Biographies of Lecturers

Burger | Cassimeris | Clymer | Dillon | Dolan | Ferris | Ghadiali | Glod | Heindel | Lopresti

Lowe-Krentz | Maas | Marzillier | Sands | Schneider | Simon | Swann | Vavylonis | Ware | Wicklund

• R. Michael Burger, Ph.D.received his BA from Ithaca College, his PhD from the University of Texas and received postdoctoral training at the University of Washington Medical School and the University of Munich.  His research has been supported by grants from national and international funding agencies that include a Ruth Kirstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health and Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Society of Germany.  His research focuses on the neurobiology of hearing with an emphasis on electrophysiological techniques.  The objectives of his work include resolving the synaptic and systems level function of auditory brain circuitry.  Dr. Burger has published in several prestigious journals including the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Neurophysiology, and the Journal of Comparative Neurology. Dr. Burger is currently an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh.

• Lynne Cassimeris, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University where her lab group studies mitosis and microtubule assembly.  In recognition of her research accomplishments, Cassimeris was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  In December 2004, Dr. Cassimeris was named a Keith R. Porter Fellow, an award that recognizes individuals who show “unusual potential for an outstanding career in cell biology.” She has served on scientific review panels for the American Cancer Society, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program.  Dr. Cassimeris’ laboratory has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and NATO.  Dr. Cassimeris is also a co-lead editor of the textbook Cells, published in 2007 by Jones and Bartlett. At Lehigh, Dr. Cassimeris was the recipient of the 2006 Eleanor and Joseph F. Libsch Research Award.  She was a Distinguished Associate Professor (1999 – 2001), endowed by the Class of 1961 and was a Dana Foundation Faculty Fellow as an Assistant Professor (1992 – 1996).  Dr. Cassimeris is the Director of the Confocal Light Microscopy Facility and previously served as chair of the department’s undergraduate research committee (1997 – 2001).  Cassimeris completed her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for work in cell biology.  Dr. Cassimeris was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania before accepting a faculty position at Lehigh University.

• Mark Clymer is a Product Manager and Business Development Specialist in the Life Sciences Group of Olympus America.  In his current role, Mark is Product Manager for a new instrument line for laboratory science, geared towards pharmaceutical drug discovery and molecular research.  He also provides marketing guidance and support for Olympus’ line of small animal imaging systems. Mark began his career as a bench-level scientist in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research.  Later, he moved into global marketing and strategic planning for a major international pharmaceutical company where he participated in the preparation and worldwide launch of a new therapeutic.  After a brief period as a pharmaceutical marketing consultant, Mark accepted a position selling microscopes and imaging systems for Olympus.  To leverage his business and marketing experience, he later transferred into his current position.
  Mark received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Gettysburg College, and his MBA in Marketing and post-MBA in Pharmaceutical Marketing from St. Joseph’s University.

• Robin Dillon, Ph.D.,is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Lehigh University who specializes in ethics and moral psychology. Her scholarly interest lies in understanding the nature and moral importance of self-respect and the phenomenology of the moral life: what it is like to try or to fail to be a self-respecting and morally good person. She is one of the leading authorities on respect and self-respect and has published entries on that subject for two preeminent encyclopedias of philosophy, as well as numerous articles in leading philosophy journals and edited volumes, and is the editor of Dignity, Character and Self-Respect (Routledge).  She was awarded an American Fellowship by the American Association of Academic Women in 2006-2007 to support work on a book on arrogance, which will be published by Oxford University Press. She has been invited to lecture at universities and conferences in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, and England, as well as throughout the United States. Dr. Dillon teaches undergraduate courses in ethical theory, bioethics, social and political philosophy, and feminist theory, and received the Stabler Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, as well as eight other teaching commendations. From 1994 to 2001 she served as Director of Lehigh’s Women’s Studies Program and is currently a member of the American Philosophical Society's Committee on the Status of Women and the Executive Board of the Society for Analytic Feminism. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and has been a member of the Lehigh faculty since 1987.

• Elizabeth Dolan, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, takes an interdisciplinary approach to British Romantic-era literature, emphasizing the history of medicine and women’s literature. She has two books forthcoming: the monograph Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era (Ashgate 2007) and a scholarly edition of Charlotte Smith’s children’s books, The Works of Charlotte Smith, (Pickering & Chatto 2007). Dolan has also published articles on Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, and Virginia Woolf. She earned her doctorate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she also held the Senior Fellowship for Literature and Medicine in the Medical School. In the summer of 2002, Dolan attended the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Institute, “Medicine, Literature, and Culture.” Dolan won Lehigh’s Junior Faculty Teaching Award in 2003, and was also named to a Frank R. Hook Assistant Professorship. Among other courses, she teaches a seminar entitled TimeSlips, in which senior English majors conduct storytelling sessions with Alzheimer’s patients. She serves on the steering committees of the Gipson Institute, the Humanities Center, South Mt. College, and the Women’s Studies Program; the advisory boards of the PA Medical Humanities Consortium, and the 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Association; and has reviewed grants for the NEH.

• Craig Ferris, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Institute for Translational Imaging at Northeastern University, is recognized as an authority on the neurobiology of aggressive behavior and a leading figure in the development and application of fMRI technologies in neuroscience. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation for over 20 years. Dr. Ferris is President of Insight Neuroimaging Systems, LLC, a bioengineering company specializing in the development of radiofrequency electronics and contrast agents for use in magnetic resonance imaging. He was formerly Professor of Psychiatry and Physiology in the Department of Psychiatry and Director, Center of Comparative Neuroimaging, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Ferris received his bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from New York Medical College, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School..

• Samir Ghadiali, Ph.D. received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Tulane University. Dr. Ghadiali is a Parker B. Francis fellow in Pulmonary Research and is the Frank Hook Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Lehigh University. He is currently a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Lehigh and also holds an adjunct research position at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The objectives of Dr. Ghadiali’s research program is to identify the molecular, cellular and organ level phenomena responsible for various respiratory disorders and to develop novel biomechanical and pharmaceutical therapies for these disorders. Dr. Ghadiali’s specific research interests include biofluid mechanics at the cellular and molecular scale, mechanobiology of pulmonary cells (including genomic and proteomic analysis), surfactant dynamics, multi-scale modeling of microfluidic systems and fluid-structure interactions. Dr. Ghadiali has received several competitive research grants and awards from the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association and the U.S. National Committee on Biomechanics. Dr. Ghadiali has also authored several publications in leading engineering and medical journals including the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Journal of Fluid Mechanics and the Journal of Applied Physiology.

• John Glod, MD, Ph.D. graduated from Lehigh University in 1988 with a B.S. in biochemistry.  He then went on to obtain his M.D. and Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Colorado.  He is currently an assistant professor in the departments of pediatrics and pharmacology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in New Brunswick, N.J.  He is a practicing pediatric oncologist and his laboratory studies the interaction between various cellular components within the tumor microenvironment.

• Ned Heindel, Ph.D. is a Professor of Chemistry at Lehigh where his research has involved the development of new drugs and diagnostic devices.  Over four decades he and his students have worked on ten therapeutic targets including toxic shock syndrome, Alzheimers disease, cancer, infectious diseases, vesication, psoriasis, vitiligo, arthritis, tooth decay, and menstrual dysfunction.  Five drug products on which he and his team have worked went into human clinical trials and two have become commercial products.  Ned received his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Delaware and completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medicinal Chemistry at Princeton University.  He has taught at Ohio University and Marshall University before coming to Lehigh and his research has been funded by the American Cancer Society, the NIH, the NSF, and the U.S. Army Medical Command.  Ned has consulted and carried out contract research for six major pharmaceutical companies. He is the recipient of the Brady Award for Cancer Research and the Henry Hill Award for Achievements in Medicinal Chemistry.  At Lehigh Ned teaches courses in medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutics, and organic synthesis.

• Daniel Lopresti, Ph.D. received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton in 1987. After completing his doctorate, he joined the Computer Science Department at Brown and taught courses ranging from VLSI design to computational aspects of molecular biology. He went on to help found the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory, and later also served on the research staff at Bell Labs. In 2003, Dr. Lopresti joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh where his work focuses on fundamental algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, with applications in bioinformatics, document analysis, and computer security. This past summer, he collaborated with Drs. Stefan Maas (Biological Sciences) and Ian Laurenzi (Chemical Engineering) as well as a student research team to develop computational techniques for searching large genetic databases for evidence of RNA editing events, a part of Lehigh's Biosystems Dynamics Summer Institute funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Other of his projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dr. Lopresti is co-director of the Lehigh Pattern Recognition Research (PatRec) Lab. He has authored over 100 publications and holds 21 U.S. patents.

• Linda Lowe-Krentz, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Biological Sciences Department. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Northwestern University. She then carried out research in cancer biochemistry at the Chicago Medical School. Her current research is focused on signal transduction and wound repair in the vascular system. Among other things, she teaches biochemistry of metabolism and a graduate course on signal transduction and cancer.

• Stefan Maas, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, came to Lehigh from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, where he served as a post-doctoral research scientist.  He earned his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and his master’s degree from the Free University of Berlin. Maas has had extensive research experience at institutions such as the Max-Planck Institutes for Medical Research and Molecular Genetics, and has received fellowships such as the Anna Fuller Fellowship in Molecular Oncology.  He has published extensively and presented at national and international conferences such as the Gordon Research Conferences, and the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting. His main research interests are in molecular genetics and the generation of complexity in nature.

• Jutta Marzillier, Ph.D. is heading the Genomics/ Proteomics Facility in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University, offering DNA sequencing, quantitative RT-PCR, microarrays, and protein analysis.  She earned her master’s degree from the University of Giessen and her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and did her postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA.  She then joined start-up biotechnology companies investigating the utilization of extracelluar matrix proteins for growth and expansion of human embryonic stem cells.  She came to Lehigh in 2003.  Currently, she is also a co-investigator with Dr. Dmitri Vezenov (Chemistry) focusing on the development of ‘Force Spectroscopy Platform for label free Genome Sequencing’ funded by NIH. 

• Jeffrey Sands, Ph.D. is a senior professor and the Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences.  He earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Delaware and his doctoral degree in biophysics from Penn State University.  He joined the faculty of Lehigh University in 1973. In his 34 years at Lehigh, Sands has taught courses ranging from introductory physics to advanced viral genetics, and has been recognized for excellence in teaching several times throughout his career. In 1982, he was the first recipient of the College of Engineering's Service Teaching Award.  He received the Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Foundation Award for professional excellence in 1983 and the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for distinguished teaching by a senior member of the faculty in 1999.  Most recently, in 2007, the Lehigh alumni class of 1997 presented Sands with the Deming Lewis Award for having “most significantly influenced its members’ educational experience.” Over the course of his Lehigh career, Sands and his research students have published over 50 journal articles in biophysics, molecular biology, and virology. Throughout the 1970’s, ‘80’s, and ‘90’s, his experimental research program was supported by grants from the NIH (Fogarty Senior International Fellowship), NSF, DOE, USDA, and several pharmaceutical companies. Currently, he consults and collaborates in the area of virus epidemiology, evolution, and vaccine development. Throughout his career, Sands has played a major role in helping lead Lehigh forward in the life sciences.  He co-founded the Ph.D. program in molecular biology in 1975, chaired the Bioengineering Task Force in 1983, served two previous terms as Department Chair in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and was Program Director for the first three Undergraduate Science Education grants to Lehigh from HHMI, from 1989 through 2002.

• Jill Schneider, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.  The Schneider Lab studies hormonal and metabolic control of reproductive and ingestive behavior.  This research impacts on the study of obesity, diabetes and eating disorders as well as fertility and sexuality.  At the interface of these fields of research lies a sensory system that monitors internal energy availability and regulates behavior and physiology.  The Schneider Lab is trying to determine the stimuli and detectors of energy availability, and how this metabolic system allows animals to regulate their food intake, energy storage and energy expenditure, including the energy expended on reproduction. The Schneider Lab has been supported by research funding from the National Science Foundation since 1988 and from the National Institutes of Health since 1995.  She was a Distinguished Associate Professor endowed by the Lehigh University Class of 1961 and recipient of the Frank Beach Award for the most promising junior research scientist in the field of behavioral neuroendocrinology.  Professor Schneider completed her Ph.D. at Wesleyan University, and was a postdoctoral research associate and research assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts.

• Neal G. Simon, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Sciences, has over 25 years research experience in behavioral neurobiology. His research in drug development, hormone-neurotransmitter interactions, and behavioral regulation has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Ben Franklin Northeast Tier Technology Partnership, the Life Sciences Greenhouse of Central PA, and the H.F Guggenheim Foundation, and private corporations. Dr. Simon serves on foundation and scientific advisory boards and consults for biotechnology companies. Dr. Simon received a B.A. with honors from the State University of New York at Binghamton, the M.S. and Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and was a National Research Service Postdoctoral Fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  In 1996, he served as a Distinguished Research Professor at Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France.

• Jennifer Swann, Ph..D. is an Associate Professor in the department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University.  She received her bachelors degree in Psychology at Penn State, her masters in psychobiology at Florida State and her PhD at Northwestern. She has published work in circadian rhythms, photoperiodism and neuroanatomy.  Currently the main focus of her research is to determine how the brain regulates behavior by correlating brain morphology with its function. To that end she has been studying the development and expression of sex differences in brain behavior. Dr. Swann teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate level and has published papers with both types of students.

• Dimitrios Vavylonis, Ph.D. Vavylonis joined Lehigh as Assistant Professor in physics in 2006 following work as a postdoc in Columbia's department of chemical engineering and Yale's department of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. He is performing research in the area theoretical cellular biophysics, developing mathematical models of actin cytoskeleton dynamics in close collaboration with experimentalists. Vavylonis received his doctorate and master¢s degree in physics from Columbia University and his bachelor¢s degree in physics from the University of Athens. His work in theoretical soft matter physics and biophysics has been published in journals such as Molecular Cell, Physical Review Letters, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Vassie Ware, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, received her BA from Brown University, her MPhil and PhD from Yale University, and did her postdoctoral training at Brown University.  Her laboratory studies species-specific differences in ribosome maturation in eukaryotic cells, with special interests in ribosomal RNA (rRNA) processing and rRNA-ribosomal protein interactions.  Dr. Ware is the Co-director of the HHMI-sponsored undergraduate education initiative at Lehigh.  She also serves as Co-director of the Distance Education MS Molecular Biology Program and as the Chair of the Infrastructure Committee in the Department of Biological Sciences. Dr. Ware teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, primarily in the areas of molecular genetics and molecular cell biology.

• Kimberly Wicklund, Ph.D. - coming soon