Eleven Faculty Members Promoted with Tenure

Benjamin Gorske (chemistry) has taught at Bowdoin since 2010, three years after receiving his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research focuses on peptoids, biomimetic catalysts, and biological probes. The winner of three highly competitive grants (NSF, PRF and RCSA), he teaches Chemistry and the Quest for Discovery, and Organic Chemistry I and II, among other courses.

Christopher Heurlin (government and Asian studies) joined the Bowdoin faculty in 2011 after earning his PhD at the University of Washington. He is an expert in modern Chinese politics, resilience and collapse in communist Asia, and the political economy of land, farmers, and state building in China. He teaches a number of courses including US-China Relations, Capitalism and State Power in China, and Asian Communism.

 Tracy McMullen (music) came to Bowdoin in 2012. She was previously a postdoctoral scholar at University of Southern California (where she obtained her PhD in 2007); a visiting scholar with the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group, University of California, Berkeley; and a postdoctoral scholar with the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice Research Initiative, University of Guelph, ON, Canada. She teaches courses including History of Jazz I and II, and Issues in Hip Hop I and II.

Ingrid Nelson (sociology and anthropology) came to Bowdoin in 2010 after getting her PhD from Stanford University. Her research focuses on young, especially marginalized, people and transitions from adolescence to adulthood. She is author of Why Afterschool Matters (Rutgers University Press, 2017), and in 2014 she was awarded the Karofsky Prize for Junior Faculty. Her courses include Sociology of Education, Transitions to Adulthood, and Race and Ethnicity.

 John “Jack” O’Brien (mathematics) came to Bowdoin in 2012. Prior to that he had been in the UK, where he was senior statistician at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Genomics and Global Health, and a research associate in statistical genetics at the University of Bristol. He received his PhD in 2008 from the University of California Los Angeles, where he also got his master’s three year earlier. He is teaching Biostatistics, Probability, Advanced Topics in Statistics, and Statistics.

 Emily Peterman (earth and oceanographic science) arrived at Bowdoin in 2012. Before that she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Santa Cruz. A recipient of the 2015 Karofsky Prize for Junior Faculty, Peterman earned her PhD at UC Santa Barbara. As a geologist her research focuses on the behavior of minerals within rocks. The courses she teaches include Investigating Earth, Ocean and Society, and The Plate Tectonics Revolution.

Manuel Reyes (mathematics) joined the Bowdoin faculty in 2011. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, having attained his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2010. An expert on abstract algebra, he teaches several courses, including Integral Calculus (intermediate and advanced), Linear Algebra (intermediate and advanced), Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning, and Advanced Topics in Algebra.

Meghan Roberts (history) arrived at Bowdoin in 2011, the same year she earned her PhD from Northwestern University. Her scholarly research focuses on eighteenth-century France, gender history, and the history of science. She is author of Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Roberts teaches a number of courses, including Old Regime and Revolutionary France, The Politics of Private Life, and History of the Body.

Daniel Stone (economics) came to Bowdoin in 2012 from Oregon State University, where he was assistant professor for four years. Prior to that he obtained a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2008. His scholarship focuses on political media markets, and behavioral and information economics more generally. He teaches Introduction to Microeconomics, Intermediate Microeconomics, Behavioral Economics, Economics of Information, and Game Theory. 

Hilary Thompson (English) was previously a visiting faculty member at Bowdoin before becoming Assistant Professor of English in 2011. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century global Anglophone literature, and the treatment of animal life in modern fiction. Her book Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium, is forthcoming in March 2018 with Routledge Press. She teaches The Animal and the Human, Global Fiction and “The Great Game,” and After Kafka.