Meet the New Faculty

This fall, Lafayette welcomes seven new professors, bringing the College’s total to 215 full-time, tenure-track faculty members.

Over the past several years, the College has been working toward increasing the size of the permanent faculty by 20 percent and decreasing the student-to-faculty ratio from 11:1 to 10:1, one of the initiatives in its strategic plan.

Two of this year’s incoming professors represent new positions. So far, Lafayette has allocated or hired 18 new faculty positions and has commitments for three more, bringing the total to 21. The strategic plan calls for 35 new faculty positions. The College has also hired the first professors specifically assigned to the interdisciplinary programs in environmental studies and Africana studies.

Christopher Anderson

Christopher Anderson joins the faculty as an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. He comes to Lafayette from The College of New Jersey, where he helped develop the bioengineering program; taught courses in medical imaging, bioengineering fundamentals, and drug delivery; and mentored senior design projects. He also served as head of product development at Targeson, Inc., a start-up company where he led the development of novel contrast agents for use in the diagnosis and therapy of cardiovascular disease and tumor growth. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia, where his research focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of blood vessel growth.

Rachel Brummel

Rachel Brummel is an assistant professor of environmental studies and the first professor hired into Lafayette’s new interdisciplinary program. Her research program focuses on environmental policy and governance, including examining how institutions respond to complex environmental problems. She earned her Ph.D. in conservation biology from the University of Minnesota, where she also taught courses in environmental policy and conservation biology. Brummel received a UM doctoral dissertation fellowship for her work on collaborative governance and wildland fire planning in the U.S. and New South Wales, Australia, as well as a Fulbright Scholarship supporting her research in Australia. She also collaborated on interdisciplinary National Science Foundation-funded research through UM’s Department of Forest Resources focusing on how social networks affect dairy farmers’ decisions concerning sustainable production and land-use systems.

Michael Butler

Michael Butler, assistant professor of biology, comes to Lafayette from Arizona State University, where he recently completed his Ph.D. in biology. At ASU, he developed and taught a graduate student seminar on tools and strategies to promote effective scientific instruction at the faculty level. He served as director of ASU’s Graduate Partners in Science Education program, which provides Phoenix-area school children with graduate student science mentors. For his dissertation, Butler studied how developmental immune history affects adult immune function in mallard ducks. His research on animal behavior has been featured in Science News, Science NOW, Discover Magazine, and the BBC.

Julia Nicodemus

Julia Nicodemus joined the faculty in January as an assistant professor of engineering studies. She earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and master’s degrees in science technology & environmental policy and mechanical engineering from University of Minnesota, as well as a master’s in middle childhood math education from Brooklyn College. Her research program focuses on developing methods of chemical storage of solar energy. She is working on a “two-step solar thermochemical cycle” for fuel production, which has the potential to produce renewable fuels with minimal greenhouse gas emissions.  The major benefit of chemical storage is that it allows transient solar energy to be stored indefinitely. While at University of Minnesota, she received two doctoral fellowships as well as a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation supporting her work on solar energy. She has published her research in peer-reviewed journals and presented at national conferences.

Daniel Quirós

Daniel Quirós is assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures, specializing in Spanish. His research and teaching interests include Central American literature, Latin American crime fiction and cinema, and conquest and Colonial studies. A native English and Spanish speaker, Quiros received his Ph.D. in Latin American literature from the University of California, San Diego. He has published two works of fiction, the novel Verano Rojo-Red Summer (2010) and a short story collection A Los Cuatro Vientos-To The Four Winds (2009). In 2010, Verano Rojo won the National Award Aquileo J Echeverria, the highest award for literature in Costa Rica.

Clara Valdano-López

Clara Valdano-López is also an assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures, specializing in Spanish. She completed her Ph.D. in Spanish American literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She has been a Spanish instructor for the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, and has taught a variety of courses in Spanish language and literature. Her primary area of research is Colonial Spanish American literatures and cultures. Her approach is interdisciplinary, grounded in visual studies, cultural geography, and gender studies. Valdano-López has received numerous grants supporting her research and has published in scholarly journals and presented at national and international conferences.

Neha Vora

Neha Vora joins the faculty as an assistant professor of anthropology and sociology. Previously, she was an assistant professor of anthropology and women’s and gender studies at Texas A&M University, where she taught courses in gender and anthropology, women in the Middle East, South Asian diasporas, feminist theory, and migration and globalization. Her research focuses on forms of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion within the contemporary Gulf Arab States, which is the topic of her book, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora, forthcoming from Duke University Press. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine.

Wendy Wilson-Fall

Wendy Wilson-Fall is an associate professor and chair of Africana studies and the first professor hired into Lafayette’s interdisciplinary program. She comes to Lafayette from Kent State University, where she served as an associate professor and chair of Pan African Studies. Prior to KSU, she was director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, from 1999-2004. Wilson-Fall’s research interests include pastoralism in Africa, African Diaspora communities in North America, and slavery and unfree systems of labor in Africa. In addition to numerous published articles and book chapters, she has written a manuscript, “Dignity in Memory: the Performance of Difference,” under revision for an academic press. Wilson-Fall received her Ph.D. in social anthropology and African Studies from Howard University.