Faculty Members Receive Promotions

Promotions and tenure appointments for HMC faculty were approved during the May meeting of the HMC Board of Trustees. Eliot Bush (biology) and Theresa Lynn (physics) have been promoted to the rank of full professor. Both serve as chair of their respective departments.

Bush, professor and chair of the Department of Biology, uses computational methods to study evolution, covering a range of topics from sequence analysis to modeling. His work includes modeling the evolution of metabolism, characterizing DNA methylation patterns in insects, developing algorithms for studying substitution bias in DNA and analyzing a 30-million-year-old primate fossil. He is co-author of the book Computing for Biologists: Python Programming and Principles. His software program, xenoGI, helps researchers reconstruct the history of genomic island insertions in clades of closely related microbes.

Lynn, professor and chair of the Department of Physics, specializes in quantum information science. Her research group focuses on quantum communication protocols using photon pairs entangled in polarization and/or spatial mode (orbital angular momentum). Lynn investigates the role of entanglement—a type of correlation that does not exist in classical physics—in providing communication bandwidth and security in protocols including quantum secret sharing. In addition to her quantum optics research program, Lynn has served on the advisory board for QuarkNet and as project coordinator for the California HIgh school Cosmic ray ObServatory (CHICOS), a large-scale array of 90 scintillation detectors for observation of ultra-high energy cosmic ray air showers, based at Caltech and located at K-12 schools in the Los Angeles area.

The committee also approved the renewal of Ambereen Dadabhoy (HSA), Sal Plascencia (HSA), Matt Spencer (engineering), and Jessica Wu (computer science) to serve an additional, two-year term as assistant professors.