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The A&S
faculty: Sharing an international background and a
global reputation for excellence and creativity
UND Discovery asked Interim Dean Bruce Dearden for
the names of six faculty members who are role model
researchers and scholars and who characterize the
breadth of the academic spectrum in the College of
Arts and Sciences.
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Widely honored as a composer,
performer, and teacher, Sergio Gallo has also
established an international reputation as a scholar,
particularly in the music of South America and
the “piano-ism” of 19th century France.
(Photo:
Chuck Kimmerle/University Relations) |
Sergio Gallo, Music
Associate Professor Sergio Gallo, beginning his seventh
year at UND this fall, is an internationally known
pianist and musical scholar who, his department chair
Gary Towne says, has vastly increased UND’s
visibility on the international music scene. Born
in Brazil, Gallo is fluent in three languages, was
educated in places like Paris and Budapest, and holds
a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University
of California. He not only composes original music
but also performs and records several times a year
as a soloist with orchestras and in recitals around
the world. His CDs are reviewed by such publications
as the American Record Guide, whose critic recently
wrote: “Sergio Gallo is a grand pianist whose
every note is sincere. It is hard to imagine a pianist
leaving me with a more intense feeling of nobility.
This suits his interpretation of works such as Debussy’s
‘Collines d’Anacapri.’” Among
Gallo’s scholarly interests are the music of
South America and the “piano-ism” of 19th
and 20th century France, as well as issues related
to the performance and teaching of music.
Thomas Gilsdorf, Mathematics
Since he arrived at UND in 1990, Professor Tom Gilsdorf
has been a role model of the well-rounded, versatile
faculty member. For example, he is filling in while
Department Chair Bruce Dearden serves as interim dean
of the College of Arts and Sciences. A Minnesota native
who completed his Ph.D. at Washington State in 1988,
Gilsdorf is an internationally known expert in an
abstract area of pure mathematics known as “locally
convex vector spaces,” which develops tools
to solve partial differential equations. He has collaborated
with mathematicians around the world, particularly
in Europe and Latin America. So far his vita contains
20 peer-reviewed journal articles, most with titles
such as Bounded Sets in L(E,F). But his published
scholarship also includes titles such as Pre-Columbian
Native American Number Systems. It is in the field
of “ethno-mathematics,” especially as
it relates to the indigenous tribes of the Americas,
that Gilsdorf finds common ground with faculty in
a broader set of disciplines than those whom mathematicians
typically gravitate toward in their collaborative
work.
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Colleagues have praised
Michael Anderegg for “his uncanny ability
to apply his considerable learning to our larger
conversations about history, politics, culture
— all of the disciplines, really —
of the humanities.”
(Photo:
Chuck Kimmerle/University Relations) |
Michael Anderegg, English
Unlike his colleague Tom Gilsdorf, Chester Fritz Distinguished
Professor of English Michael Anderegg is not a mathematician,
but he has played one. That happened last year when
he performed a lead role in a special production of
the first-run drama Proof, staged at UND by the Department
of Theatre Arts. Anderegg, whose Ph.D. is from Yale
University, arrived at UND in 1972 to teach Shakespeare,
Renaissance literature, and cinema. Over the years
he has been a prolific scholar (his latest book, Cinematic
Shakespeare, was one of the seven published by English
Department faculty in 2003-2004) and has found time
to be a public speaker for the North Dakota Humanities
Council. Above all, say his colleagues, Mike Anderegg
is “relevant.” Department Chair Jim McKenzie
puts it this way: “What is especially significant
about Michael’s work is his uncanny ability
to apply his considerable learning — including
state-of-the-art literary theory — to our larger
conversations about history, politics, culture —
all of the disciplines, really — of the humanities.”
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Gayle Baldwin was an Episcopal
priest before becoming a university professor.
She is researching the black religious community’s
reaction in New Jersey to the murder of a young
black lesbian, Sakia Gunn (pictured in foreground).
(Photo:
Chuck Kimmerle/University Relations) |
Gayle Baldwin, Philosophy and Religion
Assistant Professor Gayle Baldwin has established
herself as an advocate of fresh approaches to university
teaching, including in her own field of philosophy
and religion. One of UND’s oldest academic programs,
today it is attracting a growing number of students.
Baldwin’s work as a scholar is drawing national
attention on such topics as religion and culture in
a pluralist society, the role of narrative in forming
religious vision, and the challenge of homosexuality
to traditional Christian doctrine. An Episcopal priest
before she became a full-time academic, Baldwin earned
her Ph.D. from Marquette University and taught at
the University of South Carolina before coming to
UND in 2000. Her major project today is research for
a book, Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh: the Challenge
of Alternative Sexual Relationships to the Religious
Imagination. It concerns the reaction and response
of the African-American and white religious communities
in Newark, N.J., to the murder last year of a young
black lesbian, Sakia Gunn. The case is reminiscent
of the earlier gay-related killing of Matthew Shepard
in Wyoming.
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Kathryn Thomasson is looking
closely at protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions,
studying “samples” that can be as
small as 40 atoms.
(Photo:
Chuck Kimmerle/University Relations) |
Kathryn Thomasson, Chemistry
When you ask Professor Kathryn Thomasson when she
finds time for such an incredible professional life,
she concedes that she “doesn’t do much
else.” Her vita is more than 30 pages long,
single-spaced and full of the kind of citations that
much more senior faculty members dream of having.
Thomasson is relatively new to the ranks of academe,
earning her Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 1990
and working in private industry and completing a postdoctoral
fellowship at Tennessee Technical University before
joining UND in 1993. An early project was redesigning
much of the laboratory infrastructure in physical
chemistry and developing a new undergraduate curriculum.
Today she teaches mostly upper-division undergraduate
and graduate students (see Page 9). Her growing research
agenda incorporates large-scale computer simulations
with classical physics, chemistry, and biology, exploring
the dynamics of protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions
at an incredible microscopic level (in a sense, studying
“single molecules” ranging in size from
40 to 20,000 atoms). Among the results so far: 68
journal articles, 118 professional presentations,
and 38 single- and multiple-investigator external
grants valued at $10.6 million.
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Kanishka Marasinghe (right)
is helping to establish the Physics Department
as a player in nationally significant research.
He also is interested in teaching innovation,
recently developing UND’s first truly online
physics course. Here he works with graduate student
Mustafa Rajabali.
(Photo:
Chuck Kimmerle/University Relations) |
Kanishka Marasinghe, Physics
Associate Professor Kanishka Marasinghe, a native
of Sri Lanka, earned his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University
of Missouri-Rolla. He stayed on at that state’s
highly regarded technological university, first as
a postdoctoral fellow and then as a research assistant
professor in the Center for Material
Research. When UND recruited him in the fall of 2000,
he already had published nearly 50 journal articles,
many of them about the atomic structure of certain
novel magnetic intermetallics and vitreous iron phosphates.
Marasinghe liked what he saw, although, he says with
a smile, UND offered him only an empty room and $50,000
in start-up costs, compared to the national going
rate in his field of $200,000. But thanks to three
major grants from the North Dakota Experimental Program
to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), he soon
assembled the state-of-the-art instrumentation that
made possible a major grant from the National Science
Foundation. Marasinghe and his team of graduate students
are today rubbing shoulders with collaborators at
four national laboratories, including the Lawrence
Berkeley lab in California. They have carved out a
research niche, he says, with great potential for
the future development of high-tech switching devices
and high-energy lasers.
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