniques, including some he has developed, to explore the mechanisms of enzymes bound within the cell membrane. His work involves both characterizing enzymes to learn about their structural and dynamic characteristics, and measuring the mechanisms of proteins on the cell surface. Dr. Dempski has published a number of papers in refereed journals and delivered invited talks in Denmark, Germany, and Japan.
Department of Computer Science
Dr. Joseph E. Beck, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. Mathematics, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science, Carnegie Mellon University -- 1993
Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst -- 2001
Dr. Beck accepted this position, which is focused on the learning sciences, after serving since 2007 as a research scientist in WPI's Computer Science Department. He previously held positions as a systems scientist in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University (2003-07) and as a postdoctoral fellow in the Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute (2001-03). His research focuses on educational data mining (EDM), a new discipline that develops techniques for analyzing large educational data sets to make discoveries that will improve teaching and learning. In particular, EDM can serve as a toolkit for understanding the large amounts of data generated by the use of educational software. A leader in EDM, Dr. Beck established the first workshop in the field and in 2008 was program co-chair (with Ryan Baker) of the first International Conference on Educational Data Mining.
In his research to date, Dr. Beck has developed a better understanding of how students learn to read and has used graphical models as a framework for modeling how a student and a computer-based tutoring system interact with one another. The reading study involved analyzing 650 students who read 6.9 million words over the course of a school year, a volume of data that would have been impractical to score by hand. This research has led to four refereed journal publications, two book chapters, and 65 refereed conference or workshop papers.
Dr. Sonia Chernova, Assistant Professor of Robotics Engineering
Education: B.S. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University -- 2003
Ph.D. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University -- 2009
Dr. Chernova will be joining WPI in the fall of 2010 after completing a one year postdoctoral appointment in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her dissertation work on robot policy learning from demonstration introduced algorithms that enable the development of new robot skills based on interactive demonstration by a human teacher. Dr. Chernova's long-term research interests focus on the development of autonomous robots capable of operating alongside humans in everyday environments. Her work spans the areas of artificial intelligence, applied machine learning, human-robot interaction and adjustable autonomy, and has been published in four refereed journals and numerous refereed conference proceedings.
Dr. Joshua D. Guttman, Professor
Education: A.B. Princeton University -- 1975
Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Chicago -- 1984
After completing his Ph.D. in 1984, Dr. Guttman became a member of the technical staff at MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Mass., a not-for-profit corporation that operates federally funded research and development centers for the U.S. government. He rose through the ranks at MITRE, serving as lead scientists, principal scientist and group leader, and, most recently, as senior principal scientist. He formally or informally led a group of researchers that brought in a steady stream of research funding for work focused on information security and formal methods. Over the years he has delivered more than 20 invited lectures, published 12 papers in refereed journals, and delivered more than 40 talks at refereed conferences.
Dr. Guttman's research work has fallen into five main areas: strand spaces, which provide a way for proving that cryptographic protocols meet their goals or to find attacks against them; trust engineering, which helps design security protocols that are adequate for the real-world purposes to which they are put; rigorous security management, which concerns the many configurations upon which security mechanisms depend to do their jobs; Vlisp, a verified implementation of the programming language Scheme; and IMPS, or Interactive Mathematical Proof System, a mechanized method for mathematical proofs.
Department of Humanities and Arts
Dr. Kristin Boudreau, Professor and Department Head
Education: B.A. English, Cornell University -- 1987
M.A. English, University of Rochester -- 1989
Ph.D. English, University of Rochester -- 1992
Dr. Boudreau comes to WPI from the University of Georgia, where she has been a professor of English since 2007 and the English graduate coordinator since 2005. She joined the University of Georgia in 1997 as an assistant professor after five years as an assistant professor at Trinity University. A scholar of American literature, Dr. Boudreau is the author of more than 20 journal publications and two published books, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiment from Jefferson to the Jameses (University Press of Florida, 2002) and The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases (Prometheus Books, 2006). Her third book, Henry James's Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Boudreau has been active as an educator, teaching numerous undergraduate and graduate courses and directing theses and dissertations on Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Herman Melville. In her courses, she routinely uses examples from other disciplines to connect with majors and non-majors—for example, using a street plan of Washington, D.C., to help students in her sophomore survey course visualize "the confident efforts of 18th century culture to tame recalcitrant terrain" while reading Franklin's Autobiography.
Dr. James M. Cocola, Assistant Professor
Education: A.B. History and Literature, Harvard College -- 1998
Ph.D. English, University of Virginia -- 2009
Dr. Cocola's research and teaching interests include American literature and cultures (1898 to the present), modern and contemporary poetries and poetics, multiethnic and transnational American Studies, and film, media, and visual studies. He earned his doctoral degree at the University of Virginia, one of the world's premier places to study digital humanities. His use of information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research is reflected in his hypermedia essay, "The Ideological Spaces of the Academic Village: A Reading of the Central Grounds at the University of Virginia," which also exemplifies his interests in culture, politics, and environment, and his multidisciplinary scholarly method. His dissertation mapped a set of poets who use language not for its own sake but for the sake of evoking the world, often in the interest of environmental and social justice. He has published several articles, book chapters, review essays, reference essays, and shorter review in online and traditional formats, as well as a collection of poetry titled Bright Days: First Poems (Charlottesville: Mirador P, 2005). Dr. Cocola's scholarship has earned him a number of honors, including serving as Resident Scholar at the Georgia O'Keefe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, N.M.
Dr. David I. Spanagel, Assistant Professor
Education: B.A. Mathematics and American Studies, Oberlin College -- 1982
M.S.Ed. University of Rochester -- 1984
Ph.D. History of Science, Harvard University -- 1996
Since 2005, Dr. Spanagel has been a visiting assistant professor in the history of science at WPI, where, among other accomplishments, he co-developed and co-taught one of WPI's innovative first-year Great Problems Seminars, "Power the World." Before joining WPI, he had been assistant director of undergraduate studies and lecturer on the history of science at Harvard University (2002-05), visiting scholar in the history of science at Emerson College (1997-2001), lecturer in science, technology, and society at MIT (1996), a teaching fellow at Harvard (1991-97), and an instructor in mathematics and computer science at St. John Fisher College (1984-88). Dr. Spanagel's scholarship focuses on the earth sciences and the environmental history of North America between 1780 and 1850. He is currently completing a book titled Manifesting Destiny: American Natural History and the Empire State (to be published by the Johns Hopkins University Press Introductory Studies in the History of Science series).
Interactive Media and Game Development Program
Brian Moriarty, Professor of Practice
Education: B.A. English, Southeastern Massachusetts University -- 1978
M.Ed. English, Framingham State College -- 2009
An award-winning game designer, creative director, and multimedia producer, Brian Moriarty has worked in game development and multimedia for more than 25 years, most recently as creative director at Foundation 9/ImaginEngine in Framingham, Mass., the largest independent game developer in North America. At ImaginEngine, he produced and/or designed several children's software titles, including three Parents' Choice award winners. Earlier, he co-founded and served as creative director at Mpath/HearMe, the Internet's first voice chat community, which had more than 10 million users at its peak.
As a project leader for Lucasfilm Games, he authored the acclaimed Loom, a graphical adventure game that sold more than 500,000 copies and won numerous honors, including the MacWorld Adventure Game of the Year Award in 1990. Previously, he was senior game designer at Infocom in Cambridge, Mass., an early pioneer in interactive fiction games. He wrote three of Infocom's original prose games: Beyond Zork, Wishbringer, which received a Critics Choice Award from Family Computing, and Trinity, which was voted the Best Adventure/Fantasy of 1986 by Computer Entertainer. From 2003 to 20006, he worked as producer/educator at the Christa McAuliffe Challenger Center at Framingham State, where he developed planetarium shows and presented daily astronomy programs to middle school students. He has given lectures on the design and philosophy of computer games around the world. He is a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America and the International Game Developers Association.
Britton R. Snyder, Professor of Practice
Education: BFA Berklee College of Music -- 1997
Britton Snyder has worked as an artist in the field of video game development for the past 10 years, specializing in high-resolution, three-dimensional models and textures for computer games. His contributions to a number of well-known titles include concept art, illustrations, 3D models, storyboards, animatics (animated storyboards), and cinematics (videos used within games). He began his career as an intern at Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine, Calif., maker of the popular multiplayer game World of Warcraft. He worked on two of the company's blockbuster games, developing cinematics and storyboard sequences for Warcraft III (a predecessor of World of Warcraft) and the Diablo II expansion set (one of the biggest selling games of 2001), receiving a credit on both titles.
Snyder has also worked as an artist for Sony, Liquid Entertainment, RockStar Boston (formerly Mad Doc Software), THQ, Demiurge, and Seven45 Studios, a division of First Act. He has contributed to such games as Downhill Domination (cinematics), Dragonshard (artist), Empire Earth 2 expansion set (character artist), Empire Earth 3, WALL-E (artist) and Mass Effect for PC (downloadable content and 3D artist). Before joining WPI, he was working as a concept artist for an undisclosed project at Seven45 Studios. In addition to his BFA Snyder has studied figurative drawing and painting at Watts Atelier, the California Art Institute, and the New England Realist Art Center in Boston.
Department of Management
Dr. Frank Hoy, Beswick Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the Collaborative for Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Education: BBA Business Administration, University of Texas at El Paso -- 1967
MBA Marketing, University of North Texas -- 1970
Ph.D. Management, Texas A&M University --1979
As the inaugural Paul R. Beswick Professor of Entrepreneurship, Dr. Hoy, an internationally known authority on entrepreneurship, will play a critical role in expanding the scope and national reputation of WPI's entrepreneurship offerings. He spent 10 years as a faculty member in the Department of Management at the University of Georgia, where he founded and directed the Center for Business and Economic Studies and served as director of the Georgia Small Business Development Center (SBDC). He was named the inaugural Zwerner Professor at Georgia State in 1988, and in 1991 joined the faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) as a professor of management and entrepreneurship and dean of the College of Business Administration. While at UTEP, Dr. Hoy spent five years as chair of the Central European Small Business Enterprise Development Commission and was most recently director of the university's Center for Entrepreneurial Development, Advancement, Research and Support.
The author or co-editor of seven books, more than 40 scholarly articles, and more than 90 conference papers, Dr. Hoy is past editor of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, past Latin America editor for the Journal of World Business, and honorary editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business. His research and educational activities have been funded by more than $15 million in awards and contracts from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Education, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and the Mott and Kauffman foundations, among other agencies and organizations.
Dr. Renata Konrad, Assistant Professor
Education: BASc Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto -- 1999
MASc Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto -- 2004
Ph.D. Industrial Engineering, Purdue University - 2009
Dr. Konrad's research focus areas include health systems engineering, patient flow optimization, and health informatics. She has completed a number of graduate research assistantships, including projects in which she built a queuing model to manage the perishable blood inventory for Canadian Blood Services, developed a comprehensive simulation model for scheduling outpatients for Wishard Health Services in Indianapolis, and, for the Indiana State Department of Health, constructed models for prioritizing essential healthcare services that would need to be sustained by hospitals in the event of an influenza pandemic. In 2006 she received a $10,000 award from the Canadian Children of Chernobyl Fund to lead an analysis of health delivery in public hospitals in the Ukraine. She has also held positions as an assistant project engineer for Loblaw Companies Limited in Toronto, business analyst for AMS Management Systems Canada, Inc. (now CGI), also in Toronto, and systems contractor, health records, for Toronto General Hospital.
Dr. Justin Tsung-Yi Wang, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. Computer Science (Mathematics Minor), University of San Francisco -- 2001
MBA Finance Concentration, University of San Francisco -- 2003
Ph.D. Economics, Lehigh University -- 2009
Dr. Wang's research interests include applied economics, applied microeconomics, corporate governance, and health economics. His dissertation was a study of the impact of information in the market for coronary artery bypass graft surgery. In 2007 he completed a summer internship as a management analyst for the Center for Financing, Access, and Cost Trends, part of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, whose mission is to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans. In addition to several working papers and conference presentations on economics and health economics topics, he is the co-author of a forthcoming book chapter on the impact of national health insurance on medical technology adoption and usage. He has twice been an invited participant in the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute. Among the awards Dr. Wang has received are the Warren-York Dissertation Fellowship at Lehigh University and Lehigh's Best Teaching Assistant Award.
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Dr. Irina Mitrea, Associate Professor
Education: M.S. Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Romania -- 1993
M.S. Industrial Mathematics, Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics – 2000
Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Minnesota - 2000
Dr. Mitrea joins WPI after five years as a faculty member at the University of Virginia, where she had been an associate professor since 2007. Previously, she had held postdoctoral appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University (2000-01) and Cornell University (2001-04), where she was an H.C. Wang Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research, which includes work in such areas as real and harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and interval analysis, has been supported by a number of external awards, including the Ruth Michler Prize from the Association of Women in Mathematics ($42,000) and a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award ($407,463), the agency's most prestigious award for young faculty. Dr. Mitrea has shared her research through more than 30 papers in refereed journals, more than 20 conference presentations, and numerous invited talks, colloquia, and seminars.
In addition to her research and teaching, Dr. Mitrea has been actively involved in a number of outreach activities. As just a few examples, she created and organized the Careers in Mathematical Sciences Day, the Girls and Mathematics Summer Day Program, and the University of Virginia Undergraduate Lecture Series in Mathematics, all at the University of Virginia. She has also spearheaded a number of academic innovations, including a Ph.D. topics course in elliptical partial differential equations on nanosmooth domains and the University of Virginia's Mathematical Modeling Competition.
Dr. Burt S. Tilley, Associate Professor
Education: B.A. Modern Languages, University of Lowell -- 1988
B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Lowell -- 1998
Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University -- 1994
Dr. Tilley joins WPI with an extensive record as an educator and researcher, most recently as professor of mathematics at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. He joined the Olin faculty in 2001 as an associate professor after seven years in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has previously held positions as an NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Ecole Polytechnique in France (1996-97) and as a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University (1994-95). Since 2007, Dr. Tilley has also been an affiliate professor in WPI's Department of Mathematical Sciences.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Schlumberger-Doll Research, and other organizations, Dr. Tilley has pursued research on mathematical modeling of problems in scientific and engineering applications that focus on continuum mechanics, nonlinear partial differential equations, and nonlinear differential equations, among other areas of mathematics. Recent applications include interfacial pattern formation on thin binary fluid films in coating applications and heat transfer behavior in residential geothermal heating systems. This work has resulted in more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, a number of Mathematical Problems in Industry Workshop reports, and numerous invited talks and conference talks. He is also named on an application for a patent for "Methods and Apparatus for Harnessing Potential Energy Downhole."
Dr. Zheyang Wu, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. International Trade, Chong Qing University, China -- 1998
M.S. Mathematics, University of New Orleans -- 2004
M.Phil. Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University -- 2007
Ph.D. Biostatistics, Yale University -- 2009
Dr. Wu's dissertation research involved approaches to high-dimensional model selection that facilitate genetic studies with high-throughput data. The focus was on genome-wide association studies that identify genetic variations associated with the susceptibility to certain diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes. Such studies can involve up to a million single nucleotide polymorphisms and copy number variations. This work has resulted in a number of published papers and presentations. Dr. Wu has been a referee for three journals, Bioinformatics (2007), Annals of Human Genetics (2007, 2008), and Statistics and its Interface (2008).
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Simon W. Evans, Assistant Professor
Education: B.Sc. Aeronautical Engineering, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa -- 1998
M.S. Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT -- 2001
Ph.D. Aerodynamics, Cambridge University, UK -- 2009
After earning his M.S. at MIT, Dr. Evans held two positions in industry. As an analytical engineer in the area of heat transfer for MTU Aero Engine Design Inc. in Connecticut, he conducted 2D finite element heat transfer analysis of turbine and compressor castings and 3D heat transfer analysis of turbine vanes. At Titan Corporation (now L-3 Communications) in Massachusetts, he worked as an aeronautical engineer, gaining experience in benefit analysis for air traffic control and airline operations decision support tools, among other areas. Dr. Evans's research at Cambridge University involved the use of advanced actuation concepts for control of the boundary layer on the suction surface of compressor blades, with applications in aircraft engines. His research was partially funded by an Overseas Research Students Scholarship awarded by the UK Secretary of State for Education and Skills.
Dr. Stephen S. Nestinger, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of California, Davis -- 2003
M.S. Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of California, Davis -- 2005
Ph.D. Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of California, Davis -- 2009
Dr. Nestinger's research focus as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, was the design and control of intelligent mechatronic systems. He worked on a number of research projects in this area, including the development of an autonomous pseudo-optimum behavior aggregation method for goal-oriented control of autonomous systems, a retrofitted agile manufacturing workcell, and a highway based vehicle detection system. This and other work was funded by two Sandia National Laboratory/U.C. Davis Excellence in Engineering Graduate Fellowships, a Joseph Beggs Fellowship for Kinematics, and other scholarships and research awards. Dr. Nestinger has published more than 15 journal papers, book chapters, and peer-reviewed conference papers. He has been a peer reviewer for a number of journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics and the 2008 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Applications, held in Beijing.
Department of Physics
Dr. Erkan Tüzel, Assistant Professor
Education: B.S. Engineering Physics, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey -- 1999
M.S. Physics, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey -- 2001
Ph.D. Physics, University of Minnesota -- 2006
Dr. Tüzel completed research for his dissertation on novel course-grained algorithms to model complex fluids. After posts as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at North Dakota State University and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, he further developed his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota, where he applied his methods to problems in cell biology and materials science. His goal is to focus his research on understanding fundamental mechanisms in biology and emerging nanoscale physics, especially in areas where there is the potential for significant medical and industrial applications. Dr. Tüzel has published more than 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals and given numerous invited talks, seminars, and conference and poster presentations. He has been a referee for Biophysical Journal, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, Physical Biology, and Computing in Science and Engineering.
Department of Social Science and Policy Studies
Dr. Ryan Shaun Joazeiro de Baker, Assistant Professor
Education: Sc.B. Computer Science, Brown University -- 2000
M.S. Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University -- 2005
Ph.D. Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University -- 2005
Dr. Baker's research on the interactions that take place between students and educational software falls at the intersection of learning sciences, human-computer interaction, and educational data mining. This work has led to discoveries about human learning and learners, and to the development of educational software that adapts effectively and sensitively to individual differences. Since receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Baker has completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon (2006), a research fellowship at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham (2006-07), and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute/Pittsburg Science of Learning Center at Carnegie Mellon (2007). He also served as technical director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center DataShop, starting in the fall of 2008.
Dr. Baker has published extensively, with more than 30 refereed journal papers, book chapters, conference full papers, short papers, and poster papers. He has received one best paper award and an honorable mention for best paper award for conference papers, and was finalist for two other best paper awards. He received the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center Project Award three times. His extensive academic service includes posts as associate editor for the Journal of Educational Data Mining and program chair (with Joseph Beck) of the First International Conference on Educational Data Mining in 2008.
Maintained by webmaster@wpi.eduLast modified: November 17, 2009 16:14:57