The following are among the new faculty members at Washington University. Others will be introduced periodically.
Minjung Kyung, PhD, joins the Department of Mathematics and the Center for Applied Statistics, both in Arts & Sciences, as assistant professor. Kyung’s research interests include Bayesian statistics, spatial statistics, nonparametric regression and nonparametric Bayesian statistics. She earned a doctorate from North Carolina State University in 2006 with a dissertation titled Generalized Conditionally Autoregressive Models. Most recently, Kyung was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Florida.
Yuko Miki, PhD, joins the Department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. She earned a doctorate from New York University in May 2010. Her area of specialization is the history of the African diaspora and Latin America. Her dissertation is titled Insurgent Geographies: Black, Indians, and the Colonization of Nineteenth-Century Brazil. She has presented her work at numerous conferences, including “Just Like Our Workers’: Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Resurgence of Indigenous Labor in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil” at the American Historical Association annual meeting in January 2010. She has received a number of awards, including the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University.
Sowande’ Mustakeem, PhD, joins the Department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. She earned a doctorate from Michigan State University in 2008. Most recently, she has held an appointment as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in WUSTL’s history department and as a visiting lecturer in its African and African-American Studies program. Her research interests include the middle passage, gender and slavery in the Americas, and Diaspora/black Atlantic studies, history of medicine, and violence studies. She has received numerous awards and honors and has recently published an article on diet, disease and mortality aboard 18th-century slave ships in the Journal of African American History.
Alvaro Pelayo, PhD, joins the Department of Mathematics in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. Pelayo earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 2007. He spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow before being appointed the Charles B. Morrey Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Pelayo has received many awards and prizes, including the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society’s annual prize to a young mathematician. His research areas are dynamical systems and symplectic geometry and geometric aspects of partial differential equations, with a particular emphasis in the semiclassical analysis and symplectic geometry of completely integrable systems.