New Faculty - 2022 Issue 2
Welcome to the college's newest faculty.
C. Guilherme Becker, associate professor of biology, uses models and conducts both field and laboratory experiments to understand the factors driving wildlife disease dynamics in both tropical and temperate systems. His lab studies the relationships between biological diversity and disease; the role of symbiotic microorganisms for wildlife health; and how climate change and deforestation impact disease transmission and drive biodiversity declines.
Becker’s research has been published in journals such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Prior to joining Penn State, Becker was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama from 2017 to 2021 and a postdoctoral researcher at the State University of São Paulo, Brazil, from 2014 to 2017. Becker received a doctoral degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University in 2014, a master’s degree in ecology from the State University of Campinas in Campinas SP, Brazil, in 2007, and a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos in São Leopoldo RS, Brazil, in 2005.
Seth Bordenstein, professor of biology and entomology, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair of Microbiome Sciences, and director of the Penn State Microbiome Center, focuses his research on evolutionary and genetic principles that shape symbiotic interactions between animals, microbes, and viruses, and the major applications of these interactions to human health. Key topics of the lab include the roles of microorganisms in the origin of new host species; how humans can utilize bacteria and their associated viruses to control insect pests; identifying the social, environmental, and genetic factors that contribute to variation in the human gut and oral microbiome; and how human microbiomes respond or contribute to health disparities. The Bordenstein lab, co-run by Sarah Bordenstein, also leads Discover the Microbes Within: The Wolbachia Project, an integrative, discovery-based lab series with a 15-year history of outreach to middle and high school students worldwide.
Bordenstein has received numerous awards and honors, including the 2014 Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the 2014 Chancellor’s Award for Research, the 2017 Vanderbilt Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Research Award, and the 2018 Chancellor Faculty Fellow Award. He also received the 2020 Genetics Society of America Award for Excellence in Education.
Prior to joining Penn State, Bordenstein was the Centennial Endowed Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University and founding director of The Vanderbilt Microbiome Innovation Center. He previously served as an adjunct assistant professor at Brown University and as a postdoctoral researcher and research scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. He received a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology in 1997, a master’s degree in biology in 1999, and a doctoral degree in evolutionary genetics in 2002, all from the University of Rochester.
Ribhu Kaul, professor of physics, is primarily interested the theory of quantum mechanics and its consequences to systems of many particles. He studies how topology, entanglement, and strong interactions lead to fundamentally new phenomena in condensed matter systems. His research draws inspiration from diverse sources including experiments on quantum materials, quantum field theory, algorithms to simulate many-particle quantum mechanics, and quantum information.
Kaul was awarded the NSF CAREER award and has been continuously supported by the National Science Foundation since 2011. He has published over fifty research articles in journals such as Nature Physics and Physical Review Letters and has been invited to speak at a number of international conferences and symposia as well as seminar and colloquia talks at various leading universities and national laboratories. Outside of his research speaking engagements and classroom teaching, Kaul enjoys the opportunity to engage wide audiences in the wonders of science, through public lecture presentations and outreach events.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Kaul advanced from assistant professor to associate professor, and then to professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kentucky from 2010 to 2022. He was a visiting associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2015 to 2016, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2008 to 2010, and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2006 to 2008. He earned a doctoral degree in physics at Duke University in 2006, a master’s in physics at Cornell University in 2002, and a bachelor’s degree in physics at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai University, in Mumbai, India, in 2000.
Amita Malik, assistant professor of mathematics, focuses her research on number theory and its connections with analysis and combinatorics. The research topics are related to zeros and moments of L-functions, elliptic curves, theory of integer partitions, q-series, and Apéry-like numbers.
Malik’s previous awards and honors include an AMS-Simons Travel Grant for 2017 to 2019, a Research Award from Rutgers University in 2018, the Bateman Prize in Number Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2017, the David G. Bourgin Mathematics Fellowship, UIUC, from 2016 to 2017, a Bateman Fellowship in Number Theory, UIUC, from 2015 to 2016, and the Arnold O. Beckman Research Award (with B. C. Berndt), UIUC, for 2014 to 2015.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Malik was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and at the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM), California from 2020 to 2022. She was a Hill Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick from 2017 to 2020. She earned a doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017, a master’s degree in mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi in India in 2011 and 2008, respectively.
Michael Schweinberger, associate professor of statistics, focuses on statistical learning regarding how events (e.g., pandemics, social, economic, or political events) are affected by other events, and how such events are mediated by networks (e.g., networks of contacts, social networks, or economic networks). Over the last decade, he has advanced the mathematical foundations of network regression, which is one of the workhorses of statistical learning from observations of networks but presents mathematical challenges. In addition, he helped develop the first network-attribute models, which can be used for studying how connections affect attributes of individuals and how attributes affect connections. He was on the core development team of the statistical software package (R)Siena, which implements network-attribute models and was awarded the William D. Richards Software Award of the International Network for Social Network Analysis in 2017.
Schweinberger has published his research in the most prestigious journals in statistics, including The Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society - Series B, the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, The Annals of Applied Statistics, and Statistical Science. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Statistical Software and Computational Statistics & Data Analysis.
Prior to joining Penn State, Schweinberger served on the faculty of Rice University, held visiting positions at the University of Washington and the University of Missouri, and postdoctoral positions at the University of Washington and Penn State. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2007.
Thomas Stewart, assistant professor of biology, employs evolutionary and developmental approaches to explore how novel traits evolve and the causes of major evolutionary transitions. His work focuses on vertebrate appendages—like fish fins and tetrapod limbs—and he leverages them as models for testing hypotheses of developmental evolution and the relationship between form and function. By integrating paleontological data with experimental embryological and developmental genetic data, Stewart aims to explain macroevolutionary patterns of vertebrate diversity and to discover how new body parts evolve.
Stewart’s previous awards and honors include the Reinventing Scholarship Award from the Syracuse University Center for Graduate Preparation in 2009, the Donald G. Lundgren Memorial Award for Outstanding Scholarship and Research from the Syracuse University Department of Biology in 2009, the Enhancing Linkages between Mathematics and Ecology Fellowship from Michigan State University in 2008, the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program for 2007 to 2009, and a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program in 2008. Stewart has published his research in journals including Nature, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Scientific Reports.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Stewart was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago from 2017 to 2022 and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and the University of Minnesota from 2015 to 2017. He earned a doctoral degree in integrative biology at the University of Chicago in 2015 and a bachelor’s degree in biology at Syracuse University in 2009.
Yogasudha Veturi, assistant professor of biobehavioral health and of statistics, is a statistical geneticist who uses large scale genetic analyses to identify areas of the human genome that might increase risk of disease. She integrates multiple types of data—including genomic, transcriptomic, imaging, and environmental—with electronic health records to understand the genetic basis of complex human traits and diseases and how genes can affect more than one trait. Veturi’s goals are to address important data science and biological challenges by contributing novel methods and algorithms to the biomedical community that will be a step towards improving cognitive health of patients of advancing age, especially women and communities underrepresented in medicine. In some of her recent work, she has used genome- and transcriptome-wide analyses to explore genetic factors related to plasma lipids, late-life depression, circulatory system diseases, and central nervous system diseases.
Veturi’s research has been published in journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, PLOS Genetics, JAMA Psychiatry, Cell Genomics, and the American Journal of Human Genetics and Genetics.
Prior to joining Penn State, Veturi was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania from 2018 to 2022, a postdoctoral fellow at Geisinger in 2017. She earned a doctoral degree in biostatistics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2016, a master’s degree in plant and soil sciences from the University of Delaware in 2012, a master’s degree in statistics from North Carolina State University in 2009, and a bachelor’s degree in statistics from the Lady Shri Ram College, affiliated with the University of Delhi, in New Delhi, India, in 2007.
Yubai Yuan, assistant professor of statistics, focuses his research on complex network analysis, information diffusion and cascade, relational data embedding, and optimal transport with their application to the study of neuron dynamics. His other research interests include community detection, link prediction, mediation analysis, active learning, and crowdsourcing.
Yuan’s previous awards and honors include the NSF-Simons Center Fellow Award in 2022, a student paper award at ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium in 2021, and the ASA Statistical Learning and Data Science section student paper award in 2019.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Yuan earned a bachelor’s degree in financial mathematics at Shandong University in China in 2012, a masters in statistics at Sun Yat-sen University in China in 2016, and a doctoral degree in statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2020.