Four New Associate Deans Join Grad College
As we begin the new academic year, the Graduate College is pleased to announce four new Associate Deans. Each of whom will maintain a 50% faculty appointment in their department and will have a 50% Associate Dean appointment in the Graduate College.
Andrea Golato is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She is an affiliated faculty member in the Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) Program, the European Union Center, the Center for Translation Studies, and the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Her active research program in conversation analysis explores the interconnections between interaction, culture and grammar. She has advised numerous graduate students in German and within the wider SLATE community, and has received the Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. Andrea holds a Diplom in Translation Studies from the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz-Germersheim and a Ph.D. in German Applied Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin.
Jennifer F. Hamer received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin and is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies. Her research and scholarship emphasize the study of families and working class communities. She has published in varying journals such as The Journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Black Studies, and the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. In addition, she is the author of What it Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away from Their Children (Columbia University Press, 2001) and a forthcoming book, Abandoned in the Heartland: Living in East St. Louis, Illinois (University of California Press). She is the founding and current Editor of Black Women, Gender and Families, a new Black Women’s Studies journal and former Editor of Race & Society: The Official Journal of the Association of Black Sociologists. She has been a part of the Illinois faculty since 2004 and her service to the University has included participation on several College of Liberal Arts and campus-wide committees; interim head of the department of African American Studies; and Coordinator of the University of Illinois and The HistoryMakers, Inc. three-campus partnership developed to make accessible one of the largest audiovisual archives on famous and unsung heroes of the Black American experience.
Jimmy Hsia is Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering and has been on the Engineering Faculty at Illinois since 1991 after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT. In 2005-2007, he served at the National Science Foundation as the Founding Director of Nano and Bio Mechanics Program, and was instrumental in establishing the “Cellular and Biomolecular Engineering” initiative for the Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) in the Engineering Directorate. Hsia is the Principal Investigator of an NSF grant on “GEM4 Summer School on Cellular and Molecular Mechanics”, a series of 5 summer/winter schools for graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty members, held at Caltech (2008), UIUC (2009), UT-Austin (2010), Georgia Tech (2011), and MIT (2012). He is co-PI on a multi-institution NSF-STC proposal “Emergent Behavior of Integrated Cellular Systems” (lead institution: MIT), which has been selected for a NSF site visit. Hsia serves as the lead PI at Illinois and is responsible for the interdisciplinary education component of the STC. He is also co-PI on an (final round submission) IGERT proposal “Training the next generation of researchers in Cellular and Molecular Mechanics and Bionanotechnology (CMMB)”. Hsia’s research is in mechanics of materials and nano and bio mechanics and he is Fellow of ASME and Associate of Center for Advanced Study at UIUC.
Janet Dixon Keller (January, 2010 start date) is Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Oceanic collections at the Spurlock Museum, received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from an interdisciplinary Cognitive Science Program, University of California, Berkeley in 1975. She spent a year as post-doctoral fellow at M.I.T. in Linguistics before joining the University of Illinois faculty in 1976. Keller was Head of the Department of Anthropology from 1994-99 and Acting Head in 2000-01. She has participated in The McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program and has served on a number of College/Campus committees in recent years including: Chair of the Campus Promotion and Tenure Committee, and Chair of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Division of the Graduate College Fellowship Committee, member of the LAS Policy and Development Committee and the Provost’s Committee on Faculty Retention. She is an affiliate of the LAS International Studies Major and Global Studies Initiative. She co-curated the East-Asian and Pacific Gallery at the Spurlock Museum and has designed The Transforming Arts of Papua New Guinea, a new exhibit to open in the Campbell Gallery September 1. She has held external grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation.