The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.
Gauri Bhat, Ph.D., joins the Olin Business School as assistant professor of accounting. Bhat has taught at York University and the University of Toronto, where she did her graduate work. She has worked in the corporate sector at KPMG and Citibank and holds the following professional designations: CFA Charterholder; Chartered Accountant, India, and Cost and Works Accountant, India. Bhat will be teaching managerial accounting while pursuing research in the areas of banking, financial reporting, disclosure and corporate governance.
Ross C. Brownson, Ph.D., joins the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and the School of Medicine as professor. His research interests are in chronic disease epidemiology, evidence-based public health, the promotion of physical activity, tobacco-use prevention and the evaluation of community-level interventions. A member of the Faculty Advisory Council of WUSTL’s Institute for Public Health, Brownson co-directs the Prevention Research Center — jointly led by WUSTL and Saint Louis University — that develops innovative approaches to chronic disease prevention. Before joining WUSTL, Brownson served as a professor at the Saint Louis University School of Public Health. He earned a bachelor’s degree in cellular biology and chemistry at the University of Montana and a doctorate in environmental health and epidemiology at Colorado State University.
Francesc Ferrer, Ph.D., joins the Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned a doctorate from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in 2001 and has been a Marie Curie Fellow (2001-03) and Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow (2003-04) at the University of Oxford. Most recently, he held a postdoctoral position at Case Western Reserve University (2005-08). Ferrer’s interests focus at the interface of astroparticle physics and theoretical cosmology, studying the composition and evolution of the universe and the implications of cosmological findings on models of particle physics. Ferrer is a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory, where he is working on the mystery of the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays.
Joseph K. Goodman, Ph.D., joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of marketing. Goodman is a graduate of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He received an award for teaching excellence at the University of Texas before accepting an assistant professorship at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. Goodman’s primary research interests include consumer behavior as it relates to decision-making and happiness, product assortment and variety, consumer superstitions and illusions of control.
Joseph Jez, Ph.D., joins the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor, with a shared appointment at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Jez earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State University and a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed postdoctoral training at the Structural Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. His research employs a combination of X-ray crystallography, enzymology, molecular biology, proteomics and cell biology to understand the molecular foundations of heavy metal detoxification in plants and to explore new metabolic pathways in nematodes that are of possible pharmaceutical interest.
Korina M. Jocson, Ph.D., joins the Department of Education in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. Her research and teaching interests include literacy, youth development, ethnic studies and cultural studies in education. In particular, she examines the changing nature of literacies and new media technologies in relation to learning, teaching and communication across contexts. Jocson has collaborated with university programs, schools and community-based organizations to promote literacy development among youth from diverse backgrounds. She is the author of a forthcoming book entitled “Youth Poets: Empowering Literacies In and Out of Schools.” Jocson earned a doctorate in education in the area of language, literacy and culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University.
William Ray True, Ph.D., joins the George Warren Brown School of Social Work as a research professor. He is the director of the Health Services Research and Development Group at the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Medical Center. True’s research focuses on the psychiatric genetics of mental-health issues. His group uses administrative and clinical databases for constructing research designs for evaluating health outcomes. Before coming to WUSTL, he was a professor at the Saint Louis University School of Public Health. True earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree in anthropology at Indiana University, a master’s degree in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Florida.
Danko Turcic, Ph.D., joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of operations manufacturing management. Turcic, a native of the Czech Republic, has pursued studies from Prague to Cleveland. He earned a doctorate from Case Western Reserve University. Before completing a degree at Case Western, Turcic was vice president at the Treasury Department of U.S. Bancorp, where he worked on modeling financial and operational risk. His areas of research involve the interface of operations and finance, supply-chain contracting, game theory and operational risk.