This fall, Colorado College welcomes 13 new faculty members, including a 2013 CC graduate, and a returning Riley Scholar. New faculty members at CC include:
Jiun Bang, Political Science
Bang is a 2016 graduate of the University of Southern California, with her dissertation focusing on commodification and its effects on bilateralism and concepts of nationalism. Prior to coming to CC, Bang was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, teaching courses such as Money, Politics, and Power in Northeast Asia, and Problematizing Western Notions of Global Politics. She has published several articles and book chapters in Korean and English, and her work was featured on an episode of "PBS NewsHour" in 2018 relating to an inter-Korea summit.
Angela Castro, Spanish and Portuguese
Castro received her Ph.D. in Hispanic literatures and cultures from the University of Minnesota in 2019. Her research areas include 20th-century Afro-Caribbean female writing, Afro-Caribbean bodies, and diasporic studies. Her article, “The Haitian and Dominican Resistance: A Study of the ‘Symptom’ in Edwidge Danticat's Work The Farming of Bones,’” published in an edited volume with Sunny Press in 2020, proposes that “The Farming of Bones” portrays Dominican-Haitian history through a symptomatic trauma imprinted through bodily and mental traces that can also be seen in recent interactions between the two nations. Her current project, an exploration of writing “beyond-blackness” in the Panamanian writer Melanie Taylor’s work “Camino a Mariato,” will appear in the anthology, "Writing the Afro-Américas: Literary Interventions from Mexico to the Southern Cone." She is the co-founder of Aproximaciones Afrolatinoamericanas, a virtual transnational conversation series that brings together artists, authors, scholars, and students from throughout the Americas to discuss topics related to Afrolatinidades. At Colorado College, she teaches Latin American and Caribbean female writing, Latin American culture and literature, and Spanish language courses.
Nickie Coomer, Education
Coomer is a 2021 graduate of the Indiana University School of Education at Indianapolis (IUPUI), majoring in urban education studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of juvenile justice, special education, and social emotional learning as a result of service-learning. In the past, Coomer tutored adjudicated adolescent students at a residential facility located in rural Ohio, serving in positions ranging from tutor to resident counselor and educational liaison. Coomer looks forward to working across academic disciplines to design courses that contribute to study regarding the social impacts of just and equitable schooling and fostering student understanding of their own positionalities.
Meredith Course, Molecular Biology
Course received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University and her B.A. in neuroscience from Pomona College. She comes to Colorado College following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in the Division of Medical Genetics. She brings along with her Drosophila melanogaster (the fruit fly), a model organism that is new to the campus research community. Along with CC students, she will use Drosophila to explore molecular mechanisms underlying neurological and metabolic health and disease. Her 2021-22 courses include Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology, Laboratory in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Genetics, and Molecular Neurobiology.
Marcela Fernandez-Peters, Psychology
Fernández-Peters (she/her/ella) is a behavioral neuroscientist studying brain and hormonal mechanisms underlying animal communication. Her work has focused on the production and perception of vocalizations in small mammals and songbirds. She will continue this line of research with students at CC in the Animal Communication and Neuroscience Lab (ACN Lab) located at Tutt Science Building. The ACN lab will explore fundamental questions related to neuroendocrinology, auditory physiology and learning, bioacoustics and sex differences in brain and behavior. She will be teaching classes for majors in psychology and neuroscience. Fernández-Peters earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Cornell University and a MSc in biology at the University of Missouri St. Louis. After finishing her doctoral studies, she held a post-doctoral appointment at Washington State University Vancouver and a visiting assistant professor position at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Fernández-Peters was born and raised in Costa Rica where she earned her BSc degree at the Universidad de Costa Rica. She also coordinated two summer REU programs for Native American and Pacific islanders at the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica.
Charlotte Gabrielsen, Environmental Studies Program
Gabrielsen, a 2017 University of Wyoming graduate, earned her doctorate in ecology. Her dissertation and research interests include wetlands and animal diversity in a wide range of natural environments. Prior to joining CC’s Environmental Studies Program, Gabrielsen worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Alaska, a NASA Space Grant Research Fellow, and a conservation genetics lab technician at the University of New Hampshire. She has presented at more than 30 conferences and was featured in a 2016 news report titled “UW-Led Study Highlights the Fluid Nature of Surface Water.”
Luis David Garcia Puente, Mathematics and Computer Science
Luis David García Puente was born and raised in Mexico City. He received his Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Virginia Tech. He has held postdoctoral appointments at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on computational and applied algebraic geometry. He uses and develops methods from algebra, discrete mathematics, and symbolic computation to understand and solve problems in industrial and applied mathematics. García Puente's professional activities are motivated by the need to increase the number of underrepresented students who pursue advanced degrees in mathematics and the sciences. He is an active member of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science and the National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Sciences. He has directed undergraduate research projects for 20 years, involving close to 100 undergraduate students in his work.
Michelle Gevedon, Geology
Gevedon is a tenure-track faculty member in geology, having graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 with a doctorate in the field. Her research interests and expertise are in the geochemical systems of crystalline rocks, the process of ore formation, and the formation of Earth’s continental crust. Gevedon is a participant in the GeoFORCE program, an outreach program designed to increase the number and diversity of students pursuing STEM education, particularly in the geosciences. She comes to Colorado College with a wide breadth of teaching experience, having taught courses since 2011 at California State University Fullerton.
Minho Kim, Mathematics and Computer Science
Kim is a new member of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department, specializing in Bayesian special statistics, a method of analysis for geo-referenced data. Kim graduated from Baylor University in May of 2021 with a Ph.D. in statistics. One of his primary goals is to connect key course objectives to real-world problems, ensuring that his students retain information after leaving the classroom. Kim also has extensive experience in machine learning algorithms such as clustering, regression analyses, dimension reduction, and ensemble methods.
Eryn Murphy, Human Biology and Kinesiology
Murphy is a 2020 graduate of New Mexico University, graduating with a Ph.D. in kinesiology. Before becoming a tenure-track faculty member in Human Biology and Kinesiology, Murphy was a year-long visitor in the department. She has published or is in the process of publishing six scholarly articles, with topics ranging from the effects of standard and modified ellipticals, to gait mechanics in older adults, to the impacts of movement direction on joint kinematics. Murphy is a certified strength and conditioning specialist, as well as a certified exercise physiologist.
Cory Scott ’13, Mathematics and Computer Science
Scott earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California – Irvine in 2020. He is a 2013 Colorado College graduate and worked as a paraprofessional in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department from 2013-14. He is first author on two articles relating to using machine learning to answer questions in the physical sciences, both by direct analysis of data and by emulating computationally expensive scientific simulation codes. Scott’s teaching and research interests intersect with several other academic disciplines, and he plans on co-teaching with other CC faculty in the future.
Brandon Shimoda, English
Brandon Shimoda is a Yonsei poet/writer, and the author of several books of poetry and prose, including “The Grave on the Wall” (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and “Evening Oracle” (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is developing the creative nonfiction track, and currently is teaching creative writing workshops (creative nonfiction and multi-genre) and a class on epistolary literature. He also is planning classes on creative research, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee,” the work of Lebanese-American poet-painter Etel Adnan (“Writing the Ongoing Apocalypse”), and the literature of Japanese American incarceration, through which he plans to take students to the former Amache concentration camp in southeastern Colorado. His classes usually include studies of memory/post-memory, dreams, and contemporary Asian American writing. He has taught at the University of Arizona, Kaohsiung American School (Taiwan), the University of Montana, and Occidental College. He also is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at the Pacific Northwest College of the Arts/Willamette University. He has two books forthcoming, including a book on the afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, which received a creative nonfiction grant from the Whiting Foundation.
Guanyi Yang, Economics and Business
Yang is a macroeconomist with research interests on topics related to inequality and the labor market. He specializes in constructing theoretical models and disciplining the models using nationally representative survey and administrative data. His current research focuses on two areas: 1.) How labor market frictions amplify welfare loss during a recession and delay economic recovery. The frictions in his work come from job nature, such as differences between formal and informal jobs, temporary and regular contracts, and racial discrimination in job finding and separation. 2.) How factors change a person’s risk tolerance and affordability to various education and career choices, widening income and wealth inequalities over time. The factors he studies include childhood family structure and parental care, early adulthood family wealth, and marriage and fertility. He attempts to bring diverse perspectives that intersect race, class, and gender in his teaching of economics. Additionally, he emphasizes the importance of bringing theory to practice and back to theory in all his classes and encourages a scholarship that transforms to positive social impact. Yang received his Ph.D. in economics from the Ohio State University in 2018 and B.A. in mathematics and economics (with honor) from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2013. Before joining CC, he was an assistant professor of economics on the tenure track at St. Lawrence University. Yang grew up in a small mining town in central China and is a first-generation immigrant to the U.S. He also is a first-generation college graduate. He is currently a faculty mentor at the Research In Color (RIC) Foundation.
Additionally, CC also has a returning Riley Scholar in Residence:
Ahmad Alswaid, Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies
Alswaid graduated from Cornell University in 2020 with a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Prior to obtaining his doctorate, Alswaid taught at Marshall College in Pennsylvania, Portland State University in Oregon, and Tishreen University in Syria. He is finishing an Arabic language textbook co-authored with Munther Younes of Cornell University based on Tayeb Salih’s novel “Season of Migration to the North.” Alswaid teaches Elementary Arabic, Intermediate Arabic, and a review of these courses for students who have already taken them.