New Tenure-Track Faculty at Harvey Mudd

The faculty at Harvey Mudd College is committed to offering world-class science and engineering education in a liberal arts context so that graduates are uniquely prepared to lead and understand their impact on society. Four outstanding teacher-scholars join the College’s faculty July 1, becoming assistant professors as well as tenure-track faculty members.

Danae Schulz

Danae Schulz joins the Department of Biology. Schulz studies African trypanosomes, the parasites transmitted through tsetse flies that cause sleeping sickness (African trypanosomiasis). She is interested in how the parasites adapt to different environments in the fly and mammalian bloodstream, with an eye toward manipulating this adaptation to help fight the disease. Schulz completed her PhD in 2010 at University of California, Berkeley, and she has been working since 2011 as a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University. Schulz also holds a bachelor’s of music in violin performance from the New England Conservatory.

Brian Shuve

Brian Shuve joins the Department of Physics. Shuve is a theoretical particle physicist who develops and studies new theories to explain mysteries of the universe, such as the nature of dark matter and why there exists more matter than antimatter. He also devises new experimental tests to learn more about the fundamental constituents and forces of matter. He holds a BASc in engineering science from the University of Toronto and a PhD in theoretical particle physics from Harvard. Shuve recently began a stint as a research associate at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford and so will defer his start date at Harvey Mudd until the 2017–2018 academic year.

T.J. Tsai

T.J. Tsai joins the Department of Engineering. Tsai’s research lies at the intersection of signal processing, machine learning and music. He completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Stanford in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and recently completed his PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.

Jessica Wu

A visiting faculty member in computer science since fall 2014, Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu researches phylogenetics, developing evolutionary models and algorithms for reconstructing gene histories across multiple species to understand how genes form and function. She holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rice University and completed her PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT in 2014. Prior to joining Harvey Mudd, Wu served as a postdoctoral associate in the Computational Biology Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.

Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society. The faculty at Harvey Mudd embrace this mission and strive to make it a reality through the development of innovative pedagogies, offering opportunities for student research, engaging students in the nationally recognized Clinic Program and challenging students to develop an informed worldview that will make them responsible citizens in the 21st century.