CER Faculty Fellows
The core of the Center for Excellence in Research is a group of Faculty Fellows, who are selected based both on research accomplishments and on commitment to promoting a culture of excellence in research at USC. Fellows will serve as leaders, advisors and mentors to fellow faculty and students both within and beyond their areas of expertise. Faculty interested in taking advantage of CER Fellows' mentoring opportunities should contact the Fellow directly or contact the Office of Research Advancement.
Current Faculty Fellow-led workshops are listed at the research salons page: Visit Site
Download the 2008 CER Faculty Fellows Application: To Application Forms
2008-09 Faculty Fellows
Lisa Bitel: The Future of Academic Feminism
Bitel will organize an interdisciplinary discussion about the future of academic feminism tentatively titled “What’s Gender Got to Do With--?”. She will partner with colleagues from a wide range of academic fields—from engineering to environmental science, multimedia studies to journalism—to host informal gatherings where interested faculty and graduate students can jointly investigate the relevance of feminist thought and practice for their own disciplines, and consider the impact of gender on scholarly work in their fields. These panels will explore feminism methods and gendered problems as terms for collaborative interdisciplinary projects and will also consider ways of integrating scholarly and political feminist agendas. In addition, the sessions will offer opportunities for senior scholars to mentor junior colleagues and for participants to consider collaborative feminist research across the disciplines.
Bitel is the author of four books about gender and religion in the European Middle Ages: Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland (Cornell, 1990), Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland (Cornell, 1996), Women in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2003), and the forthcoming Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Converted Barbarian Europe (Oxford, October 2008). She has written articles on such varied subjects as medieval sexuality, the history of dreams, church architecture, cursing saints, and feminist pedagogy. She is the director of Monastic Matrix, a collaborative web-based digital repository of materials related to premodern religious women. She has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Irish American Cultural Institute, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She is currently working on two related book projects: An iconographic and cultural analysis of a modern-day visionary in the Mojave desert, and a history of visions and the invisible in early medieval Europe. Bitel is professor of History and Religion and Chair of the Gender Studies Program.
William Deverell: Innovations in Archival Research
Deverell will organize workshops focused on doing research in USC libraries and research collections, as well as in local archives and museums. He will work with USC colleagues and researchers on creating greater awareness of digital and database research opportunities. Deverell further hopes to work with CER in fostering interdisciplinary research on the history of medicine and in assisting undergraduates with research projects in a variety of disciplines.
Deverell is Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Professor of History at USC. He earned his undergraduate degree in American Studies from Stanford and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American history from Princeton. Prior to coming to USC in 2004, Professor Deverell taught at the California Institute on Technology and the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of numerous studies on the 19th and 20th century American West. Recent publications include Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Land of Sunshine: The Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles, which he co-edited with Greg Hise. With David Igler of UC Irvine, he is editing The Blackwell Companion to California and with Greg Hise, he is editing The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles. Deverell is also the co-author of an 8th grade United States history text published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. He is currently at work on a book examining the post-Civil War American West.
Susan Forsburg: Cell and Molecular Imaging
Forsburg’s fellowship will develop a Cell and Molecular Imaging Cooperative centered on the UPC campus. High tech, state of the art biological imaging occurs in diverse labs around UPC, ranging from LAS departments of Biological Sciences and Earth Sciences to the Viterbi School of Engineering. But the instruments and methods are not centralized; they are widely dispersed in individual laboratories with very different research interests. This plan will create a community to share technology and develop common goals and collaborations. This will be accomplished by an initial faculty workshop, and a regular users’ meeting of students, staff, and faculty as well as a website. To broaden the awareness of imaging methods on campus and keep abreast of new technologies, active users will be asked to lead a short course in their preferred methods, which will be complemented by inviting a prominent imaging specialist from outside to present an annual seminar. Finally, the artistic and educational value of the images produced by these instruments will be enhanced by developing an annual bio-imaging competition, with participation of members of the School of Fine Arts and the School of Cinematic Arts.
Forsburg, a Professor in Molecular & Computational Biology, studies how chromosomes are duplicated and separated during the cell division cycle. Forsburg uses molecular genetics and cell biology methods to investigate this problem in a model microbial system, the fission yeast S. pombe. Her lab studies several genes that are required to keep the yeast chromosomes intact and functional. All of these genes are present in humans, and all have links to human cancer. Recently, Forsburg’s lab has developed live cell imaging techniques to monitor the behavior of these gene products in intact cells. Forsburg’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
Gaurav Sukhatme: Undergraduate Research and Professional Development in Interdisciplinary Research
Sukhatme will be organizing two working groups - one focused on establishing research programs with the National Science Foundation, and the other on establishing 'Research Experiences for Undergraduates' (REU) sites at USC. He will also hold workshops geared towards assistant professors currently at USC and senior PhD students interested in the professoriate. The workshop will largely focus on researchers in engineering, the natural sciences, and mathematics. The purpose of the workshops is to showcase exemplary multidisciplinary research and to develop a set of best practices regarding the pursuit of a career in which multi- and interdisciplinary thinking is the norm.
Gaurav S. Sukhatme is an Associate Professor of Computer Science (joint appointment in Electrical Engineering-Systems) at the USC. He directs the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory which he founded in 2000. His research interests are in multi-robot systems and robotic sensor networks. His recent work has focused on the creation of aquatic robotic networks for environmental applications. Sukhatme has served as PI on numerous NSF, DARPA and NASA grants. He is a Co-PI on the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), an NSF Science and Technology Center. He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of AAAI, ACM and a receipient of the NSF CAREER award and the Okawa foundation research award. Sukhatme is one of the founders of the Robotics: Science and Systems conference. He is program co-chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Autonomous Robots.
2007-08 Faculty Fellows
Richard Cote: Biomedical Nanoscience
Cote is a Professor of Pathology and Urology. His M.D. is from the University of Chicago. He joined USC over a decade ago, coming from Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center. Cote is director of the KSOM Laboratory of Immuno- and Molecular Pathology. He is also co-chair of the Provost’s Research Initiative on Biomedical Nanoscience. His research focuses on the detection of cancers and the cellular and molecular markers of tumor progression.
Hossein Jadvar: Translational Imaging
Jadvar holds a joint appointment as an associate professor in Radiology, where he is the Director of Research, and in Biomedical Engineering. He has been a member of the USC Faculty since 1999. He received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Michigan, and his M.D. from the University of Chicago. His research addresses a wide array of topics in the use of imaging tools in the identification of diseases and the deployment of medical technologies.
Peter Mancall: External Funding for the Humanities
Mancall is Professor of History. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and taught at the University of Kansas for 12 years prior to coming to USC in 2001. Mancall is the director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. The EMSI brings together over 40 faculty from across the humanities at the College and arts schools to advance research on the early modern era.
Maja Mataric': Science and Technology Applications for Special-Needs Populations
Professor of Computer Science, Matariċ is also the Associate Dean of Research for the Viterbi School of Engineering. Her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence is from MIT; she has been on the USC Faculty since 1997. She is the founding director of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, and researches the use of assistive interactive robotics. In addition, Matariċ serves as president of the 2006-07 Academic Senate.
Carol Prescott: Genetics and Social/Behavioral Sciences Research
Prescott is Professor of Psychology. She obtained her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Virginia, and was on the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University before she joined USC in 2005. Her research addresses genetic influences on psychiatric disorders, and she has convened university-wide workshops on alcohol-related behavioral research.
Rand Wilcox: Interdisciplinary Statistics
Wilcox is Professor of Psychology. His Ph.D. in psychology is from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has been a member of the USC faculty for over 25 years. Wilcox’s research addresses the use of statistical applications to the social and behavioral sciences.
Wilcox is the coordinator of the USC Interdisciplinary Statistics Group. For more information on the ISG: Learn More
Faculty Fellowship: Application Form and Guidelines
The application deadline for 2008-09 Faculty Fellowships has closed; applications were due January 7, 2008.
Application forms are available in
Acrobat (.pdf) or
Word (.doc)
Last updated: Thursday, August 21, 2008, 3:56pm PDT
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