Faculty News – June 2026

This month’s faculty announcements include new fellowships, research and a shout-out in Scientific American: 

Assistant Professor Laura de Castro Quaglia (Public Policy) was awarded the Elise J. Bean Oversight Fellowship from the Levin Center for Congressional Oversight. The yearlong fellowship will support her research into government accountability, with a focus on how federal agencies respond to GAO recommendations. She’ll be analyzing a dataset of over 50,000 recommendations to identify persistent gaps in implementation and develop new methods of measuring oversight effectiveness.  

Lecturer Taj Khan (Economics) was appointed associate editor for the Journal of Public Affairs. The international, peer-reviewed journal shares research that examines how complex issues influence the connections between government, industry and citizens.  

Assistant Professor Sarah Murray (Criminal Justice) was awarded funding by the University Studies Abroad Consortium to teach in Chile during summer 2027. The international partnership will enable her to bring a deeper, global perspective to her work with students.  

Assistant Professor Mike Weselcouch (Mathematics) was featured in Scientific American for his innovative work using the popular video game Minecraft to teach complex mathematical principles. By diving into the world of the game — including orchestrating a battle of slimes versus zoglins — he and his research partner created an unexpected and engaging way of calculating the value of pi. The work shows how creative teaching can inspire young audiences to see math not as a static set of formulas, but as a dynamic way of understanding the world. 

Visiting Assistant Professor Mike Wise (Environmental Studies) was the lead author on a paper published by the journal Plants. In a large experiment on a perennial species of goldenrod, he found that plants could specialize in either sexual reproduction (via flowers and seeds) or asexual reproduction (via plant stems and vegetative growth), as well as specialize in producing many small flower clusters or fewer large flower clusters. The strength of the genetic tradeoffs between these traits depended on nutrient levels in the environment. Those tradeoffs could help explain why natural plant populations maintain diversity in reproductive traits rather than evolving a single optimal strategy for each trait — a fundamental question in evolutionary ecology.