Claremont McKenna College

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WELCOMING OUR NEWEST TEACHER-SCHOLARS

From its beginning, Claremont McKenna College's faculty has espoused the highest standards of the teacher-scholar ideal. Consistent with the goals articulated in the Strategic Plan, the College undertook 13 faculty searches to replace retiring faculty, begin converting visiting faculty to tenure-track appointments, and achieve modest faculty growth. These new members of the faculty are accomplished and distinguished individuals in the areas of economics, government, history, psychology, modern languages, and the sciences:

• Jay Conger, a renowned expert on leadership and organizational behavior, will hold the inaugural Kravis Research Chair in Leadership Studies. Joining CMC from the London Business School, where he was a professor of organizational behavior, Conger is a senior research scientist at USC's Center for Effective Organization. He is past chairman and executive director of the Leadership Institute at USC's Marshall School of Business, and earned a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Harvard University. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 scholarly articles and ten books, including Shared Leadership; Reframing the How's and Why's of Leading Others; and the Leader's Change Handbook.



• Brock Blomberg, associate professor of economics, will lead the economics curriculum of the Politics, Philosophy and Economics program. He was a senior economist on The Council of Economic Advisers and joins CMC from Wellesley College, where he taught macroeconomic theory, advanced econometrics, and economics and politics. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and has served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Tufts University, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Blomberg has published extensively and is currently researching the economic model of global terrorism, and the relationship between political variables and exchange rate movement.



• Lisa Meulbroek, the Fritz B. Burns Chair in Financial Economics, received a Ph.D. in applied economics, with concentrations in finance and industrial organization, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, she was a member of the Harvard Business School faculty for 11 years, with concentration in advanced corporate finance. She has published and presented extensively, and was a senior research scholar at the Securities and Exchange Commission and an associate at Goldman Sachs, as well as The Boston Consulting Group.



• Joshua Rosett, an associate professor of economics and who will teach in our accounting program, has been on the faculty of Tulane University since 1998 and also taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the U.S. Business School in Prague, and Southern Methodist University. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University, with expertise in the areas of financial reporting, measurement of intangible assets, and corporate governance and control. He has published extensively and is currently researching advertising, market share and investment for Internet firms. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.



• Kenneth Miller, a 1985 cum laude graduate of Pomona College, returns to Claremont as assistant professor of government. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. He joins CMC from the University of San Francisco, where he taught public policy. As a lawyer, he is co-founder of the Sacramento office of Morrison & Foerster, LLP. Dr. Miller served two years as administrator of the John Gardner Public Service Fellowship Program jointly operated by Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also moot court and judicial council advisor, and was an intern in the office of Congressman David Dreier '75, Trustee.



• Arash Khazeni, assistant professor of history, is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, with his dissertation on the economy of oil in southwestern Iran. Prior to joining the CMC faculty, he was a teaching fellow at Yale in the modern Middle East and Central Asia, the anthropology of Iran, and modern South Asia. He has served as a translator at Yale and for the Refugee Ministry of New Haven, and he speaks five languages, including Arabic, Persian, and Spanish. He has presented papers at the Middle East Studies Association and was awarded a research grant from the Council on Middle East Studies.



• Kristina Sessa, assistant professor of history, received her Ph.D. in ancient and medieval history from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was an instructor in the department of history. A magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University, her focus of study includes Roman and Medieval history, and her dissertation examines Anecdote and Authority: Roman Episcopal Biography in its Late Antique Context. She also taught the history of Western philosophy at San Quentin State Penitentiary. She speaks six languages, and served as editor of Critical Sense: A Journal of Critical and Political Theory, University of California, Berkeley.



• Alison Paris, assistant professor of psychology, is a graduate of Dartmouth College and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan with dissertation research on the benefit of early intervention in children's reading and comprehension skills. Her interests include cognitive development, learning and motivation, developmental psychology, child development, and educational psychology.



• Tobias Gregory, assistant professor of literature, is an expert in 16th and 17th century literature and the history of English literature. He was on the faculty of California State University, Northridge, for four years, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Dr. Gregory has presented papers and lectures at the University of Texas, the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival, and the Renaissance Conference of Southern California, of which he is president. Additionally, he has received numerous awards, including a Mellon/ACLS Junior Faculty Fellowship, Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, and the Isabel MacCaffrey Prize awarded by the Spenser Society.



• Delia Greth, assistant professor of Spanish, earned her Ph.D. in second language acquisition and teaching from the University of Arizona, where she also earned bachelors and masters degrees in psychology and Hispanic linguistics. While in Arizona, she coordinated the Heritage Speaker Program and received numerous awards, including the Alma de la Gente academic scholarship for Mexican-American women.



• Minju Kim, assistant professor of Korean, received a Ph.D. in Korean linguistics and East Asian languages and cultures at UCLA, with her dissertation on the Grammaticalization of the Korean Existential Verb Issta. She is also a graduate of Yonsei University, Seoul, where she earned a bachelor's degree in German language and literature, and a master's degree in Korean studies.

Science and technology have proven essential disciplines in economic progress, as well as advancements in many areas, such as healthcare, environmental management, and national security. To support these increasingly vital and vigorous fields of study, we have added two new faculty members in the Joint Science department:

• Jennifer Armstrong, assistant professor of biology, earned a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, San Diego, and is a graduate of New Mexico State University. She joins us from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught for the past four years. A molecular cell biologist, she is conducting fruit fly research on cell differentiation, described by Professor David Sadava as the "frontier of modern biology." Her publications include Molecular Cell, Current Opinion in Genetics and Development, Journal of Experimental Botany, and Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology.



• Scott Williams, a 1995 Harvey Mudd alumnus, returns to Claremont as assistant professor of chemistry. He earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Washington, and is completing his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, researching the thermodynamics and mechanisms of polar substituted alkenes. He has published in numerous journals, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and has presented papers in China, The Netherlands, and at three annual meetings of the American Chemical Society.

We are also involved in the five-college search to fill a new shared chair, the William R. Kenan Chair in Computational Neuroscience. This intensely interdisciplinary field examines the relationship between the activity of individual neurons and the brain itself, with implications in departments such as psychology, philosophy, and biology. Studies encompass brain trauma recovery, learning and memory, manic depression, and Alzheimer's.

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