New Faculty Winter 2018
Fabienne Anne Bastien, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics, studies variations in the brightness of stars, particularly in Sun-like stars. She investigates the cause of this variation both to increase understanding of stellar astrophysics and to facilitate the discovery and characterization of exoplanets – planets outside Earth’s solar system. Bastien is also a member of several research collaborations that aim to discover new exoplanets, to understand how the characteristics of exoplanetary systems depend on stellar properties such as age, and to apply statistical approaches to large amounts of data regarding stellar light.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Bastien was a NASA Hubble postdoctoral fellow from 2014 to 2017. She earned a doctoral degree in physics with a concentration in astronomy at Vanderbilt University in 2014, a master’s degree in physics at Fisk University in 2010, and a bachelor’s degree in astronomy from the University of Maryland in 2005.
Maria del Carmen Carmona Benitez, assistant professor of physics, is a particle astrophysicist who studies dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe, and has eluded scientists since its existence was first suggested in 1933. The quest to find out what dark matter is made of is considered one of the most pressing questions in physics. She was a key member of the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, the most sensitive dark matter detector until its decommission in 2017, which was located in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), a former gold mine nearly one mile underground in Lead, South Dakota. She is now helping to build the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, a next-generation dark matter detector that will be at least 100 times more sensitive than its predecessor. Carmona is an expert on detector hardware and operations, cryogenics, calibrations, data analysis and Monte Carlo simulations.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Carmona was an assistant project scientist from 2014 to 2017 and a postdoctoral research associate from 2013 to 2014 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to that, Carmona was a postdoctoral research associate at Case Western University from 2009 to 2013. She earned a doctoral degree in physics in 2009, a master’s degree in physics and mathematics in 2006, and a bachelor’s degree in physics in 2004 at the University of Granada, Spain.
Cui-Zu Chang, assistant professor of physics, studies topological insulators -- materials that allow electrons to move along the surface but not in the interior. He experimentally demonstrated for the first time the quantum anomalous Hall effect in a magnetically doped topological insulator film, where impurities were intentionally introduced to impart magnetism. This work was featured in the scientific background of 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. The quantum anomalous Hall effect is a phenomenon where electrons in a two-dimensional plane have dissipation-free current that is incredibly resistant to change and is driven by internal remnant magnetism, and its realization has potential applications for reducing power consumption in future electronic and spintronic devices. Chang is also interested in interface superconductivity -- the phenomenon of zero electrical resistance on the interface between two solid materials.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Chang was a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a doctoral degree in physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 2013 and a bachelor’s degree in optical engineering at Shandong University in Jinan, China, in 2007.
Luiz de Viveiros, assistant professor of physics, devotes his research to trying to answer one of the big questions of physics: what makes up the universe? His research focuses on neutrinos, one of nature’s most elusive particles -- it’s mass still unknown, and the search for mysterious dark matter, which makes up more than 80% of the matter in the universe. He has a long history of working on dark matter experiments, having been part of CMDS-II, XENON10, ZEPLIN-III, and the Large Underground Xenon (LUX); and he is currently working on LUX-ZEPLIN, a next-generation dark-matter detector that will be the most sensitive search to date. More recently, de Viveiros is working on the Project 8 Neutrino Mass experiment. This project seeks to determine the mass of the neutrino by precisely measuring the energy spectrum of Tritium beta decay using a technique that allows the measurement of individual electrons in a magnetic trap, called Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES).
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, de Viveiros was an assistant project scientist from 2015 to 2017 and a postdoctoral researcher from 2014 to 2015 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partícula (LIP) in Coimbra, Portugal from 2009 to 2013. He earned a doctoral degree in physics at Brown University in 2009 and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Clark University in 2001.
Elizabeth Elacqua, assistant professor of chemistry, combines chemistry, biology, and materials science to understand how large molecules self-assemble. She is particularly interested in the synthesis and directional assembly of soft materials, such as polymers and colloids, which can controllably change shapes and sizes, and possibly function, in response to external stimuli. A foundation of her research program is to control the assembly of large molecules into well-defined supramolecular architectures – structures held together by reversible interactions -- using dynamic covalent and noncovalent chemistry. Elacqua also investigates how to control interactions between molecules in certain materials that take the form of crystals or thin films, or that are made of millions of repeating units, by blending traditional synthesis, crystal engineering, supramolecular chemistry, and polymer science.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Elacqua was a postdoctoral research associate at New York University from 2013 to 2017. She earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of Iowa in 2012 and bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and biology at Le Moyne College in 2006.
Stéphane Guerrier, assistant professor of statistics, is a data scientist interested in the development of data analysis tools with applications in engineering, the natural sciences, economics, and medicine. He is particularly interested in the statistical methods: time-series analysis, robust statistics, model selection, computational statistics, and spatial statistics.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Guerrier was an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2014 to 2017 and a visiting professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2016. He was a scientist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland in 2014 and a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2013 to 2014. Guerrier earned a doctoral degree in statistics at the University of Geneva in 2013, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in environmental engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2008 and 2006, respectively.
Susan Hafenstein, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and associate professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at the Penn State College of Medicine, uses a structural approach to investigate how a virus establishes an infection and causes disease in a host and how a virus changes its own structure during the course of an infection. Hafenstein uses a three-dimensional imaging technique called Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), which allows atomic resolution imaging of particles at the subcellular level. This technology has undergone recent transformative advances propelling cryo-EM into a new era and launching a “resolution revolution.” She has been the Director of the Cryo-EM Imaging Facility at the Penn State College of Medicine since 2011 and is now faculty director of the new Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences cryo-EM imaging facility.
Prior to joining the Penn State College of Medicine in 2009, Hafenstein was an associate research scientist at Purdue University from 2007 to 2009 and a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University from 2003 to 2007. She earned a doctoral degree in pathobiology at the University of Arizona in 2003 and a bachelor’s degree in animal science at Louisiana State University in 1992.
Joyce Jose, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, studies virus-host interactions involved in the development of diseases caused by alphaviruses and flaviviruses. Transmitted by mosquitoes, these viruses cause infectious diseases, like Zika, dengue, and West Nile, that remain international public health concerns with no currently available vaccines and no prophylactic or therapeutic treatments. She uses high-resolution live-cell imaging and electron microscopy to analyze modifications induced by the viruses to the structure and cytoskeleton of the cells of the mammalian hosts and the insects that transmit these viruses. A goal of Jose’s research program is to understand the molecular details of the virus life cycle, and to design and develop new strategies to perturb them in order to control and combat these pathogens.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Jose was an assistant research scientist from 2014 to 2016, a research associate from 2010 to 2014, and a postdoctoral research associate from 2004 to 2010 in the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University. She was also the operations manager for the Bio-Safety Level-3 - Select Agent Labs at Purdue from 2011 to 2016. Jose earned a doctoral degree in biotechnology at Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu, India in 2004, a master’s degree in biotechnology at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, Kerala, India in 1997, and a bachelor’s degree in zoology at Newman College in Thodupuzha, Kerala, India in 1995.
Kenneth L. Knappenberger Jr., professor of chemistry, focuses his research on developing new imaging methods that reveal how microscopic structures influence the optical and electronic properties of nanomaterials – materials less than 100 nanometers thick. He uses sequences of ultrafast laser pulses to generate images that visualize energy flow through light-harnessing materials on timescales on the order of one quadrillionth of a second. He is currently investigating how nanostructures can be tailored to optimize the performance of nanomaterials.
Prior to joining the faculty Penn State, Knappenberger was the Head of the Magneto-optics Program at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University from 2016 to 2017; an assistant, then associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Florida State University from 2008 to 2017; a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2005 to 2008; and a Lubrizol Research Fellow at Penn State from 2004 to 2006. He earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at Penn State in 2005 and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Lock Haven University in 2000.
Hong Ma, Professor of Biology and Huck Distinguished Research Professor of Plant Molecular Biology, studies plant development and evolution using a number of approaches, including molecular genetics, cell biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. He explores the genes responsible for the development of reproductive structures -- including pollen and the pollen-producing structure, the anther. He also investigates the genes that promote reproductive development in response to environmental changes in light, heat, and water availability. Additionally, Ma is interested in the evolutionary patterns of reproductive genes and has used genetic data to explore the evolutionary history of flowering plants.
Ma returned to Penn State in 2017 following his service as professor and dean of the School of Life Sciences at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, from 2008 to 2017. He served as a faculty member in the Penn State Department of Biology from 1998 to 2013. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, he served as an investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1990 to 1998, and a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech from 1988-1990. Ma earned a doctoral degree in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 and bachelor’s degrees in biology and biochemistry at Temple University in 1983.
Sally Mackenzie, Lloyd and Dottie Huck Chair for Functional Genomics and professor of biology and of plant sciences, studies how organelles in plant cells interact genetically with the cell’s nucleus to control plant growth and development. Her lab investigates the influence of signals from organelles on epigenetic changes -- alterations to the genome that do not change the genetic sequence -- that affect plant stress response and studies the potential to exploit these processes for agricultural benefit. She is particularly interested in the role of MSH1, a nuclear gene discovered by her group that is found in all plants, but not in fungi or mammals. Plant stresses suppress the expression of MSH1, which leads to changes in the behavior of two plant organelles, the mitochondria and the plastid, and alters plant growth.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Mackenzie was Ralph and Alice Raikes Professor of Plant Science at the University of Nebraska from 1999 to 2017 and rose from the rank of assistant to full professor at Purdue University from 1988 to 1999. She earned a doctoral degree in plant genetics at the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1986 and a bachelor’s degree in botany at the University of California, Davis in 1981.
Alexey Silakov, assistant professor of chemistry, studies the interplay between bioinorganic chemistry, physical chemistry, and structural biology. He is interested in understanding the relationship between the structure and the function of enzymes that contain metal ions, a key problem in enzymology that can be used to better understand enzymatic systems and to predict the function of other proteins. Silakov also develops new methods in spectroscopy to provide the most complete electronic and structural information about the catalytically active centers of these enzymes and the intricate mechanisms of biological systems that are of interest to medical and renewable energy fields. Another goal of his research is to develop high-sensitivity and versatile electron-paramagnetic resonance techniques that would provide structural information about biological systems such as proteins, DNA, and RNA.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Silakov was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Penn State from 2012 to 2017 and at the Max-Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry from 2007 to 2012. He earned a doctoral degree in physical chemistry at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany in 2007, a master’s degree in physics in 2003 and a bachelor’s degree in radiophysics in 2001 at the Kazan State University, Russia.