Six Colorado College faculty members have been approved for tenure and promotion to associate professor. They are:
David Brown, mathematics. Brown joined Colorado College in 2004. He earned a B.A. in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., in 1992 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of California, Davis, in 2001. Brown is a mathematical biologist, using mathematical models to investigate biological phenomena. His research is in population biology and ecology, with a recent foray into bacterial genetics. In his dissertation work, he studied stochastic (i.e. incorporating chance) models of the spatial spread of plant diseases. As a postdoctoral candidate, he studied the interactions between global climate change, soil food webs, and nutrient fluxes.
Emily Chan, psychology. Chan joined Colorado College in 2004. She earned a B.A. in psychology from Princeton University in 1997 and a
Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2002. Chan’s research interests include social psychology; interpersonal perception and self-presentation; prejudice and stereotyping; conflict and negotiation; judgment and decision making; evolutionary psychology; and cross-cultural social psychology.
Gail Murphy-Geiss, sociology. Murphy-Geiss joined Colorado College in 2004. She has a B.A. from Westminster College in Pennsylvania, a master’s of divinity from Boston University and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology. Her doctoral work in religion and social change culminated in a dissertation on family values among mainline Protestants. She teaches in the areas of gender, religion and family, and research methods. Her most recent research projects focus on sexual harassment in the United Methodist Church and women arrested for domestic violence. She also is interested in religion in relation to social institutions, especially law (civil religion and globalization; secularization; Supreme Court decisions on the “separation” of church and state and their social roots/consequences), church-sect-cult development, and new religious movements. Within the sociology of family, she is interested in changing family structures and domestic violence.
Andrew Price-Smith, political science. Price-Smith joined Colorado College in 2005. He has a B.A. from Queen’s University in Ontario, an M.A. from the University of Western Ontario, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto, where he also served as founding director of the Project on Health and Global Affairs at the Munk Center for International Studies. Before coming to Colorado College, Price-Smith taught in the government and environmental sciences departments at the University of South Florida. He is a specialist in international health and development and biosecurity issues and the author of “The Health of Nations,” which was short-listed for the Grawemeyer Award, and “Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization.”
Wade Roberts, sociology. Roberts joined Colorado College in 2004. He holds a B.A. from Minnesota State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. He currently teaches courses in political and environmental sociology, the sociology of health and medicine, and quantitative research methods. He also teaches a field-based course on development in Sierra Leone, where he is conducting a case study to examine both the institutional origins of state failure and the present organization of development efforts in a failed state context. That research builds on his continuing cross-national research on the institutional determinants of economic and social development. Roberts is particularly interested in the broad-based impacts of national family planning programs for a variety of development outcomes, and remains engaged in an ongoing project on the politics of institutional design of the U.S. welfare state, examining privatization reform efforts of Social Security and Medicare.
John Williams, history. Williams joined Colorado College in 2004. He earned a B.A. from Indiana University in history and East Asian languages and literature in 1990, an M.A. from Harvard University in East Asian regional studies in 1993, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005. His dissertation, titled “Fraud and Inquest in Jiangnan: The Politics of Examination in Early Qing China,” studied the political culture of Qing China using a civil service examination scandal as a point of departure for examining the relationship between ethnic tension, social mobility, and corruption in the early 18th-century. His research interests include 18th-century Qing political culture; Manchu aristocratic politics; the Yongzheng succession; popular religion and peasant militias in 20th-century China; and China, the Columbian exchange, and the Pacific Rim.
