At the beginning of each academic year, we announce and welcome the faculty members and coaches who are joining the Claremont McKenna College community. Read these brief biographies to learn their fields of expertise and academic backgrounds.
New Associate Professor
Rachel Fenning, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rachel Fenning joins the Psychological Science Department as an associate professor of Psychology. She will also direct the Claremont Autism Center. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with particular expertise in assessment and treatment for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Her research examines child and family contributions to social emotional development, biobehavioral regulation, and clinical outcomes in children with ASD and related intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). She also develops and tests interventions designed to promote physical health, adaptive behavior, and well-being in underserved children with ASD and their families. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources and Services Administration. She is the incoming President-Elect of Division 33 (IDD/ASD) of the American Psychological Association, and she currently serves on the Editorial Board of Psychological Assessment and Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology.
New Assistant Professors
Juliana Fillies, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Juliana Fillies joins the Modern Languages and Literatures Department as an assistant professor of Spanish. Her research background includes Afro-Latin American literature, culture, and history. She is especially interested in understanding how stereotypes were constructed through visual and literary texts and how they impacted the development of Latin American societies. Her current research project explores the representation of Afro-Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th-century photography. She discusses how photography contributed to creating stereotypes about Black individuals and illustrates how Afro-Latin Americans appropriated the medium to express their identity.
Ahona Panda, Assistant Professor of History
Ahona Panda joins the History Department as an assistant professor of History. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2019, where she was also a postdoctoral Humanities Teaching Fellow, 2019-2021. Her research and teaching interests span the history of philology, print and book history, the history of political movements, working-class histories, gender and sexuality studies, world literatures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Bengal Undivided: Language and the Limits of Nationalism in Modern South Asia, in which she examines Hindu-Muslim relations through a political history of the Bengali language.
Jessica Zarkin, Assistant Professor of Government
Jessica Zarkin joins the Government Department as an assistant professor of Government. She studies the politics of law and order, police militarization, and urban security governance in Latin America, where citizen security remains a pressing challenge for democratic development. Her work combines observational data, quasi-experimental research designs, survey experiments, and a range of qualitative methods and has appeared in Perspectives on Politics and the British Journal of Political Science. She earned a BA in Political Science from ITAM in Mexico City and a PhD in Government from Cornell University.
Sandra Watson, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience
Sandra Watson joins the Keck Science Department as an assistant professor of Neuroscience. Her research explores the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in neuronal homeostasis and how disruptions in these pathways contribute to psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Watson’s research background includes the study of regulated protein degradation in axon maintenance and the impact of amphetamine on sleep in the fruit fly. Watson’s current research focuses on how the brain maintains appropriate levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter critical in motivated behaviors and linked to addiction, depression, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s disease. Using the fruit fly as a model system, students in her lab will employ genetic, imaging, biochemical, and behavioral techniques while investigating novel modulators of dopamine homeostasis and dopamine-dependent behaviors.
New Coaches
Mitchell Fedorka, Head Men’s Golf Coach and Assistant Professor of Physical Education
Mitchell Fedorka joins the CMS Department of Physical Education as an assistant professor of Physical Education and head men’s golf coach. This year marks Fedorka’s sixth season with the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men's golf team, including two years’ service as interim head coach prior to being appointed to the permanent position in February 2022. In his first season as the head coach, Fedorka led the Stags to a SCIAC title in dominant fashion, winning all three of the league's events by a combined total of over 30 strokes. CMS then went on to finish third at the NCAA Division III Championships, marking the second-highest finish in program history behind the national title season of 2016. As a collegiate player at the University of La Verne, Fedorka finished second in the NCAA Division III Championships as a junior in 2009, and also earned the Jack Nicklaus Award as the top player in all of NCAA Division III that season.
David Nolan, Head Women’s Soccer Coach and Assistant Professor of Physical Education
David Nolan joins the CMS Department of Physical Education as an assistant professor of Physical Education and head women’s soccer coach. Nolan joins the Athenas with intimate familiarity with the SCIAC and the Claremont Colleges community, after spending seven years with the Pomona-Pitzer women’s soccer program, ending his tenure as the associate head coach. He served as the head recruiter for the Sagehens and helped the program reach the NCAA Division III Final Four in his final season in 2019. During Nolan’s tenure, Pomona-Pitzer won three SCIAC titles, made four NCAA appearances, and reached the Elite Eight in 2016 (falling to Chicago in penalty kicks) before its Final Four appearance in 2019. Originally from Dundalk, Ireland, Nolan came to the United States and played collegiate soccer for two seasons at California Baptist University and two seasons at La Sierra University, where he served as a team captain. He also earned the La Sierra Golden Eagle Award for being the top male athlete, as well as the Sportsmanship Award. Nolan earned his bachelor’s degree in marketing from La Sierra in 2013. He went on to earn a master’s degree in coaching and athletic administration from Concordia University in Irvine in 2018.
Trevor Swartz, Head Men's Soccer Coach and Assistant Professor of Physical Education
Trevor Swartz joins the CMS Department of Physical Education as an instructor of Physical Education and head men's soccer coach. Swartz joined the CMS staff last summer as the top assistant to then-head coach Ryan Fahey ’10, and helped the Stags to an undefeated regular season in SCIAC play. The coaching staff were collectively named the SCIAC Coaching Staff of the Year after leading the Stags to a 10-0-2 conference record, the program's first undefeated season in league play since 1993. Swartz graduated from Indiana's Kelley School of Business as a triple major in economics, public policy analysis, and business analytics, and then earned his master's degree from Concordia University Irvine in coaching and athletic administration in 2021. He earned Academic All-Big Ten honors as a sophomore, junior and senior, and served on the Indiana Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC). After finishing his collegiate career, Swartz went on to the professional ranks, where he played one season with Toronto FC 2 and one season with the Greenville Triumph in South Carolina, where he was part of a USL Championship team in 2020. Throughout his professional career, Swartz also gained coaching experience, serving as a volunteer on the coaching staff at Sacramento State in 2019 and at DePaul in 2020.
New Full-Time Visiting Faculty
Jason Bennett, Visiting Lecturer of Physics
Jason Bennett joins the Keck Science Department as a visiting lecturer of Physics. As a Fulbright scholar, his work focused on gauge theory, Lie algebras, differential geometry, and gravity. As a graduate student, Bennett focused on a novel phase of matter that has become a frontier of quantum information, condensed matter, and high-energy theory—fractons. Currently his work is aimed at understanding how to unite these two fields: deriving theories of fractons via the same procedure used to derive theories of gravity from Lie algebras. Bennett would love to organize independent studies/reading projects/senior theses on these topics. He is interested more generally in pedagogy and outreach aimed at helping students shake off any preconceived notions they are “bad at physics/math,” and combatting any associated imposter syndrome. He is also passionate about helping students combat self-selection by helping them apply to graduate school, scholarships like the Fulbright, and undergraduate research experiences like NSF REUs.
Heidi Blocker, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
Heidi Blocker joins the Psychological Science Department as a visiting assistant professor of Psychology. She has published research on social moderators of emotional facial mimicry measured with electromyography. She is broadly interested in the social and cognitive processes underlying the formation of and prejudices towards social groups. She is also committed to involving students in big-team science replication and cross-cultural research studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Social/Affect Psychology from the University of Denver.
Robert Brodman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology
Robert Brodman joins the Keck Science Department as a visiting assistant professor of Biology. His teaching interests include a variety of courses in zoology, ecology, and evolution. His obsession with pond-breeding salamanders has led to research spanning from ecology to animal behavior with questions focusing on conservation questions. He has developed an undergraduate research program centered on investigating the impacts of herbicides, habitat restoration, climate change, disease ecology, and farming practices on amphibians and reptiles and the behavioral ecology of lizards, birds, and bats. Brodman has published more than 50 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters, and over 50 technical reports and editorials, many of these co-authored with undergraduate students. His specialty has become long-term ecological and conservation studies often involving five years or more of data collection, including published results from a 14-year study of amphibian populations in Indiana, a 12-year study of salamander populations in Ohio, a 15-year study on pond-breeding salamanders throughout the Midwest, and a soon-to-be published 10-year study of the impact of climate change on amphibians in Indiana Dunes National Park. He is excited to establish long-term studies at the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station.
Chris Dettmar, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Chris Dettmar joins the Keck Science Department as a visiting assistant professor of Chemistry. His research background is in spectroscopic instrument development; specifically, nonlinear optical imaging of crystalline biological macromolecules. He previously taught at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and worked in industry developing and producing microscope integrated spectroscopy products. His current research interests include fluorescence lifetime imaging and large data set signal processing.
Rickey Fayne, Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature
Rickey Fayne joins the Department of Literature as a visiting assistant professor of Literature. His teaching interests include 19th, 20th, and 21st-century American literature, African Diasporic literatures, fiction writing, and poetry. His fiction and poetry appear or are forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Joyland, Witness, The Sewanee Review, and Guernica. He has earned support for his writing and research from the W.E.B. DuBois Library at UMass Amherst; Northwestern University; the Michener Center for Writers, the Tin House Workshop, and the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Jeremy Fortier, Visiting Assistant Professor of Government
Jeremy Fortier joins the Government Department as a visiting assistant professor of Government. He has wide-ranging interests in the history of political thought and beyond. He has published several articles looking at the relationship between early modern and contemporary liberalism (particularly in the context of inter-disciplinary, public-facing political writings by Danielle Allen, Steven Pinker, and John Rawls). He has also published a book focused on the autobiographical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, which is intended as the first of several studies exploring how different political philosophers have acknowledged limits to their own rational capacities. A forthcoming paper brings to light a dialogue between Nietzsche and Ralph Ellison on the question of how individuals, and national communities, ought to orient themselves towards their past while attempting to create a new future. His current research considers the extent to which liberal politics can encourage people to be “reasoners” rather than “rationalizers” (including in the context of comparative constitutional education).
Taehyung Kim, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Taehyung Kim joins the Keck Science Department as a visiting assistant professor of Chemistry. His research background and interest are in materials chemistry, especially nanostructured and bioinspired polymers. and organic materials. While earning his Ph.D. at UMass, Amherst, Kim’s primary research was developing and analyzing the phases of block copolymer nanorods confined in the nanopores of anodic aluminum oxide membranes and the self-assembled structures of liquid crystalline molecules. One of his recent projects as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside was the fabrication of photomechanical organic molecular crystals, which show micro- or millimeter scale deformation with the stimulus of the infrared, and the investigation of the mechanism of their motions.
Mia Maltz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Analysis
Mia Maltz joins the Keck Science Department as a visiting assistant professor of Environmental Analysis. She is a mycologist and soil microbial ecologist working at the interface of community ecology, biogeography, and mycology. Her work broadly focuses on community responses to environmental perturbations, which feedback to influence plant and fungal community structure and ecosystem functioning. As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Biomedical Sciences at UC Riverside, Maltz’s research overall focused on fungal communities and functional ecology in novel ecosystems, including pumice plains, drying lakebeds, and the lung mycobiome. Some of her newer projects on wind-driven (i.e., aeolian) microbiomes have recently been published in Frontiers in Microbiology and California Agriculture.
Daniel Watling, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Daniel Watling joins the Religious Studies Department as a visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to CMC, he was a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and a research fellow at the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School. He specializes in Islamic philosophy and theology, with a particular focus on medieval Iberia and North Africa. Watling’s research has focused on the 12th century Almohad Caliphate and its place within Islamic intellectual history. His current project examines the writings of the caliphate’s founder, Muḥammad ibn Tūmart (1080-1130), as well as their role in establishing a new form of Islam that simultaneously embraced theological rationalism and radical messianism.
Edward Wen, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Edward Wen joins the Keck Science Department as visiting assistant professor of Chemistry. His past research includes exploring novel organic chemical reactions, computational study of electronic structure/stability of free radicals, and computational study of protein folding. His current interest is in chemistry education (including environment friendly experiments, digital learning platform, etc.).
Leif Zinn-Brooks, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Leif Zinn-Brooks joins the Mathematical Sciences Department as a visiting assistant professor of Mathematics. Zinn-Brooks’ research is in mathematical biology. He is particularly interested in using systems of differential equations to model cell migration and developmental biology. His Ph.D. thesis focused on modeling the development of the lateral line (a sensory system akin to the human auditory system) in zebrafish. The lateral line is established in a zebrafish embryo when a collective of cells migrates from head to tail, depositing smaller cell clusters along its journey. These clusters later become the sensory organs that make up the lateral line. During a postdoc at UCLA, Zinn-Brooks worked on modeling circadian rhythms in multinucleate cells, motivated by the fungus Neurospora crassa, which is able to maintain a robust circadian rhythm across many nuclei at very low mRNA transcription levels. He also recently worked with an undergraduate student on simulating rolling paths of ball-rolling dung beetles.
New Part-Time Visiting Faculty
Najah Azzouzi, Visiting Instructor of French
Najah Azzouzi joins the Modern Languages and Literatures Department as a visiting instructor of French. Azzouzi works on 19th and early-20th-century French and Arabic literatures, particularly on the effect of French taste on elite and bourgeois Egyptian subjectivity. She examines Arab Nahda (Renaissance) elite and middle-class identity as a product of European coloniality and the exchange relations and material conditions of modernity, and she shows how good French taste became the language of choice for expressing and measuring Arab Egyptian reform by Egypt’s Francophone intellectuals. Azzouzi demonstrates how the Francophone (post)colonial subject develops and elaborates nationalistic reform formulas that are inseparable from elite class-oriented judgments and modes of being.
Paul Gaffney, Visiting Associate Professor of Literature
Paul Gaffney joins the Literature Department as a visiting associate professor of Literature. His research has focused on medieval European romances and chronicles, particularly their transmission and evolution. He has taught many courses on linguistics (especially dialects and language change), Shakespeare, utopian and dystopian literature, architectural studies, and place studies.
Yun Liu, Visiting Associate Professor of Economics
Yun Liu joins the Robert Day School as a visiting associate professor of Economics. Her research interest is empirical corporate finance, focusing on the effects of social networks on corporate governance issues. Liu has published work on the impacts of outside options on executive turnover and compensation structure, the effects of social capital on board compensation and earnings management, board diversity and inclusivity, and the formation and value creation of joint ventures and strategic alliances. Her ongoing research studies topics such as financial report readability, corporate social responsibility practices, shareholder voting, and private equity.
Elizabeth Rega, Visiting Professor of Biology
Elizabeth Rega joins the Keck Science Department as a visiting professor of Biology. She earned her undergraduate degree in biology and German from Valparaiso University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in biological anthropology. Rega is a professor of anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, as well as the associate vice provost. As a research scientist doing paleontology and archaeology, she has published numerous scientific articles and has conducted fieldwork on three different continents. Her specialization in human and nonhuman primate anatomy has led her to being a frequent consultant to the animation and gaming industries, including Walt Disney Feature Animation, Walt Disney Imagineering, and Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Rich Whitney, Visiting Professor of Leadership
Rich Whitney joins the CMC Leadership program as a visiting professor. He serves as the program chair for the University of La Verne doctoral program in organizational leadership. He loves to teach leadership courses focused on the consciousness of self and self-awareness aligning with his interest and research in when one identifies as a leader. This personal approach combined with the foundations and theories of leadership helps one step into their leader-ness. He has been training, facilitating, and speaking to groups on leadership for over 20 years. Whitney’s research interests include the phenomenology of leadership, brain-based learning, and program development. Influenced from the foundations of group facilitation, leadership and training he believes teaching is the art of dialogue and direction. Whitney has worked extensively with the Boy Scouts of America in program and leadership development.