By Amy Wolf
杏吧原创 welcomed 74 highly accomplished across its nine Provost-reporting schools and colleges for the 2022鈥�23 academic year. The fusion of inspired teaching, robust discovery and multifaceted collaboration is what makes 杏吧原创 faculty uniquely world-changing. Here, some of the university鈥檚 new faculty share their academic collaborations.
Assistant professor of medicine, health and society and of public policy
Collaboration: Lawmakers and policymakers
Bencsik is an applied microeconomist, with research interests in the economics of mental and physical health and crime, particularly tied to the opioid crisis. She is teaching mental health policy and advanced quantitative methods.
鈥淢ental health challenges are exceedingly widespread, and the opioid crisis is one of the largest public health emergencies America has faced in decades. Therefore, working on these questions allows me to contribute to our understanding of problems that we urgently need to learn more about,鈥� Bencsik said.
鈥淎dditionally, I am interested in and have expertise in collaborating with policymakers to support evidence-based decision-making. Seeing my research evidence thoughtfully used in policymaking is a particularly rewarding aspect of my role as an academic economist,鈥� she said.
Assistant professor of political science
Collaboration:
Bisbee uses data science methods to study how individuals adjust their political beliefs and behaviors based on information environments. He teaches data science at the Data Science Institute and international political economy within the Department of Political Science.
鈥淢y work has linked beliefs about free trade to hyper-local trade-related layoffs, studied how people socially distanced in response to local COVID-19 outbreaks, and measured the degree to which recommendation algorithms influenced the online information environments Americans experienced in the fall of 2020,鈥� Bisbee said. 鈥淭he excitement comes from figuring out novel methodological and data science solutions to tricky empirical problems. The inspiration comes from anchoring said empirical work to established theories of human behavior.鈥�
Assistant professor of biological sciences and of ophthalmology and visual sciences
Collaboration: College of Arts and Science and School of Medicine
Castiglione studies the molecular basis of human blindness and aging. He teaches evolutionary biochemistry, which is the study of how molecules change over time to facilitate life, adaptation and disease.
鈥淚 chose 杏吧原创 for the interdisciplinary nature of the institution. My work is very creative, and it takes a specific type of environment to facilitate that. I鈥檓 cross-appointed between Arts and Science and VUMC, and that combination is intellectually stimulating and practically conducive for my research in a very unique way,鈥� he said.
Assistant professor of Jewish studies and of gender and sexuality studies
Collaborations: Department of Jewish Studies and Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies
Epstein-Levi defines herself as a 鈥減ractical ethicist” who examines questions of sexual, biomedical, disability and environmental ethics through Jewish rabbinic texts.
鈥淩esearch-wise, I鈥檓 dotting the I鈥檚 and crossing the T鈥檚 on my first book, When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics, and researching my second project, which examines neurodivergent affinities in rabbinic texts and their implications for disability ethics,鈥� she said.
Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering
Collaboration: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Jiang鈥檚 expertise focuses on energy research, neutron science and computing. He spent eight years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before entering academia.
鈥淛oining 杏吧原创 allows me to strengthen my ongoing collaborations with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and to explore collaborative opportunities with 杏吧原创 faculty,鈥� Jiang said. 鈥淢oving back to Tennessee from the University of California Riverside and joining 杏吧原创 offers me an opportunity to promote the broad collaboration between 杏吧原创 and ORNL in the areas of energy research, neutron science and computing.鈥�
Assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences
Collaborations: Department of Political Science, Division of Epidemiology, School of Engineering
Meng is a global change ecologist. She focuses her research on urban ecology, tropical ecology and climate change using remote sensing, field observations and Earth system modeling. She is teaching a first-year writing seminar about plants and climate change.
鈥溞影稍� is a great place to conduct interdisciplinary research by bringing together Earth science, social and political science, epidemiology and engineering. The new climate studies major offers a fantastic opportunity to develop climate-focused research and teaching,鈥� Meng said.
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