Harvey Mudd Welcomes New Faculty

Motivated by the mission of broadly educating students in science, engineering, mathematics and in the humanities, social sciences and the arts, faculty members at Harvey Mudd College develop innovative pedagogies, offer opportunities for student research, engage students in experiential learning and challenge students to develop an informed world view.

The College welcomed new scholars who pledge to continue this tradition. Faculty searches in physics and computer science, as well as in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies, resulted in the hiring of three teacher scholars, whose tenure-track appointments are effective July 1.

Mark Ilton joins Harvey Mudd’s Department of Physics as an assistant professor, coming from a post-doctoral position at the Conte Polymer Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ilton holds a PhD in physics from McMaster University and M.S. and B.S. degrees in physics from the University of Waterloo. His research area is the dynamics of energy release in elastomers and impulsive biological systems.

Lucas Bang joins the Computer Science Department as an assistant professor. Bang earned a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a B.S. in computer science and mathematics from UNLV. Bang’s work focuses on software verification and formal methods for security.

Alfred Flores joins Harvey Mudd and the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies (which serves all undergraduate students of The Claremont Colleges) as an assistant professor of Asian American studies. Flores holds a PhD in history from UCLA and an M.A. in public history and B.A. in history from the University of California, Riverside. Flores researches race, settler colonialism and U.S. militarization in the island of Guahan (Guam). He is working on a book manuscript that examines the U.S. military expansion of Guahan through indigeneity, labor and race from 1944 to 1962.

Having finished his PhD in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University in May, George Montañez, who was hired last year, will join the Computer Science Department as an assistant professor. He holds an M.S. in computer science from Baylor University and a B.S. in computer science from the University of California Riverside. He was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. He twice served as an intern at Microsoft Research and once at Yahoo! Labs. He has worked as a software engineer and full-stack developer. His research lies at the intersection of computer science, algorithmic search and mathematics. At the 2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Montañez won the Best Poster award and the INNS/Intel Best Student Paper award for “The LICORS Cabinet: Nonparametric Light Cone Methods for Spatio-Temporal Modeling,” coauthored with Cosma Rohilla Shalizi. He previously won the Best Paper award at CIKM 2014, with coauthors Ryen White and Xiao Huang for their paper on cross-device search.

In addition to these tenure-track hires, Harvey Mudd awarded the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow position to Alyssa Newman. She earned a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and will spend a year at HMC as a post-doctoral fellow in science, technology and society. Newman’s research considers intersections between race and reproductive technologies.

In 2019, Harvey Mudd College will conduct tenure track searches for positions in engineering and computer science.