Jeffrey Oishi – News

$1.34 million NSF grant positions �ֲ��ý as leader in solar-terrestrial physics in Maine

�ֲ��ý News — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:48:20 +0000

A $1.34 million grant to �ֲ��ý from the National Science Foundation will position the college to play a crucial role in the study and teaching of solar activities that have a great impact on Earth.

With the grant, �ֲ��ý will appoint a new tenure-track professor in solar-terrestrial physics, which explores interactions between the sun and Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere. Appointed within the �ֲ��ý Department of Physics and Astronomy, this will be the first faculty position of its kind in Maine.

“Solar-terrestrial physics is a discipline of pressing importance,” said Associate Professor of Physics Jeffrey Oishi, the principal investigator for the NSF grant. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

“This funding represents a significant investment in our ability to expand research capabilities, augment the curriculum inside and outside the field of physics, and inspire �ֲ��ý students to become scientists who grasp the broad and interdisciplinary implications of solar-terrestrial research and knowledge,” said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

The new grant is from the NSF’s Faculty Development in geoSpace Science program, which seeks to spur the integration of geospace science into U.S. higher education and the training of the next generation of geospace science leaders.

“Solar physics is a discipline of pressing importance, as solar processes affect communications and power systems,” said Associate Professor of Physics Jeffrey Oishi, who chairs the Department of Physics and Astronomy at �ֲ��ý and is the principal investigator for the grant.

“These impacts affect all aspects of modern society via disruptions to communications and power generation. Solar physics is an unusually rich intellectual discipline, relying on a wider range of subfields of physics and computation, and having strong ties to geophysics, atmospheric science, climate science, and environmental studies.”

This NASA image captures a solar flare, at right, on Jan. 12, 2015. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation that can disturb communications and power generation on Earth, and thus are critical phenomena in the field of solar physics.(NASA/Goddard/SGO)

In creating the first-of-its-kind faculty position at a Maine college, �ֲ��ý expands its already outsized capacity to contribute to STEM research, ranking second only to the University of Maine in terms of STEM research and development expenditures per student.

�ֲ��ý physics professors have an already broad range of expertise, including ultracold atomic physics, with a major research project ongoing in the Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station; extragalactic astrophysics, including groundbreaking research recently published in Nature; theoretical fluid mechanics and plasma physics; and frequency-comb spectroscopy.

“Many of our students are deeply interested in the intersection of physics, the environment, and policy.”
Jeffrey Oishi

The NSF grant includes funding for student researchers to work in the professor’s lab during the summer. �ֲ��ý students take an active role in faculty research, and �ֲ��ý physics majors attend graduate schools at a rate of 40 percent, well above the national average (15 to 30 percent, depending on measure).

The NSF grant also positions �ֲ��ý to introduce new geospace topics into the �ֲ��ý curriculum, both within the physics department and in related interdisciplinary programs, such as environmental studies.

An ongoing NASA mission with great implications in the field of solar physics is the Parker Solar Probe gathering data as it orbits the sun. (Photo illustration NASA/Johns Hopkins via AFP)

“Many of our students are deeply interested in the intersection of physics, the environment, and policy,” said Oishi. “For example, a new faculty member will give �ֲ��ý the capacity to develop a course that considers the implications of solar-terrestrial interactions on our technology-driven society.”

While the literal focus of solar-terrestrial physics teaching and research are out of this world, much of the work is down to earth.

“Our new colleague will have the support and the opportunity to connect with innumerable space science efforts, including those in Maine that seek to contribute to the state’s economic growth,” said Hill.

“A solar physicist at �ֲ��ý will also be able to forge regional connections with major solar and geospace research institutions. Finally, our student-centered approach to physics research will educate �ֲ��ý graduates who are trained in geospace sciences and prepared either for graduate study or immediate entry into the workforce.”

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under award No.2347922. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Ask the College Experts: The value and opportunity to do research

Jay Burns — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 16:49:19 +0000

The exponential growth of computing power has been a boon to the research that Assistant Professor of Physics Jeffrey Oishi and his students do every day at �ֲ��ý.

But supercomputers still can’t top the power of the human mind to ask the right research questions, he says.

Oishi recalls what one of his college professors, the famed computational scientist David Keyes, once said in class. “He said he’d rather have today’s algorithms on yesterday’s computers than yesterday’s algorithms on today’s computers.”

In other words, even with the exponential growth of computing power, “how we phrase our ideas and problems to the computer” is what matters, Oishi says. “How we phrase our questions can radically change results by a much larger factor” than any increase in computing power.

For example, just yesterday, Oishi and a , found a way to solve a problem 2,000 times faster — on the same computer — simply by changing the mathematical formula slightly.”

For Oishi and the , “that’s where the real excitement comes —in the ideas and ways of looking at problems.”

Oishi is a computational physicist. His lab, , seeks to understand highly complex systems “that are far from equilibrium,” meaning that “there’s a lot of energy flowing through them. The classic examples for me are fluid turbulence in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the stars and their stellar atmospheres.”

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He’s also looked at smaller-scale problems, like the growth of bacterial biofilms that thrive on surfaces — such as industrial pipelines and medical devices. “Biofilms grow and divide and exist in a fluid medium. It’s one of the biggest problems for hospitals, for example, in intravenous lines.”

The research involves “extremely large supercomputer simulations on national-class facilities at NASA and some of the National Science Foundation centers,” he says. In addition, his students have access to the college’s high-performance computing cluster. The HPCC is a “workhorse.”

Oishi earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees at two universities, Columbia and the University of Virginia. Now he’s teaching and doing research at �ֲ��ý, and he sees the benefits for his students when it comes to doing research at a small liberal arts college.

In 2016, Jeffrey Oishi visits the college’s high-performance computing cluster, a workhorse of his and his students’ research, in a ground-floor hub room in Kalperis Hall. (Jay Burns/�ֲ��ý College)

“And, importantly, the students bring value to the research work,” he adds. Last January, a student in his lab, Morgan Baxter ’20, co-authored a scholarly article published in the highly regarded .

The ample opportunities to do research is partly a numbers game. “Particularly in STEM fields, there are fewer students, and no graduate students, to do the work,” Oishi says. “So a student can be in the thick of a project from an early stage.You can quickly see what it’s like to do scientific research and find out if it’s interesting to you because it’s so vastly different than coursework.”

There’s variety, too, in the work that undergrads do. “Undergrads in my research group play a variety of roles in computational and theoretical physics,” he says, “from software development to what you might think of as traditional theoretical physics — using a pencil and paper and trying to make sense of equations.”

Students also do data analysis, “which can be done with a minimal physics background,” Oishi adds.

Doing research builds “practical skill, even if you’re doing something extremely theoretical and extremely abstract.”

Students learn the valuable, lifelong skill of searching for an answer when “you don’t know even if there’s an answer, let alone what that answer is. Learning to grapple with that, learning how to sit with that feeling, and move through it productively — that’s the single greatest benefit of doing research.”

At �ֲ��ý, high-performance computing is for everyone — not just superheroes

Jay Burns — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 22:13:32 +0000

The college’s new high-performance computing setup is not visually dazzling, at least compared with the huge computer we remember from Batman’s Batcave, circa 1968. It occupies barely half of a 6-foot-tall computer rack.

But then again, the computing setup, known as a “cluster” because it links 12 separate computers, doesn’t need to fill a whole cave. And perhaps most important, it’s a shared resource — not reserved for one or two superheroes.

“Ours is for anyone who has the need to examine data in a deep way.”

While many colleges have high-performance computing clusters, it’s not uncommon for them to be appropriated by a few faculty members (superheroes, as it were).

�ֲ��ý’ HPCC, however, is designed as a “community-based resource as opposed to one that would just benefit specific faculty members,” explains Andrew White, director of academic and client services for Information and Library Services. “Ours is for anyone who has the need to examine data in a deep way.”

Jeffrey Oishi, the college’s new computational astrophysicist, visits the HPCC where it lives: in a ground-floor hub room in Kalperis Hall at 65 Campus Ave. (Jay Burns/�ֲ��ý College)

One of those people is Jeff Oishi, the college’s new computational astrophysicist. He’ll be a power user, and some of his research funds helped to purchase the HPCC, which sits in a 15-by-17 hub room in the basement of Kalperis Hall, one of the college’s two new residences on Campus Avenue.

Oishi calls the HPCC “the once and future” of computing. “Once” because sharing was once the way to access powerful computing, and “future” because it anticipates how �ֲ��ý will use and expand the HPCC.

When it comes to an HPCC, “high performance” has the same meaning as it does for a 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda muscle car. It means extraordinary power.

For Oishi and his student researchers, this computing power will run models that explain how gases flow inside the atmospheres of giant planets like Jupiter. In one project, they will use an approximation known as linearization to model how gases go from stable to unstable. In a second project, Oishi’s team will do 3D simulations of these transitions.

When a big job comes to the HPCC from Oishi’s lab in Carnegie Science, the job goes first to one of the 12 computers, each of which are known as “nodes.” The receiving node, called the “head node,” is the traffic cop that manages requests and draws on the other 11 nodes’ computing power as needed.

In computer parlance, this gabfest is called “all-to-all” communication and it’s a hallmark of high-performance computing.

“The head node splits up the job, with pieces going to everybody else,” explains Jim Bauer, director of network and infrastructure services for ILS. ��“The nodes all communicate with each other, assemble the results, and send it back to the head node.”

As the job gets crunched and all the processors inside all the nodes swing into action, each processor is “talking with every other processor all the time,” Oishi says. It’s an overlapping conversation, like a Robert Altman movie. In computer parlance, this gabfest is called “all-to-all” communication and it’s a hallmark of high-performance computing.

The speed of this conversation depends on a dazzling array of pricey cables that connect the head node to the other nodes and each node to one another. So while you can use $2 HDMI cables for your home theater, in this case, “cables do matter,” says Bauer. Collectively called “fabric,” all this high-speed networking allows data to whip around at 100 gigabytes per second, the gold standard of high-speed computing.

High-speed (100 gigabytes per second) cables and networking, known as “fabric,” connect the 12 nodes of the HPCC.

The �ֲ��ý fabric is distinctive, Bauer says. “We went with new technology,” known as Intel Omni-Path, “that is more cost-effective and twice as fast” as typical fabric uses in an HPCC.

In terms of computing specs, each of the 12 nodes in the �ֲ��ý HPCC has 28 cores, the processing units that do the work, for a total of 336 cores. A team from Dell helped �ֲ��ý design the setup, and it has 1.5 terabytes of RAM and 48 terabytes of disk space.

By historical comparison, the first academic computer that �ֲ��ý purchased, in 1979, was a Prime 550 with roughly three-quarters of a megabyte of RAM and 300 megabytes of storage space.

“It was a leader of its day,” says Bauer, and it could process 700,000 “instructions” per second. “The HPCC runs at just under six billion instructions per second.”

That’s impressive, but computing power is relative, of course. To meet computing needs that are even bigger, Oishi uses NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer, which has nearly 200,000 cores compared to �ֲ��ý’ 336. “But otherwise, it’s built on nodes almost identical to ours,” he says.

As he meets the �ֲ��ý HPCC for the first time, Oishi says he’s “impressed by how small the cluster is” compared with some that he’s used in the past.

Since computers today use so much less power than their forebears, they give off less heat, which means the components of an HPCC can be packed close together — notwithstanding the air-conditioning that blasts away from one corner of the room.

Had Oishi arrived at �ֲ��ý as a solo computational physicist, the college might have created a one-off HPC setup for him. But Oishi — who is the co-principal investigator of a NASA grant that will send $114,000 to �ֲ��ý to support his research on stellar magnetism — was joined this fall by another new assistant professor of physics, Aleks Diamond-Stanic.

Himself the holder of a $108,000 grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute to study the stellar mass of starbursts, Diamond-Stanic uses big data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to study the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes. So he, too, had big-time computing needs.

The �ֲ��ý HPCC setup is known as the ‘condo’ model: While the infrastructure belongs to the college and professors sort of “buy into it.”

The pair’s arrival — and the anticipation that more and more faculty will need powerful computing resources — created a critical mass for the HPCC project, says White. “When Jeff talked to us about his needs, and Aleks talked about his needs, we saw a way to support them while serving the larger �ֲ��ý community, too.”

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic will use the HPCC to crunch big data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

In fact, White, Bauer, and others had already been testing some ideas for HPC at �ֲ��ý. “Thanks to Aleks and Jeff, we went from zero to 60 just like that,” White says.

The �ֲ��ý HPCC setup is known as the ‘condo’ model: The infrastructure belongs to the college, and professors sort of “buy into it,” Oishi says. That is, he and Diamond-Stanic, have contributed some of their startup funds — research dollars that the college provides to new faculty — to purchase new nodes. In return, they’ll have priority access.

”I think that’s a really great model because it’s expandable and it’s flexible,” says Oishi. Indeed, the fact that the HPCC rack is currently only half-full anticipates that more faculty will buy into the “condo,” especially professors in the college’s new Digital and Computational Studies Program, slated to debut as a major in fall 2018.

In that sense, the �ֲ��ý HPCC will “support our current faculty and help us attract new colleagues,” says White.

Thirty years ago, if you wanted access to powerful computing, you tapped into a shared resource. By the 1990s, when Oishi was at the American Museum of Natural History, things had changed.

At the museum, he worked with a computational biologist, Ward Wheeler, who was custom-building his own HPCCs to research the evolution of tree DNA over the past 500 million years. Ward’s budget wasn’t huge, Oishi recalls, “but he realized that he could order parts,” such as processors and cases “from a commodity source, get a team of people in his office with screwdrivers, and put them all together over a weekend.”

Fast forward a decade, to when Oishi was a postdoc at Berkeley, and every researcher with any kind of budget was building their own HPCC. “It fell to the faculty member or a grad student to maintain them because the IT department would say, ‘Do whatever you want but we’re not touching that. You brought it in, you built it, you put it in your closet.’ And we were running out of closet space.”

That created waste and redundancy, so by around 2010 colleges and universities began to move back to offering shared high-performance computing resources. “They stepped in and said, ‘Let us do this for you,’” Oishi says.

�ֲ��ý College welcomes new faculty for 2016–17

Doug Hubley — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 12:00:44 +0000

The �ֲ��ý faculty during Commencement 2014. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

In the 1970s and ’80s, President Hedley Reynolds began an expansion of the �ֲ��ý professoriate that markedly increased the number, as well as the quality, of the college’s faculty.

When Reynolds retired, in 1989, all but 16 of the 159 faculty members had been appointed during his presidency.

This strategy elevated both the value and the reputation of the �ֲ��ý education during the late 20th century, helping to make the college the national presence that it is today.

But another consequence of Reynolds’ strategy, and an inevitable one, is playing out in this century as the young fresh faces of the 1970s and ’80s approach retirement age.

In 2012, �ֲ��ý filled five tenure-track openings. Last year, it filled four. This year, out of a total of 11 long-term hires, nine individuals have filled eight tenure-track positions, including two postdoctoral spots that will convert to tenure track a year from now.

In short, as President Clayton Spencer noted in a recent letter to the �ֲ��ý community, the 2015–16 academic year was the college’s largest faculty-recruiting year in recent memory.

And the boom isn’t over: “This year we will search for 15 new faculty — 11 tenure-track, three long-term lecturers, and one senior, tenured position to lead the new Program in Digital and Computational Studies,” Spencer wrote.

Of course, as in Reynolds’ day, this influx of fresh talent amounts to an exciting process of renewal for the college. “What �ֲ��ý looks like in the future is at least partially revealed each time we hire a new faculty member,” Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer writes in his overview of the new tenure-track hires.

Let’s meet them.

+Wesley Chaney, Assistant Professor of History

Name: Wesley B. Chaney

Position: Assistant Professor of History

Where he studied: Stanford University
Davidson College

His work: In his graduate work, Chaney focused on legal, social, and environmental issues in northwest China in the 18th and 19th centuries. His dissertation examined the impacts of the advent of regular civilian administration, specifically disputes over land and trade. At �ֲ��ý, he teaches Chinese history from various eras and perspectives — and he’d like to introduce a course reflecting his current research into sports, gender, and the body in modern China. “It’s important to show undergrads the research that we’re doing and have them see how exciting that is.”

A teaching goal: Chaney based his dissertation research on archival material that included legal records involving homicides. Because of political or administrative concerns, he says, “creating these narratives was, in a lot of ways, more about creating a seamless narrative when, actually, what was on the ground was probably far messier. Historians need to be critical of the assumptions that went into the production of these records. We always keep in mind who’s the author, who’s the audience, why might this have been written, what is silenced in this source?”

These kids today: “It’s striking how many students today have studied Chinese language in high school, and have even been to China. So this is a big change. And even if they haven’t taken Chinese language, there’s far more knowledge about China now. But I give the historical context to understand the China of today — as well, I hope, as sparking a curiosity in a different way of being human.”

Wesley Chaney, Assistant Professor of History. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Aleksandar M. Diamond-Stanic, Assistant Professor of Physics

Name: Aleksandar M. Diamond-Stanic

Position: Assistant Professor of Physics

Where he studied: University of Arizona
Carleton College

Before �ֲ��ý: Postdoctoral fellow, University of Wisconsin–Madison

His work: Virtually a vacuum, outer space does contain very diffuse matter — primarily hydrogen gas. This gas can coalesce to form stars, but the number of stars thus generated falls short of the potential. An astrophysicist, Diamond-Stanic seeks to understand that inefficiency in star creation. Specifically, he studies interactions between galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their centers, and how those interactions relate to gas and star formation. This work, for which Diamond-Stanic and �ֲ��ý students are working with Hubble Space Telescope imagery, is supported by funds from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

A teaching goal: “Physics has a little public relations problem: ‘That’s hard, I don’t want to do that, you have to be like Einstein.’ That myth is problematic because you lose very talented people as a result. It’s a social justice problem: People are being denied the right to pursue what they might be interested in. I want to push for ways to recognize that and improve it, to make teaching more welcoming and inclusive, so that people can pursue their interests and dreams in the field.”

Why �ֲ��ý: Diamond-Stanic discovered astrophysics through a welcoming and supportive professor at Carleton. “I wanted to get back to that small-college environment. I see my colleagues at larger research-focused institutions being pulled away from my values and priorities: How do you mentor and teach undergraduate students? That’s really No. 1 at �ֲ��ý. Given the importance of those priorities to my own identity development, my own decision to go into physics, that’s something I value highly.”

Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, Assistant Professor of Physics. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Nathan C. Faries, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies

Name: Nathan C. Faries

Position: Assistant Professor of Asian Studies (joint appointment)

Where he studied: The Pennsylvania State University
Baylor University
Wheaton College

Before �ֲ��ý: Associate Professor of English, University of Dubuque
(A tenured position; he left in good standing to join family at �ֲ��ý.)

His work: Faries teaches Chinese language, literature, and culture. He is an authority on Christian narratives in China and has recently researched Catholicism, the official rehabilitation of Confucianism, and the important 20th-century writer and literary scholar Su Xuelin. Faries wrote The “Inscrutably Chinese” Church: How Narratives and Nationalism Continue to Divide Christianity.

The appeal of his work: “I grew up in a kind of missionary culture where there was this idea of the fierce oppressive Chinese government, the underground church, and all this secret stuff going on. And I went there to live, and realized that is not the whole story. I wanted to know: What are the mechanisms of control and freedom? How does the government negotiate its relationship with people who have a loyalty outside of the borders? And how do those Christians negotiate their identity, because they’re through-and-through Chinese? I like to see how narratives help them walk this tightrope between different parts of themselves.”

Why �ֲ��ý: “�ֲ��ý students have an attitude about education that I appreciate. They have questions, they’re engaged in their studies. It’s not a sideline for them or a career move. It’s liberal arts studies: How can I enlarge my vision through this and serve society eventually? And the college has all this support for pedagogy, how to be a better teacher. It’s a great focus.”

Nathan Faries, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Carolina González Valencia, Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow

Name: Carolina González Valencia��

Position: Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture
Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow*

Where she studied: School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Broward College

Her work: González brings a studio art background to work in new media, film, and video, including animation. A native of Colombia, her projects include videos that combine diverse production methods to explore issues of family and personal history, migration and immigration, feminism, displacement, and labor. As a Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Fellow in 2016–17, she’s designing curricula for teaching animation and video in addition to teaching two courses.

Why she teaches: “Teaching allows me to connect with different ideas and to expand the conversation. I see the classroom as a circulation system, where we learn from and inspire each other. This exchange is refreshing and nurturing. Teaching also allows me to expand and question my research, to keep an active dialogue with my field — and at the same time, to facilitate a creative process for students where they can see themselves as makers of their own ideas.”

Why �ֲ��ý: “Art by its nature is interdisciplinary, so teaching art to students who are studying different fields creates a rich exchange of ways of thinking, researching, and interests that’s unique to a liberal arts college like �ֲ��ý. I’m eager to collaborate with other fields — Latin American studies, film studies, women and gender studies, social sciences, just to name a few. And I’m excited to see how my own art practice will develop within this context.”

*Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellows become tenure-track assistant professors in their second year at �ֲ��ý.

Carolina Gonzalez Valencia, Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Andrew J. Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Name: Andrew J. Kennedy

Position: Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Where he studied: University of Virginia
Providence College

Before �ֲ��ý: Postdoctoral fellow, University of Alabama at Birmingham

His work: Kennedy studies phenomena involved in specific types of learning and memory, such as those that enable us to use language. Specifically, he looks at so-called epigenetic mechanisms, or chemical processes that control the organization of genes, as they relate to synaptic plasticity and long-term encoding of memory. Supported by the Pitt-Hopkins Research Foundation, he is conducting pioneering research into Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome, a rare disorder on the autism spectrum. In related research funded by the INBRE Investigator program, he’s also studying approaches to enhance cognition more generally.

What he loves about his work: “We’re in a position to ask really exciting questions about how the brain functions to facilitate learning and memory. A century ago, quantum physicists developed tools to start probing the fundamental aspects of matter, and it was a whirlwind of discovery. I think we’re entering a similar era in neuroscience. In this century, one of the big questions will be how the brain works to elicit complex human behavior. As long as there have been humans, we’ve wondered what it means to be human, and we can now look into the brain at a molecular level and start to understand that in a physical way. So, it’s a very exciting time.”

Why �ֲ��ý: “�ֲ��ý is special because it bridges the gap between the educational excellence of an elite small college and a commitment to high-quality research. You have juniors and seniors who have gained a deeper understanding of the underlying principles in the classroom, and you can put them into research labs that are asking the kinds of questions that they may devote themselves to in graduate school and beyond.”

Andrew Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Yinxing (Mia) Liu, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies

Name: Yinxing (Mia) Liu

Position: Assistant Professor of Asian Studies (joint appointment). From 2014 to 2016, Liu was a lecturer in Asian studies and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at �ֲ��ý.

Where studied: University of Chicago
The Pennsylvania State University
Xiangtan University, China

Before �ֲ��ý: Postdoctoral associate, East Asian Studies Center, Yale University

Her work: Liu is an art historian who studies modern and contemporary art, cinema, and visual culture in China and East Asia, focusing on the dynamics and cross-fertilization between different media. She has previously written on landscape aesthetics in Chinese cinema, while her recent work focuses on pictorialist photography in China during the mid-20th century, its social-political engagements, and its interaction with traditional art media such as ink painting.

Why study Chinese art? “If you want to engage with the world, Chinese culture is a huge part of the world. And Chinese art has a very strong presence in contemporary art now. Also, the beauty of art is that you can’t really pin it down. Art is a good way for us to challenge our preconceptions and jog our prejudices. It keeps our minds open, young, and fresh. That’s very fitting for a liberal arts education, too — that’s the point of us being here, really. In the case of Chinese art, especially, we can see different perspectives and hear different voices challenging one message from a single source, and also jolting our preconception of a culture and a tradition that keeps evolving with the time.”

Why �ֲ��ý: “I like the liberal arts setting; I never had experience with it before I came to �ֲ��ý. I like the freedom of my research — I can define my own research profile, within reasonable boundaries. I also like the fact that students are very engaged. They want to learn.”

Mia Liu, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Andrew M. Mountcastle, Assistant Professor of Biology

Name: Andrew M. Mountcastle��

Position: Assistant Professor of Biology

Where he studied: University of Washington
Bowdoin College

Before �ֲ��ý: Postdoctoral fellow, Harvard University

His work: Mountcastle studies mechanisms that animals employ for motion through environments that can be complex, dynamic, and often unpredictable. His current focus is insect flight. “Insects are ubiquitous, and yet there are so many aspects of insect life and locomotion patterns that we don’t fully understand. Wings have fascinated me for years: They are highly adapted and the focus of intense, often competing, selective pressures. In addition to flight, insect wings also have assorted other functions, including helping camouflage the insect or facilitating courtship activity.” Most recently, he has worked to incorporate a type of joint found in wasp wings into a flying microrobot.

The Maine connection: Mountcastle grew up in Orono, where his father recently retired from the University of Maine physics faculty. “Maine has been in my blood ever since. It’s great to be back.”

A teaching goal: As an undergraduate, Mountcastle took a physics course in which students were expected to develop and address their own research questions. (He developed a microphone array to locate birds by their calls.) “I was asking questions that, to my knowledge, hadn’t been explored, and was coming up with tools and techniques to answer them. It was thrilling. I really try, in my teaching, to bring my students to the frontiers of scientific knowledge. For me, that was the most rewarding part, as opposed to just sitting there and learning about what other people have already learned.”

Andrew Mountcastle, Assistant Professor of Biology. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Jeffrey S. Oishi, Assistant Professor of Physics

Name: Jeffrey S. Oishi��

Position: Assistant Professor of Physics

Where he studied: University of Virginia
Columbia University

Before �ֲ��ý: Assistant Professor of Physics, Farmingdale State College

His work: Oishi is a computational astrophysicist specializing in fluid dynamics. In a recent project, he developed relatively simple mathematical models to help understand instability in the rotation of magnetized fluids within stars — an analysis that otherwise, he says, demands “far more computational power than will exist in our lifetime.” Undertaken with research partners in Colorado and students at �ֲ��ý, Oishi’s current project aims to adapt the behavior of solar magnetic fields as models for stars in general.

The appeal of his work: “It’s an intersection of a lot of different fields. I do a lot more math than the average astronomer, more programming than the average theorist, and more astronomy than the average fluid dynamics person. So what really appeals to me is that I can pull from a broad set of skills, which means I’m always learning something new.”

“Ask an Astronomer”: Oishi exemplifies a generation of scientists committed to engaging the public. He took part in the “Astronomy on Tap” barroom lecture series in Brooklyn and joined a friend who, with a sign reading “Ask an Astronomer,” answered questions about the field in the New York subway. “We got a lot of stories from people who liked science as a child, and then something happened and they lost interest or felt they could no longer pursue it — a teacher or experience in school made them feel science wasn’t for them. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to reach those people and make science more inclusive.”

Jeffrey Oishi, Assistant Professor of Physics. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

+Patrick W. Otim, Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow

Name: Patrick W. Otim��

Position: Lecturer in History
Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow*

Where studied: University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Notre Dame
Gulu University, Gulu, Uganda
Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

His work: As a Diversity and Faculty Renewal Fellow, Otim is designing courses on African history and African studies more broadly. His research has focused on his native Uganda, but he will teach the history of East Africa this fall, the history of health and healing in the winter, and a broad survey of African history next fall.

Why study Africa? “It is an important continent with a lot of rich and diverse histories and global connections. For example, you cannot study slavery without thinking about Africa. Even in the post-independence era, if you want to talk about things like the Cold War, Africa was greatly involved. So to study history without Africa is just telling only part of a story. Africa really has to be there.”

A teaching goal: Otim comes from a small town called Gulu in northern Uganda, which was the center of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency. From 2002 to 2008, he worked for an international NGO assisting people displaced by the insurgency. That work illustrated the clash between Western concepts of justice and local practices: In northern Uganda, victims of wrongdoing expect perpetrators to confess and show remorse publicly, rather than serving time. “It’s this different kind of understanding that I want my students to think about. When you’re in a different cultural context, you shouldn’t think, ‘This is how justice should be.’ It is never uniform. I feel I can contribute to peace by teaching students my understanding of peace.”

* Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellows become tenure-track assistant professors in their second year at �ֲ��ý.

Patrick Otim, Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

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