Posts
 |
| New SHASS faculty members include: (top row, l-r) Martin Beraja, Dave Donaldson, and Amah Edoh; (middle row, l-r) E. J. Green, Simon Jäger, and Eric Klopfer; (bottom row, l-r) Justin Reich, Miriam Schoenfield, and Lisa Parks. Photos courtesy of the faculty members. |
Dean Melissa Nobles and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently announced the newest members of the SHASS faculty. They have diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research, which include counterfactual economic models, philosophy of mind, educational gaming, and global media. They are:
Martin Beraja is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2016. Upon graduating, he spent one year as a postdoc at the Louis A. Simpson Center for the Study of Macroeconomics and the Department of Economics at Princeton University. Beraja is a macroeconomist who studies economic fluctuations and growth. In his dissertation, he developed a method for evaluating counterfactual policy changes in a way that is robust across models whenever researchers are uncertain about features of these models that are difficult to distinguish in the data. In other work, he has focused on bringing theory and micro-data together in order to discipline quantitative exercises that shed light on how the aggregate economy responds to shocks. He is currently studying how forms of technical change that complement certain types of skills shape the dynamics of inequality and productivity growth in economies where workers with such skills are scarce.
Dave Donaldson is a professor of economics. He obtained an undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford University and a PhD from the London School of Economics. He is a co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and a program director at the International Growth Centre. Donaldson’s teaching and research specializes in the fields of international trade, development economics, and economic history. He and collaborators have investigated topics such as the welfare and other effects of market integration, the impact of improvements in transportation infrastructure, how trade might mediate the effects of climate change, and how trade affects food security and famine. This research was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2013 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 2017.
Amah Edoh joins the MIT faculty as assistant professor of African Studies in the Global Studies and Languages section (GSL), having completed a postdoc in the section in 2016-2017. She received the PhD in 2016 from MIT’s Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). Edoh’s research focuses on how “Africa” is produced as a category of thought through material practices across African and non-African locations. Her current book manuscript is a multi-sited ethnography following the transnational trajectory of Dutch Wax cloth, a textile designed in Holland for West African markets since the 19th century. The manuscript examines how ideas about Africa and its place in the world are negotiated through visual and material forms and practices along the cloth’s path from design studio to dressed bodies.
E. J. Green earned a PhD in philosophy along with a cognitive science certificate from Rutgers University in 2016, and was a Bersoff Fellow at New York University from 2016 to 2017. Green’s research addresses topics at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with a particular focus on perception. His papers have examined the perceptual experience of shape properties, the nature of perceptual reference, and the structure and function of perceptual object representations. His research interests also include foundational issues within the philosophy of cognitive science, such as the format of mental representations and the border between perception and cognition.
Read more...
Source: MIT News
