George Mason University

Michael E. Summers

Michael E. Summers is a planetary scientist who studies the structure, origin, and evolution of planetary atmospheres. Summers received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1985. His research has dealt with the atmospheres of the Earth and most of the other planets in our solar system along with several of their moons. He has collaborated on numerous NASA planetary, satellite, and space shuttle missions.

Summers is currently a member of the science team of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and its moon Charon, which was launched in January, 2006, performed a flyby of Jupiter in February 2007 on its way to a rendezvous with Pluto in 2015. His work on Mars deals with the possibility of subsurface life and methods of its detection. He is a member of the NASA/Langley Mars Airplane team that is planning the first airplane to fly on another planet. His research on Earth's atmosphere has focused on atmospheric ozone and the formation of noctilucent clouds, which are the highest clouds on Earth. He is a member of the science team of the AIM satellite mission that was launched in 2007 to study the role of these clouds as possibly the most sensitive indicator of global climate change.

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James E. Maddux

The Director of the Clinical PSYCHOLOGY doctoral program, Dr. Maddux is a clinical psychologist whose major interest is the integration of theory from clinical, social, and health psychology. His research is concerned primarily with understanding the influence of beliefs about personal effectiveness and control on psychological adjustment and health-related behavior. He is the Editor of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and Self and Identity. He has published papers in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Health Psychology, and American Psychologist. He is co-author of Social Cognitive Psychology: History and Current Domains and co-editor of Psychopathology: Foundations for a Contemporary Understanding. He also is a member of the Examination Committee of the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards, which creates the Examination for the Professional Practice of Psychology. Dr. Maddux is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association's Divisions of General, Clinical, and Health Psychology.

Department of Psychology

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Susanne Denham

Susanne A. Denham is an applied developmental psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. Her research focuses on children’s social and emotional development. She is especially interested in the role of emotional competence in children’s social and academic functioning. She is also investigating the development of forgiveness in children.

Denham’s program on social-emotional assessment for school readiness is currently funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. In addition, her work on the intra- and interpersonal contributors to children’s forgiveness, and her longitudinal investigation on the development of emotional competence are ongoing. She is the author of two books Emotional Development in Young Children and, with Dr. Rosemary Burton, Social and Emotional Prevention and Intervention Programming for Preschoolers as well as numerous scholarly articles. Having served as a member of several editorial boards, Denham is currently the editor of Early Education and Development. Denham received her MA from The Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Department of Psychology

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Lance Liotta

Lance A. Liotta, professor of life sciences at George Mason University, was one of the first scientists to investigate the process of tumor invasion and metastasis at a molecular level. Scientists in his Laboratory of Pathology discovered a series of novel genes and proteins that regulate cancer invasion and metastasis, providing new strategies for cancer diagnosis and treatment. His groundbreaking work has led to the invention of technologies used in more than 1,000 labs worldwide.

Liotta is co-director of the GMU Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine. The goal of the Center is to discover new proteins useful for the early detection and individualized therapy of cancer and other diseases. He holds more than ninety patents for his work and has published more than 600 papers. Liotta is the recipient of numerous scientific awards for cancer research, including the U.S. Surgeon General’s Medal. He earned an MD/PhD from Case Western Reserve Medical School. His PhD is in biomedical engineering.

Department of Molecular and Microbiology

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Linda J. Seligmann

Linda J. Seligmann is a professor of anthropology and director of Graduate Studies of the Anthropology Program at George Mason University. She has served as coordinator of the Anthropology Program and director of the Center for the Study of the Americas at George Mason. She is a specialist in the Andean region of Latin America with research interests in agrarian issues, political economy, and the dynamics of gender, class, and ethnicity in the informal economy, and she has spent more than 20 years doing field research in both urban and rural regions of the Andes. Her published books include Peruvian Street Lives: Culture, Power and Economy among Market Women of Cuzco; an edited volume, Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares; and Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969-1991.

She has also published numerous articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Urban Anthropology and Ethnohistory. Her current research is on transnational and transracial adoption and changing assumptions about American families.

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Debra B. Bergoffen

Debra B. Bergoffen is professor of philosophy and is a member of both the Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies faculties. Bergoffen’s philosophical and interdisciplinary research is rooted in the continental and feminist traditions. She is the author of numerous journal articles and anthology chapters, and the co-editor of several collections of philosophical essays. Her book, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities details the significance of Beauvoir’s singular philosophical voice and examines its impact on contemporary philosophical and feminist theory. Bergoffen’s research probes the ways in which U.N. Tribunal judgments in the wake of the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda direct us to revisit our concepts of humanity, human dignity, and human rights.

Bergoffen chaired the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies from 1980-1987, and was Director of the Women’s Studies Research and Resource Center from1998-2002. She received George Mason's Distinguished Faculty Award in 1989 and Teaching Excellence Award in 1993.

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Barbara Melosh

Barbara Melosh is a professor of English and History who serves on the faculties of Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. She held an appointment as curator of medical sciences at the National Museum of American History during her first seven years at George Mason. She received her PhD in American civilization from Brown University in 1979. Melosh’s career reflects her broad interests in American social and cultural history. She has authored The Physician’s Hand: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (Temple Univ. Press, 1981), Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Art and Theatre (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption, (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002).

An adoptive mother herself, Melosh tells the story of how men and women without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. She is currently preparing for a second career as an ordained minister, studying for her Master of Divinity at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. She is working on a book-length memoir of her recent experience as a hospital chaplain.

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Vernon Smith

Vernon L. Smith, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, 2002, is currently professor of economics and law at George Mason University, a research scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES), and a Fellow of the Mercatus Center all in Arlington, VA. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 articles and books on capital theory, natural resource economics, and experimental economics. He serves on or has served on the board of editors of numerous journals, as president of various societies, as professor of several universities, and as a Fellow with many organizations. He is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association, an Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year, the 1995 Adam Smith award recipient conferred by the Association for Private Enterprise Education.

The Cambridge University Press published his Papers in Experimental Economics in 1991, and they published a second collection of more recent papers, Bargaining and Market Behavior, in 2000.

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Robert Ehrlich

Robert Ehrlich is author or editor of nineteen books, including Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True, (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001). He has written numerous articles in the areas of particle physics, nuclear arms control, and physics education. He has been an associate editor of the American Journal of Physics and has received several grants. Recently, he was honored as the recipient of the 2001 American Association of Physics Teacher's award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Ehrlich has lectured widely on his work in the United States and abroad.

Ehrlich is a professor of physics and serves in the School of Computational Sciences at George Mason University since 1977. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1964. While at Columbia he worked on the "two-neutrino" experiment for which his thesis advisor Jack Steinberger shared the Nobel Prize. He has had faculty appointments at Rutgers University, SUNY New Paltz, and has also chaired two physics departments—SUNY's between 1970 and 1977, and George Mason's between 1977 and 1989.

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Kevin Avruch

Kevin Avruch is author or editor of five books, including Information Campaigns for Peace Operations (2000) and Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998). He has written numerous articles and essays on culture theory and conflict analysis, nationalist and ethnoreligious social movements, politics and society in contemporary Israel, international migration, among other topics. Avruch has been book review editor of Anthropological Quarterly and serves on several editorial boards. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad, and his work has been recognized by the International Association of Conflict Management and the United States Institute of Peace, where he spent one year as senior fellow in the Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace.

Avruch is professor of anthropology and served as its coordinator from 1990-1996. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and faculty and senior fellow in the Program on Peacekeeping Policy (School of Public Policy), at George Mason University, where he has been since 1980. He received his PhD from the University of California at San Diego. He has taught at UCSD, the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Peter Brunette

Peter Brunette is recognized nationally and internationally as a film scholar and critic. He has written or edited six books on film, including The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Martin Scorsese: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 1999). His 1987 book Roberto Rossellini (republished by University of California, 1996) remains the definitive study in English on Rossellini's films. His scholarly work has centered chiefly around European cinema and the application of poststructuralist literary theory to film. He is a weekly film critic for Film.com, and just in the last year, he served on panels at the Palm Springs Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Rotterdam Film Festival. He is also the artistic director of the Key Sunday Cinema Club with branches in six cities.

Brunette received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1975 and joined the faculty of George Mason University that same year. His scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and George Mason University.

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James Pfiffner

James P. Pfiffner is a nationally-recognized expert on the United States presidency. Pfiffner's scholarly agenda for two decades has focused on the U.S. presidency and the national government. Among his influential publications are dozens of articles and ten books, including The Strategic Presidency: Hitting the Ground Running (second edition 1996) and The Modern Presidency (third edition 1999). He co-edited a special issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly on "The Crisis in the Clinton Presidency." Pfiffner's substantive contribution to that volume is titled "Sexual Probity and Presidential Character." Not only an outstanding scholar, Pfiffner is an exceptionally effective teacher and lecturer. He is invited to speak regularly at conferences and seminars, as well as at briefings of domestic and foreign government officials.

Pfiffner was a faculty member in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University since 1984. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, taught at the University of California, Riverside, California State University Fullerton, and served in the United States Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, where he earned an Army Commendation Medal of Valor.

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Lois E. Horton

Lois E. Horton is a professor of sociology and sits on the faculties of Cultural Studies and Women's Studies. She received her PhD from Brandeis University in 1977 and served at the University of Hawaii, Amerika Institute of Frederick Maximilian University in Munich, and as the chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mason from 1995-1997. She has lectured in Europe and Asia. Horton addresses various aspects of American and African American social and cultural life, focusing particularly on race, gender, and social change in her scholarship.

She is coeditor of A History of the African-American People, contributing author to City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of the District of Columbia (1983), and coauthor of Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Protest, and Community Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860, and Von Benin Nach Baltimore, which was published in Germany.

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Carol Mattusch

Carol Mattusch joined the faculty of George Mason University in 1977 and chaired the Department of Art and Art History from 1982 until 1992. Her teaching has been in art history, in classical archaeology, and in several interdisciplinary programs, primarily at the undergraduate level. At the same time she has lectured for the Archaeological Institute of America and for the Smithsonian Institution Resident Associates Program, been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and served as news editor of Archaeological News.

In her scholarship, she uses an expertise in ancient bronze-LAHSting to illuminate the broader implications of ancient technology upon Classical sculpture, in order to reach as broad an audience as possible, making connections for them with their own experience in the modern world. Her work has received support from George Mason University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institute in Berlin, where she has since been appointed a Corresponding Member.

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