Lehigh University
Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
New Faculty - 2012 / 2013
Sanaz S. Aghazadeh
Assistant Professor,
Accounting
Sanaz Aghazadeh earned her doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, and her bachelor’s degree in accounting from Louisiana State University. Prior to joining the Lehigh faculty she served as an associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Her research interests are in judgment and decision making, specifically as they relate to the auditing profession. Her research accomplishments include being selected as a AAA Doctoral Consortium fellow and being awarded the CAQ Academic Research in Auditing Grant (2011) to support her work on her dissertation, “Expressed Client Confidence and Skepticism: The Effect of Expressed Client Confidence on Auditor Judgments.” Her teaching interests are in auditing, and she received the OU Price College of Business Graduate Excellence in Teaching award.
Kelly F. Austin
Assistant Professor,
Sociology & Anthropology
Kelly Austin earned her doctorate and master’s degrees in Sociology from North Carolina State University and her bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Human Development and Family Sciences from Oregon State University. Austin joins the Lehigh faculty after the completion of her dissertation: “A New Infection and the Forgotten Diseases: HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in Less-Developed Nations.” Austin’s work has been published in numerous journals such as The Sociological Quarterly, International Journal of Sociology, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Her research and teaching interests include global development and inequality, social epidemiology, the environment, and quantitative methods.
Arindam Banerjee
Assistant Professor,
Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics
Arindam Banerjee earned his doctorate from Texas A&M University, his master’s degree from Florida Institute of Technology, and his bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India , all in Mechanical Engineering. Before coming to Lehigh, Banerjee served as an assistant professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Missouri, Rolla) and as a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Banerjee is the author of a number of journal articles, book chapters, and conference publications. Banerjee’s interest lies in fluid dynamics in extreme environments, alternative energy applications (wind and hydro energy), and bio-fluid dynamics.
Allen M. Carrion
Assistant Professor,
Perella Department of Finance
Allen Carrion earned his doctorate in business administration from the University of Utah, his M.B.A. from the University of Maryland, and his bachelor’s degree ineEngineering from Virginia Tech. Before joining academia, he worked in fixed income analysis and risk management at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He has also provided consulting services to several government agencies on trading, risk management, and derivative valuation matters and has a continuing research affiliation with the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). His research interests include empirical market microstructure, empirical asset pricing, and risk management, and his primary teaching interest is in corporate finance.
Kwame Essien
Assistant Professor,
History
Kwame Essien earned his doctorate in African and African diaspora history from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Prior to Lehigh, Essien served as a Derrick Gondwe postdoctoral fellow at Gettysburg College, and an assistant professor as the University of Central Arkansas. Essien co-authored Culture and Customs of Sudan, and has published articles, chapters, reviews, and encyclopedia entries. He has presented his works at national and international conferences, and is the recipient of the 2011 Junior Scholar Excellence Award in African Studies. Essien’s research focus is on comparative histories of slavery, reverse migrations, race and cultures in Africa, and the African diaspora/Atlantic world, homophobia in Africa and African American history in Ghana/West Africa.
John T. Fox
Assistant Professor,
Civil & Environmental Engineering
John Fox earned his doctorate and master’s degrees in Environmental Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and his bachelor’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from the Virginia Military Institute. Before joining Lehigh’s faculty, he served as a research assistant at Penn State University, and previously served as the Vice President for Education and Defense at the Virginia Military Institute Honor Court. Fox has published articles in journals such as Environmental Science and Technology and Transactions of the American Foundry Society, and he has presented his work at conferences across the U.S. His research focuses on preventing pollution from industrial activities, reclaiming industrial waste for value-added resources, and developing novel materials for environmental engineering applications.
David A. Griffith
Professor & Chair,
Marketing
David Griffith earned his doctorate in marketing with a concentration in international business from Kent State University. Prior to joining Lehigh, he was the John William Byington endowed chair in global marketing and professor of marketing at Michigan State University. Griffith’s research focuses on business-to-business governance, firm-customer linkage, and international marketing strategy. He has published over 100 refereed articles, with his work appearing in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of International Business Studies. He serves as the editor-in-chief (2008-2013) of the American Marketing Association’s Journal of International Marketing, and has received numerous awards for research and teaching excellence, most recently the 2011 John and Dortha Withrow Teacher-Scholar award.
Arman Grigoryan
Assistant Professor,
International Relations
Arman Grigoryan earned his doctorate in political science at Columbia University, a master’s degree in international relations at the University of Chicago, and a bachelor’s degree at the Yerevan State University in Armenia. He has been the recipient of postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships at the University of Michigan, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. Grigoryan has presented at numerous conferences internationally and published articles in the International Studies Quarterly, International Security, and Ethnopolitics. His teaching and research focus on international relations theory, nationalism, interstate and intrastate conflict.
Julie Haas
Assistant Professor,
Biological Sciences
Julie Haas earned her doctorate in biomedical engineering from Boston University after a bachelor’s degree in music and mathematics from Indiana University. Before joining the faculty, Haas served as a postdoctoral research fellow at UC San Diego and as a research associate at Harvard University’s Center for Brain Science. Her work has been published in numerous journals such as Science, Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, and Journal of Neurophysiology. Her teaching and research focus is on the circuitry of the brain, in particular studying the changes in neural connection strength that result from activity.
Khurram Hussain
Assistant Professor,
Religion Studies
Khurram Hussain earned his doctorate, master’s degree, and master of philosophy in religious studies from Yale University, his master’s degree in religion from Yale Divinity School, and his bachelor’s degree in religion and physics from Bowdoin College. Before joining Lehigh’s faculty, he served as a teaching assistant in Lehigh University’s religion studies department and Yale University’s departments of political science, eeligious studies, sociology, Yale Divinity School, and Yale’s women’s studies program. Hussain was the recipient of the 2011WAVES award for Male Faculty Ally at Lehigh’s wWmen’s Center, and served as a predoctoral research fellowship in the center for global Islamic studies at Lehigh University. His research interests include comparative religious ethics, contemporary Islam, and the relationship between religion and politics in the modern world.
Michael Imerman
Assistant Professor,
Perella Department of Finance
Michael Imerman earned his doctorate and bachelor’s degrees in Finance from Rutgers University. Prior to coming to Lehigh, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. Before his career in academia, Imerman worked as an analyst on Wall Street. He has been invited to prestigious banking and risk management conferences including some hosted by Federal Reserve Banks, has presented his research across the country, and currently has several articles under review at top finance and economics journals. Imerman’s research and teaching interests include credit risk modeling, banking and financial institutions, risk management, and derivatives.
Yoon Ju Kang
Assistant Professor,
Accounting
Yoon Ju Kang earned her doctorate in Accounting and a master’s degree in accountancy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her bachelor’s degree in business administration and public Relations from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, Korea. Before coming to Lehigh, Kang served as a teaching and research assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and as a junior associate for Samsung Securities in Seoul, Korea. She was a PricewaterhouseCoopers scholar, and the recipient of two fellowships from the University of Illinois. Kang is a certified public accountant, and a member of the American Accounting Association. Kang’s research interests lie in the judgment and decision making literature in auditing and corporate governance contexts. She has presented at conferences in the U.S. and Australia.
Alberto J. Lamadrid
Assistant Professor,
Economics
Alberto Lamadrid earned his doctorate in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University, his master’s degree in Engineering Management from New Jersey Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in Economics from New York University, and his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. Lamadrid's research interests are in electricity markets, power systems, energy economics, and resource economics. Before coming to Lehigh, Lamadrid was a research assistant at Cornell University, and a vice president of portfolio management for Citibank International in London. Lamadrid has published in journals such as the Energy Journal and the International Journal of Innovations in Energy Systems and Power. He has presented his works at conferences, colleges, and universities throughout Europe, Latin America, and the U.S.
Christopher T.H. Liang
Associate Professor,
Education & Human Services
Christopher Liang earned his doctorate in Counseling Psychology and his master’s degree in College Student Personnel Services from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Prior to joining the Lehigh faculty, he served as an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of La Verne. He has presented his work at numerous national conferences and his work has been published in peer-reviewed journals. Liang’s teaching and research interests include experiences of racism and racism-related stress, multicultural psychology, community psychology, social justice, and the intersections of racism, sexism, and masculinity ideologies among ethnic minority communities.
Julie Michiko Miwa
Assistant Professor,
Biological Sciences
Julie Michiko Miwa earned her doctorate in Neuroscience from the Rockefeller University in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology/Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her bachelor’s degree in Neurobiology from the University of California at Berkeley. Miwa was a visiting postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry in Yale University’s College of Medicine, and was a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. She holds two patents, has authored numerous publications, and is the recipient of a variety of grants and fellowships. She has presented her work across the U.S. and Europe. Her teaching interests include neuroscience, physiology, plasticity, and biotechnology.
Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy
Assistant Professor,
Economics
Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy earned his doctorate in Economics from the University of Houston, and a master’s degree in Physics from Odessa National University in Ukraine. Prior to joining Lehigh’s faculty, Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy served as an assistant professor at the University of Memphis, where he taught graduate Macroeconomics and Econometrics, and conducted research on monetary policy analysis. Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy’s papers have been published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and International Journal of Forecasting. He has been the recipient of several research grants, and has presented his works at conferences and seminars throughout the U.S. and abroad.
Brook Sawyer
Assistant Professor,
Education & Human Services
Brook Sawyer earned her doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of Virginia, and her master’s degree in Psychological Services from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Lehigh’s faculty, Sawyer served as a research associate at Temple University, and was a research faculty member at Thomas Jefferson University. Her research interests focus on promoting positive outcomes for young children who have disabilities, and preschool children who are English Language Learners. Based on this work, she has authored and published numerous articles and presented at national conferences. Sawyer’s teaching interests focus on bridging the research to practice gap to prepare classroom teachers with knowledge of child development and evidenced-based practices in language and literacy.
Nicholas C. Strandwitz
Assistant Professor,
Materials Science & Engineering
Nicholas Strandwitz earned his doctorate in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining Lehigh’s faculty, Strandwitz worked as an NSF postdoctoral fellow in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. He has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Materials Chemistry and the Journal of American Chemical Society. Strandwitz’ research interests include the synthesis and design of inorganic materials for solar energy conversion, chemical and electronic properties of nanostructured semiconductors, photoelectrochemistry, and earth abundant and nonconventional semiconductors.
David A. Vicic
Associate Professor, Chemistry
David Vicic earned his doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Rochester, and his bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University. He joins Lehigh after serving as an associate professor at the University of Hawaii and the University of Arkansas. He has received a number of awards, including a postdoctoral fellowship with the American Cancer Society, and participated in a NATO Advanced Study Institute in Budapest, Hungary. His research focus is on organic, inorganic, organometallic, and fluorine chemistry, for which he has secured numerous research grants. His many works have been published in journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Inorganic Chemistry, and Organometallics. Vicic has presented invited lectures at universities, companies, and conferences throughout the U.S. and around the globe.
Susan S. Woodhouse
Associate Professor,
Education & Human Services
Susan Woodhouse earned her doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, her master’s degree in counseling from the California State University, Hayward, and her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from New College of the University of South Florida. Before joining Lehigh, she served as an assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University and as a postdoctoral fellow in developmental psychology at the University of Maryland. Woodhouse has received numerous honors and awards, has presented her work nationally, and has published in journals such as Child Development, Journal of Counseling Psychology, and Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. Her research and teaching interests include mother-infant attachment, parenting in low SES families, intervention with high-risk families and infants, and relationships in early childhood settings.
