{"id":74836,"date":"2019-09-18T09:11:59","date_gmt":"2019-09-18T13:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/busm\/?p=74836"},"modified":"2019-09-18T09:12:35","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T13:12:35","slug":"junior-faculty-recognized-with-career-development-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/2019\/09\/18\/junior-faculty-recognized-with-career-development-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"Junior Faculty Recognized with Career Development Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s eight winners span a range of disciplines<\/h3>\n
\"\"
This year\u2019s Career Development Professors: Robert Metcalfe (clockwise, from top left), Heba Gowayed, Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Anne Feng, Dennis Jones, Derry Wijaya, Florian Douam, and Sanaz Mobasseri. Photos by Cydney Scott and Jackie Ricciardi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Studying refugees in the Trump era\u2019s political climate is, as Heba Gowayed <\/strong>diplomatically puts it, \u201csuboptimal.\u201d So the first-ever longitudinal survey she plans to do, which would take years in the best of times\u2014measuring how easily refugees master English, find a decent job, and gain a fundamental sense of security and belonging\u2014remains an aspiration for now.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of sociology has conducted plenty of other research that has won her one of this year\u2019s eight Career Development Professorships<\/a>, awarded to promising junior faculty.<\/p>\n

Gowayed<\/a> has a contract for a book that will take an up-close look at Syrian refugees resettled or granted asylum in the United States, Canada, and Germany, comparing their access to resources under these different systems. \u201cI argue that human capital can be created, transformed, or destroyed by national incorporation policies,\u201d Gowayed says. \u201cMy overarching goal as a researcher is to document the lives of people whose experiences are underrepresented in academic work, [using] a method by which the researcher immerses herself in others\u2019 social worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Career Professorships, variously named for the donors and alumni who fund them, are awarded annually from among those nominated by their deans and colleagues as promising scholars in their fields. <\/strong>Most of the professorships are tied to specific BU schools; all are for three years and provide stipends for the recipients\u2019 salaries and scholarship.<\/p>\n

Gowayed has been named a Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Professor<\/strong>, \u201ca tremendous opportunity that I am truly grateful for,\u201d she says. \u201cIt provides me with the resources and encouragement to begin work on my next project. The funds offered\u2026enable a multinational project and will enable me to involve students at Boston University to support me in what will be an important learning experience for us all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sanaz Mobasseri<\/a>,<\/strong> a Questrom School of Business assistant professor of management and organizations, was named an Isabel Anderson Career Development Professor <\/strong>for her scholarship in discrimination against black job applicants. Inspired by others\u2019 research showing the difficulty applicants with criminal records securing work, Mobasseri recently studied almost 400 applications submitted to 184 employers in Oakland, Calif.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI was expecting to find that employers varied in how negatively they interpreted a job applicant\u2019s criminal record, and that this variation was related to their neighborhood crime level,\u201d she says. To her surprise, she discovered that while working near recent violent crime cut the likelihood of blacks getting a callback, that happened regardless <\/em>of whether they had a criminal record or not. She didn\u2019t find the same bias in white and Hispanic callback rates.<\/p>\n

Addressing that bias, she says, \u201cis a difficult problem to solve, and it remains an open question for researchers\u201d who are looking at such things as hirers being open to their bias, and intentionally blinding themselves to race on applications. Whatever the answer, her new professorship will help her with workplace-interactions data she\u2019s been collecting, ensuring \u201cmuch faster progress on building and analyzing these new data sets because I\u2019ll be able to hire a few team members.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the natural sciences front, Florian Douam<\/a><\/strong>, a School of Medicine assistant professor of microbiology, will use his Peter Paul Career Development Professorship <\/strong>to advance an innovation that will strike nonexpert ears as science fiction: humanized mice.<\/p>\n

Those are mice \u201cengrafted with human tissues,\u201d enabling research into human diseases that would normally be hard-pressed for subjects, says Douam, an <\/strong>investigator at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories<\/a> (NEIDL) studying virus threats such as yellow fever, Zika, and dengue. Using these mice, his lab will \u201cexplore at an unprecedented resolution, over time and in multiple tissues, how the human immune system mobilizes during an infection,\u201d he says. (He made major progress on yellow fever research as a postdoc at Princeton using this tool.)<\/p>\n

The Peter Paul Professorship, Douam says, \u201cis going to provide me with instrumental resources that will allow me to move my research program forward better and faster.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are the other Career Development appointees:<\/p>\n

Chandramouli Chandrasekaran<\/a><\/strong>, a MED assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology and a CAS assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, is now a Moorman-Simon\u00a0 Interdisciplinary Career Development Professor<\/strong>. <\/strong>Chandrasekaran studies monkeys to find the neural basis of decision-making and cognition, a complement to others\u2019 research into human cognition. His work combines diverse tools, from electrodes and imaging to statistical techniques.<\/p>\n

Anne Feng<\/a><\/strong>, <\/strong>a CAS assistant professor of Chinese art, has been chosen an East Asia Studies Career Development Professor<\/strong>. <\/strong>A scholar of Buddhist art and architecture, among other topics, Feng is an expert on the Dunhuang caves in western China, repositories of ancient art first dug out in the fourth century. Her University of Chicago dissertation dealt with water imagery in the wall paintings there. She is currently preparing a monograph that explores the impact of an aquatic imaginary on the pictorial programming and immersive architectural schemes of Buddhist cave sites on the Silk Road.<\/p>\n

Dennis Jones<\/a><\/strong>, <\/strong>a MED assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, has been named a Ralph Edwards Career Development Professor<\/strong>. <\/strong>Recruited to BU to develop a program studying lymphatic development in cancer and infections, Jones was a lead investigator on research while a Yale PhD candidate and a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also has focused on mentoring undergraduates, especially in teaching. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Robert Metcalfe<\/a><\/strong>, a Questrom assistant professor of markets, public policy, and law, is the latest Reidy Family Career Development Professor. <\/strong>A behavioral economist, Metcalfe uses extensive data sets to help large companies address managerial problems, from health to the environment to digital matters. One recent article he authored studied hundreds of airline captains across 40,000 flights and found that if they knew their fuel efficiency was being monitored, they improved in that area, which lowered carbon dioxide emissions.<\/p>\n

Derry Wijaya<\/a><\/strong>, a CAS assistant professor of computer science, is this year\u2019s University Provost\u2019s Professor. <\/strong>An expert on machine learning, Wijaya researches automatic translation between languages that don\u2019t have vast, transcribed passages (Uzbek to Samoan, in an example cited in her nomination for the professorship). She also evangelizes for computer science to middle school girls and low-income students with the aim of diversifying those working in the field.<\/p>\n

\u201cKey to any research institution\u2019s vitality and long-term health is an energized and talented class of rising faculty,\u201d says Jean Morrison, University provost. \u201cBU is proud to employ some of the very best emerging educators and researchers in the world across dozens of disciplines and to invest in their growth and success with career development professorships. This year\u2019s cohort is no exception. From medicine and public health to science, technology, business, and the humanities, all are making tremendous early impact in their fields, and we are excited to see what the future holds for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

This BU Today<\/em> story was written by Rich Barlow<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congratulations to Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Florian Douam and Dennis Jones! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[127,89,91],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74836"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74839,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74836\/revisions\/74839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}