Meet the New Faculty

Gallemore brings a different dimension to international affairs. Most recently, at Northeastern Illinois University, he was a member of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. Gallemore has taught subjects as varied as Geographic Information Systems, Human Dimensions of Global Change, and Southeast Asian geography. His research has been featured in journals including Ecological Economics, Millennium, World Development, and Global Environmental Change. He has a B.A. in international studies from Missouri Southern State University and an M.A. in political science and a Ph.D. in geography from Ohio State University.

Gordon amassed an impressive career in chemical engineering at Lafayette – and now she’s back. As a 2011 Summa cum Laude graduate, Gordon was a recipient of the Charles Duncan Fraser Prize, given to the chemical engineering student who is “best qualified for advanced work in materials science and engineering.” Gordon continued her work at University of Delaware, where she was a Women in Engineering representative and obtained an NSF Graduate Fellowship and a NASA Space Grant Fellowship to develop novel materials for testing on the International Space Station. Gordon is obtaining her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from University of Delaware.

Griffith brings a wealth of experience and a penchant for mentoring to Lafayette. Among the students he worked with at Davidson College, Hamilton College and Columbia University, two are Ph.D. candidates in chemistry and materials science and engineering. A former Fulbright Fellow, Griffith worked in organic chemistry research at the Technische Univeritat Braunschweig in Braunschweig, German. He received the Pegram Award from Columbia University, an honor given for “meritorious achievements by a chemistry graduate student in progress toward the Ph.D.” He obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia in 2013.

Groo comes to Lafayette from Scotland, where she served as program director of Film and Visual Culture at University of Aberdeen — a position she held after receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2009. Among her cinematic specialties are early and silent-era cinemas; new media and digital culture; and visual ethnography. Groo’s writing has appeared in various journals, books, and encyclopedias, and she has presented her work at numerous conferences. She is the co-editor of New Silent Cinema and the author of Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Guisinger’s experience has taken her from research at private-sector financial institutions to teaching Master’s level courses in economic policy. She has worked as a visiting scholar in the research division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and a research officer at the International Monetary Fund. Her writing has appeared in the International Journal of Forecasting. Guisinger’s research fields include macroeconomics, time series econometrics, labor economics and international finance. She obtained a Ph.D. from George Washington University in 2016.

Having recently arrived from South Africa, Lee has held academic positions at Harvard University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Since 2013, he has taught at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has published several books, including Making a World after Empire (2010), Unreasonable Histories (2014), and Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015). Lee is an editorial board member at Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies and for the book series “Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century” at Peter Lang Publishers. He obtained a Ph.D. in African history from Stanford University in 2003.

Salas Landa received her M.A. in museum studies from New York University in 2008 and her Ph.D. in anthropology from Cornell University in 2015. Prior to coming to Lafayette, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. Currently, she is revising the manuscript for her book, “Violent Remains: Life among Mexico’s Revolutionary Ruins.” In 2007, she published Tierra, Agua y Poder [Land, Water, and Power]. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell’s Latin American Studies Program, as well as Mexico’s Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT). She is the 2015 recipient of the Roseberry-Nash Prize from the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. She was also awarded an honorable mention prize by the Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section, for her most recent article.

SoRelle earned her Ph.D. in American politics at Cornell University. Her dissertation, “Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Credit,” examines how the development of consumer credit policy in the U.S. has diminished political engagement among borrowers and presented challenges for public interest advocacy on the issue. She is a graduate of Smith College and holds a Master of Public Policy from Harvard. Prior to joining the faculty at Lafayette, SoRelle worked in both legal advocacy and electoral politics.

Thomas is a theoretical particle physicist whose research focuses on understanding the mysterious “dark matter” that makes up more than a quarter of the observable universe.  He earned his Ph.D. from of University of Michigan, has held research appointments at University of Arizona, University of Hawaii, and Carleton University, and has taught courses across the physics curriculum at Reed College and at Colorado College. He served as a co-organizer of a workshop on non-traditional dark-matter scenarios at University of Pittsburgh and has also been involved in numerous outreach activities and public presentations on particle physics.

Wadiak comes to Lafayette from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he taught medieval and early-modern literature, with a focus on Middle English. He is interested in late chivalric culture, the tradition of romance across time, and the medieval understanding of lovesickness as a literal disease, among other topics. His first book, Savage Economy, explores violence and community formation in late-medieval romance; it comes out from Notre Dame in December. His most recent project involves Chaucer’s use of the word “sweetness” to describe suspect forms of pleasure, typically those enjoyed by other people.

Specializing in subjects such as atmospheric chemistry and sustainable energy systems, Woo has taught and completed research at both Lafayette and Columbia University. As a visiting professor at Lafayette in 2015, Woo studied the physical effects of the characterization of aqueous aerosol surface-active organics. He performed similar studies of aerosols at Columbia, though he has also performed work with blood-plasma separation modules. Woo’s work has been published in a number of journals, including Environmental Science Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia.

Zhou comes to Lafayette from the Mathematical Biosciences Institute of Ohio State University, where she worked as a postdoctoral fellow. She obtained her Ph.D. in applied mathematics from University of Washington in 2013. Zhou’s areas of interest include applied mathematics, mathematical biology, dynamical systems, and stochastic processes. She has given presentations on various topics around the world, and volunteered at outreach events at elementary schools.