John Alongi - Mathematics

Professor Alongi studies dynamical systems from a topological perspective with attention to recurrent orbits for flows and the structure of hyperbolic sets for diffeomorphisms.  He is the Director of Mathematical Experience for Northwestern Undergraduates (MENU) and School of Continuing Studies (SCS) Liaison.

Geraldo Cadava - History

A native of Tucson, Arizona, Professor Cadava specializes in histories of the U.S.-Mexico border region and Latina and Latino populations in the United States. His current project, called "Corridor of Exchange: Culture and Ethnicity in Tucson's Modern Borderlands", is about the history of the Arizona-Sonora border region since World War II. It focuses on the cultural events, institutions, and phenomena--such as a rodeo, department store, university, and public art controversy--that have shaped the area's transborder interactions and rise as a focus of national immigration debate. He teaches courses on Mexican-American History, Latino Studies, the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and Race and Ethnicity in the United States.

Francisco Castelan - Academic Advising

Francisco is a University Academic Adviser. He specializes in health professions advising, so any pre-med students can get help from Francisco! He loves biking in Chicago.

Greg Cera - Academic Advising

Currently, fellow Greg Cera is a student advisor at NU's Academic Advising Center. In his days as an undergraduate at NU (History and Political Science major in 1996, although he started out as an environmental science major), Greg Cera worked at the White Hen on Emerson and as a bartender and waiter at Yesterdays. He earned his Masters degree in Science and Education in 1999, specializing in university administration. In his free time, Greg enjoys traveling. He recommends reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac; his favorite food is cheeseburger; and he's a very good billiard player!

Jaime Dominguez - Political Science

Jaime is a College Adviser and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science. He is one of the principal architect’s of the Chicago Democracy Project (CDP), a thirty-year online political database that provides citizens, community groups, and religious organizations with information on campaign finance, electoral outcomes, government contracts, minority appointments, and levels of public employment for the City of Chicago. He is currently working on a second grant to expand the CDP to twenty-five major cities as well as a pilot project that examines the state of Latino politics in Chicago. Jaime is particularly interested i how Latino heterogeneity and population growth is redefining traditional political and race relations between blacks and whites.

James Farr - Political Science

James Farr teaches political theory and the history of political thought with special emphasis on early modern and American political thought, democratic theory and citizen education, and the history and philosophy of social science. He conducts research in these areas and has published around sixty articles on Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Marx, Lieber, Dewey, Lasswell and Popper. He has also done research on conceptual change, situational analysis, hermeneutics, and social capital. He is currently completing a series of essays on John Locke and the new world, with emphasis on slavery and ethnography. He is also completing a series of essays on the history of American political science, understood as both a discipline and a discourse, in which he emphasizes the centrality of debates over method, civic education, and the state. 

Susan Fox - Academic Advising

Susan Fox is the primary contact for the Master of Engineering Management Program. Her responsibilities include admission, recruiting, advising, scheduling, marketing, MEM payroll, MEM adjunct faculty, graduation events, MEM Alumni Newsletter, Directory, and the development of corporate contacts.

Paul Friesema - Political Science

Professor Friesema's interests include natural resources and environmental policy as well as urban politics. Much of his work focuses on the politics and policy issues arising from the environmental assessment process, including examining how the assessment process can be incorporated into land use planning. He has also been conducting a long-term study of the political empowerment of native peoples on issues concerning natural resources. Friesema also serves on a study team that is examining the possible outlines of a series of national parks in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Jessica Greenberg - Communication Studies

Fellow Jessica Greenberg is a professor in Communication Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and has been at Northwestern for 2 years. Her current research interests pertain to democracy, youth activism, and citizenship in Serbia. 

Michael Kramer - History

 Michael J. Kramer is a lecturer in History and American Studies and an Undergraduate Academic Adviser in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He specializes in twentieth-century United States cultural and intellectual history with a focus on popular culture, the arts, civil society and citizenship, and transnational history. Professor Kramer received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 2006 and his B.A. from Columbia University in 1995. He has taught at Loyola University, Lake Forest College, and at George Mason University.

In addition to academic advising and teaching, he is currently preparing a book manuscript, "Let's Get Together: Rock Music and the Making of the Sixties Counterculture." Future research projects include a biography of the public intellectual Paul Goodman, a history of the 1976 United States bicentennial celebration, a reexamination of the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University, a history of the concept of vernacular culture, and a study of the development of arts criticism in the United States since the late nineteenth century.

Daniel Molden - Psychology

One of Dan Molden’s main interests is the ways in which people’s motivations can influence their basic cognitive process and the implications this has for judgment and behavior. Thus far, he has pursued this interest in several different ways. The first involves examining how people’s preferences for using certain types of judgment strategies that “feel right” to them can affect the impressions they form of themselves and others. The second involves examining how these preferences affect the coping strategies people use after they experience some kind of threat to the self.

Maria Reyes Morgan Fuertes - Spanish

Reyes Morán Fuertes is a Lecturer in Northwestern’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Outside the classroom, Reyes plans to pursue research in the area of Spanish language and grammar. Her goal is to research complex linguistic and grammatical phenomenon, and distill them into simpler forms which can be easily taught to non-native students of Spanish.

Dan Lewis - Education & Social Policy

Dan A. Lewis’ research agenda provides an approach to studying social policy that meets the challenge of a profound transformation in social policy over the last 40 years. Gone are the days of new federal programs to solve national problems. The New Deal and the Great Society are seen by many as the source of our problems rather than solutions. Lewis’ work responds to these changes in the political climate.

In addition to numerous articles, Lewis has written or edited six books in these areas, including The State Mental Patient and Urban Life (1994), and Race and Educational Reform in the American Metropolis (1995). At the Institute for Policy Research he has directed major program projects on community reactions to crime, deinstitutionalization of state mental health patients and Chicago school decentralization. More recently, he conducted evaluations of the homelessness problem in the Chicago suburbs. Lewis also recently headed a large-scale university consortium that studied welfare reform efforts in Illinois for the state legislature and interested citizens.

Lewis serves on many nonprofit boards and civic committees. At Northwestern, he served as director of undergraduate education at the School of Education and Social Policy. Currently, Lewis directs the Center for Civic Engagement and the San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Field Study Programs.

Sonbinh Nguyen - Chemistry

SonBinh’s research encompasses three divisions in chemical science: inorganic/organometallic chemistry, organic synthesis, and polymer science. He is also interested in environmental friendly catalysis and biomaterials.

Andy Rivers - Physics & Astronomy

Andrew Rivers is a Weinberg College Adviser and a Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy. Andrew's Ph.D. research included a large scale radio astronomy survey of the so-called "Zone of Avoidance": a large region of the sky containing few visible external galaxies due to obscuration by dust near the disk of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Looking for hidden galaxies using long wavelength radio waves, which pass through the dust unobscured, Andrew discovered approximately 20 previously unknown nearby galaxies. In his free time, Andrew enjoys spending time with his wife Carolyn, his daughter Cassie, and his Pekinese puppy "Boo". Leisure activities include tinkering with Linux, attending obscure art films and reading nonfiction from diverse fields.

Fay Rosner - French

Fay Rosner currently teaches intermediate French courses, as well as the French Writing Workshop.  She earned her Ph.D. in French at the University of Chicago, where she was awarded a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship.  While at the U. of C. she taught introductory and intermediate French, as well as a course on Proust and a survey course on world literature.  She is currently working on a paper to be presented at an international Proust conference to be hosted by The University of Illinois at Urbana.  In Winter 2010, she will be teaching a Freshman Seminar on the representation of music, painting and theater in In Search of Lost Time. Her professional interests include integrating the arts and literature into language instruction, strategies to improve writing, and the relationship between philosophy and literature. 

Joseph Schofer - Civil Engineering

Professor Schofer's research interests focus on planning and management of transportation systems, particularly the provision and use of data and information for effective decision-making and evaluation of systems, plans and projects. He works on mobility and safety of people and sustainability of transportation systems from the perspectives of policy, planning, design and operations. Recently he has explored variable speed limit systems, factors affecting pedestrian crashes, transportation contributions to sustainable community development, and use of data and forecasts by transportation decision makers.

Paul Specht - Design Engineering

Paul Specht is a professor in the McCormick School of Engineering. He is an esteemed faculty member associated with the Segal Design Institute, and he enjoys teaching Engineering & Design Concepts, a class for freshmen engineers. 

Kathleen Stair - Material Science & Engineering

Fellow Kathleen Stair is a Senior Lecturer in Materials Science and Engineering. Both of her degrees, B.S. in Engineering and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering, are from Northwestern. After completing her Ph.D., she worked at the Amoco (now BP) Research Center in Naperville, Illinois, "growing" semiconductor materials for use as optical waveguides and laser diodes. She has been a senior lecturer in MSE since 1996, and her duties include managing the metallography facility and teaching many of the undergraduate materials laboratories. She enjoys the opportunities this gives her to interact with many of the undergraduate and graduate students in the department.

Jeffrey Thomas - Civil Engineering

Jeff Thomas’ general area of research is the materials science of cement, that is, studying relationships between processing, microstructure, and engineering properties. Another aspect of his research is the application of scattering techniques such as small-angle neutron and x-ray scattering (SANS and SAXS) and quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS) to the study of cement-based materials.

Greg Ward - Linguistics

Greg Ward's primary research area is discourse/pragmatics, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, intonational meaning, and reference/anaphora. He has published over 70 papers and given over 135 talks and presentations.