Introducing new faculty members

The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.

Haluk Ergin, Ph.D., joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as associate professor. Ergin earned a doctorate at Prin-ceton University in 2003 and afterward joined Massachu-setts Institute of Technolo-gy’s faculty as assistant professor. Ergin’s research is on decision theory and matching theory. In his work on decision theory, he focuses on models in which economic agents’ choices do not obey the standard rationality principles. In his work on matching, he has worked on mechanism design issues in school choice models.

Young-Shin Jun, Ph.D., will join the School of Engineering in January 2008 as assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering. She comes from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is completing her work as a postdoctoral fellow. She brings expertise in molecular scale experimentation of environmental systems to the Aquatic Processes Cluster. Before going to Berkeley, she earned a doctorate in environmental sciences and engineering from Harvard University.

Ian MacMullen, Ph.D., joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned a doctorate in political science from Harvard University in 2004 and then served for three years as assistant dean in WUSTL’s College of Arts & Sciences. A political theorist whose primary research and teaching interests lie in the politics of education and of religious and cultural pluralism, MacMullen’s first book, “Faith in Schools? Autonomy, Citizenship, and Religious Education in the Liberal State” (Princeton University Press, 2007), articulates a vision of liberal government in a pluralist society through a consideration of the fundamental principles of public education policy.

Jamie Newhard, Ph.D., joins the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor of Japanese. She previously was an assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Arizona State University. She earned a master’s degree and doctorate in Japanese literature from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts degree in comparative literature from Brown University. Her research interests include the history of literary scholarship, medieval and early modern reception of classical literature, history of reading, book and publishing history, gender issues in premodern Japanese literature and classical Japanese language.