On Tuesday, March 14, the Boston University Office of the Provost announced faculty members who have been promoted to full professor. Join us in congratulating our 14 newly-promoted Arts & Sciences faculty.
Jennifer Balakrishnan, Mathematics & Statistics, is a computational number theorist researching algorithmic number theory and arithmetic geometry. Supported by numerous grants from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation (NSF), including a CAREER award, she is recognized among the world’s leading authorities on the quadratic Chabauty method and the application of p-adic techniques to Diophantine geometry. She is a past Sloan Research Fellow and a recent recipient of the American Mathematical Society’s Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars and the Association for Women in Mathematics’ Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. She has published one book, one book chapter, and 17 articles in top-tier mathematics journals, including La Matematica.
Taylor Boas, Political Science, specializes in comparative politics in Latin America, focusing predominantly on campaigns, corruption, electoral accountability, and mass media, applying quantitative and qualitative methods. He has earned a reputation as one of the leading scholars on the politics of Brazil, with recent work examining the electoral activities of Latin America’s growing evangelical community. He has written two books, including 2016’s Presidential Campaigns in Latin America: Electoral Strategies and Success Contagion with a third currently under review, along with 10 book chapters and numerous journal articles, book reviews, and working papers examining elections in Central and South America.
Tereasa Brainerd, Astronomy, has gained international recognition for work establishing weak lensing – the tiny change in the apparent shape of distant galaxies as their light passes close to another massive object – as a powerful probe for better understanding the structure and evolution of the universe as well as furthering the exploration of dark matter. Her current NSF-sponsored research studies the spatial and velocity distributions of satellite galaxies and uses computing and data methods, such as neural networks and machine learning, to simplify simulations. She has published two books, two book chapters, and dozens of refereed articles in top science journals, including The Astrophysical Journal.
Tarek Hassan, Economics, specializes in international macroeconomics and finance, as well as economic history and determinants of growth. He has gained recognition across his field for research into how portfolio-building strategies affect currency exchange markets. His more recent work applies natural language processing to earnings calls to evaluate firm-level exposure to risk, including political risk, Brexit, and COVID-19 – and how those risk factors determine outcomes such as investment and stock price volatility. He is a frequent presenter at international economics conferences and has published in numerous top-tier journals, including Annual Review of Economics and The American Economic Review.
John Marston, Anthropology, is an environmental archaeologist who studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use, with a focus on ancient societies of the Mediterranean and western and central Asia. His research specifically examines how people make decisions about land use within changing economic, social, and environmental settings, and how those decisions affect the environment at local and regional scales. He has secured grant funding from National Geographic, the NSF, Fulbright, and the American Philosophical Society to support his field research and has published six book chapters and 18 journal articles. He is a past recipient of CAS’s Templeton and Gitner awards for excellence in teaching, advising, and mentoring and of the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Book Award.
Lida Maxwell, Political Science, is a political theorist whose work touches on several related areas, including feminist theory, queer theory, contemporary democratic theory, environmental political theory, and law and politics. She has presented her work at the meetings of the Western, Midwest, and American Political Science associations, as well as at numerous American and European universities. A 2020 recipient of Contemporary Political Theory’s best article award, she has published four widely praised books, including 2019’s Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth, along with three book chapters and articles in top peer-reviewed publications. A fifth book examining the contributions of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman is in development.
Rachell Powell, Philosophy, is an expert in multiple fields of philosophy, whose research explores conceptual and methodological problems in evolutionary theory, as well as ethical dimensions of the new biosciences. She has additionally made contributions in human evolution, the evolution of morality, theories of disease, animal and environmental philosophy, and the biomedical enhancement of human capacities. She has published two books, including 2020’s Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind, along with dozens of book chapters, papers, and articles in leading philosophical and bioethics journals. She is associate editor of Life Sciences, Philosophy & Technology, and her work has been supported through numerous federal and foundation grants.
Kate Saenko, Computer Science, specializes in machine learning, concentrating on the development of new systems to enhance vision and language understanding. The recipient of several active federal grants supporting her research into artificial intelligence, she has published extensively in leading computer science journals, and is director of BU’s Computer Vision Learning Group and a consulting professor at the MIT-IBM Watson Lab. She additionally co-directs BU’s Artificial Intelligence Research Initiative through the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. Last year, she received an AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Computer Vision, and in 2017, she received the Most Innovative Solution award, alongside her students, in the IEEE Large-Scale Activity Recognition Challenge.
Johannes Schmieder, Economics, is an empirical microeconomist whose research is at the intersection of labor and public economics. He is among the nation’s top scholars in unemployment insurance and has made significant contributions as well in the study of domestic outsourcing, job search and matching, and the source of wage differentials across firms. He is a past recipient of BU’s Neu Family Award for Teaching Excellence in Economics and the Peter Paul Career Development Professorship and has published over a dozen articles in top-tier economics reviews, including Journal of Public Economics and Quarterly Journal of Economics. He has additionally received two excellence in refereeing awards from American Economic Review.
Henrik Selin, International Relations, is a leading scholar of global environmental governance, researching international environmental cooperation and policy making in the context of advancing sustainable development. He has made important contributions around the governance of mercury pollution and other hazardous chemicals. He is associate dean for studies within Pardee and associate director of BU’s Institute on Sustainable Development and additionally serves as editor of Global Environmental Politics. His research has been sponsored by numerous agencies including the NSF and the International Renewable Energy Agency. He has published two books, including 2020’s Mercury Stories: Understanding Sustainability through a Volatile Element, along with 14 book chapters and articles in top journals.
Konstantinos Spiliopoulos, Mathematics & Statistics, researches probability, stochastic processes, and statistics, exploring the application of stochastic partial differential equations to challenges in the sciences, engineering, and finance. He has also worked to establish deep new mathematical theory and to solve important applied scientific problems in cellular biology, data science, machine learning, and neural networks, among several fields. Supported by numerous NSF grants, he is a member of BU’s Center for Information & Systems Engineering, a past Simons Fellow in Mathematics, and a frequently invited lecturer. He has published two book chapters and 35 articles in important mathematics and scientific journals.
Jared Weinstein, Mathematics & Statistics, specializes in number theory, with a focus on automorphic representation theory, which explores abstract algebraic structures. He is recognized internationally as a leading scholar in the field of p-adic geometry, particularly the local geometry of Shimura varieties. He is a past Simons Foundation Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, has published extensively in his field’s top journals, and has been a PI on numerous NSF grants. He is recognized as one of the few people in the world who are conversant enough with the new “perfectoid” geometry – replacing the traditional rings of arithmetic geometry – to be able to apply it usefully and further advance the field.
Paul Withers, Astronomy, specializes in the study of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere of planets, using radio science instruments and developing theoretical models to discover how multiple factors – from solar flux to magnetic fields – interact under the unique conditions of each planet. Credited with reinvigorating the field of radio occultation experiments, he has earned several major NASA achievement awards and is a PI on numerous active NASA and NSF grants exploring conditions on Earth, Saturn, Mars, and Venus. He is associate chair of his department and associate director of the BU Center for Space Physics. He has published two book chapters and 84 articles in premier scientific journals.
Min Ye, International Relations, is a scholar of East Asian politics, with specific focus on Chinese domestic and international political economy and security, as well as regional relations with India and other developing nations. Respected as a leading intellectual voice on the Belt and Road Initiative and US-China relations, she has published three books, including 2020’s The Belt, Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China, 1998-2018, along with two book chapters and a dozen articles in important field journals, including the Journal of East Asian Studies. She is a recent Rosenberg Institute Scholar at Suffolk University, a past director of BU’s East Asian Studies program, and has received grant funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation to support her research.