Faculty Profiles
Meet our distinguished faculty at Stony Brook Southampton:
Sara Aponte-Olivieri
Adjunct Professor
Ms. Aponte-Olivieri
is completing work toward her Ph.D. in Compared Civilizations and Literatures from Stendhal University in Grenoble, France, where she previously taught, and will teach Conversational Spanish at Stony Brook Southampton. She has expertise in French, English and Italian, as well.
Sara.Aponte-Olivieri@stonybrook.edu
Katherine Aubrecht
Assistant Professor
Katherine Aubrecht teaches Chemistry and Environmental Studies courses at Stony Brook Southampton. Before coming to Southampton, she held faculty positions at Saint Anselm College and the College of the Holy Cross. She earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Reed College and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Cornell University. Her research interests include biodegradable and biorenewable polymers, block copolymers, and environmentally benign synthetic methodology.
Katherine.Aubrecht@stonybrook.edu
Kurt Bretsch
Lecturer
Dr. Bretsch teaches Marine and Environmental Science courses at Stony Brook Southampton. He has previously held teaching positions at Bowdoin College, St. Lawrence University and Coastal Carolina University, and has led students in classes, research projects and immersive field experiences in a diversity of marine environments including the open Atlantic and Caribbean, coral reefs, salt marshes, sandy beaches, rocky shores and estuaries. His research interests lie within Marine Community Ecology. He earned his Ph.D. at the Baruch Marine Field Laboratory of the University of South Carolina, where he created and used a unique sampling method to reveal patterns of salt marsh intertidal habitat use by tidally migrating nekton.
Kurt.Bretsch@stonybrook.edu
William Burford
Adjunct Professor
Bill Burford's "legit" career brought him to Bay Street Theatre in nearby Sag Harbor, where he served for years as producer and general manager with such luminaries as Zoe Caldwell, Alan Alda, Austin Pendleton and Julie Andrews. He taught playwriting for the Southampton Writers Conference in 2008 and has directed for other national playwriting programs, including those of Preston Jones, Edward Albee and the New Harmony conference. Director and instructor for Stony Brook's West Campus since 2004, he now teaches theater and develops programs in arts and sustainability at Southampton. In 2009, Burford joins the MFA Writing program to facilitate production for its new playwriting initiatives. His honors BA in philosophy at UT Austin was followed by an MFA in directing under Francis Hodge. His thesis examined Cold War eastern European political comedy.
William.Burford@stonybrook.edu
Arlene Kons Cassidy
Lecturer
Arlene Kons Cassidy received her bachelor's degree in Applied and Theoretical Mathematics and a master's degree in Economics from Stony Brook. She completed her Ph.D. in Administration/Management with a concentration in Economics and Mathematics at Walden University. Dr. Cassidy has several years experience teaching a variety of economics, mathematics and business courses for undergraduate as well as graduate students. She has mentored Ph.D. students and has worked as a consultant in varied research design and statistical analysis projects. She has also served on several committees involving academic evaluation and program development, organized and chaired student activities and worked with student advisement. Through her years in education, she has received several awards from students, educational institutions and the community.
Arlene.Cassidy@stonybrook.edu
Maryann Duffy
Lecturer
MaryAnn Duffy teaches Writing and Literary Analysis for the EOP/AIM program. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Minor in History from Mundelein College of Loyola University in Chicago. She earned a MFA in Secondary Education in English from Hunter College in Manhattan while working at their Writing Center tutoring graduate and undergraduate students. Subsequently, she was the Academic Advisor for The Higher Education Opportunity Program for Long Island University and an Adjunct Professor for the Friends World and Education Departments. She then taught writing at Stony Brook's West Campus and served as a consultant for the HEOP program at LIU. You can find articles about writing by Ms. Duffy in WritersÕ Journal Magazine.
Maryann.Duffy@stonybrook.edu
Heather Dune Macadam
Lecturer
Heather Dune Macadam taught creative writing at Savannah College of Art and Design and holds her MFA from Southampton Graduate Campus. Her novel, The Weeping Buddha was a finalist for the Nero Wolfe Awards and is still receving national attention. Her first book, Rena's Promise - A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, was nominated for a National Book Award and received international acclaim as it was translated into a number of languages. Ms. Macadam has been published by The New York Times, The Advocate, and Racing Home: New Stories by Award-Winning North Carolina Writers, where one reviewer remarked she writes like "an archangel with an avenging pen." You can also hear her quirky perceptions on life and teaching on NPR's All Things Considered, where she is a "semi-regular" commentator.
Heather.Macadam@stonybrook.edu
Emmanuelle Pales Espinosa
Adjunct Professor
Ms. Espinosa
earned her Ph.D. in Marine Biology from the University of Nantes in France. She is an expert on the impact of biotic and abiotic factors on phytoplankton assemblages, and recently co-authored an article on the Pacific oyster in the Journal of Aquaculture.
Emmanuelle.PalesEspinosa@stonybrook.edu
R. Marc Fasanella
Lecturer
Holding a Ph.D. from New York University, Marc Fasanella has been a professor of Art and Design for nearly 20 years. Originally trained as an Art and Industrial Arts teacher during his youth, he apprenticed himself to the trades of carpentry, landscaping and stone masonry. He has produced independent work as an architectural consultant, curator, graphic designer, publisher and woodworker. Fasanella is the author of a series of articles on the design and construction of Jones Beach State Park, the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. The recipient of a Long Island University Trustees Award for Scholarly Achievement for his writing and design in the spirit of 19th century luminary William Morris, Fasanella is now coordinating the Avram Gallery on campus in addition to his teaching responsibilities at Stony Brook Southampton.
Christopher J. Gobler
Associate Professor
Christopher J. Gobler earned his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and continues to be a leading expert in various aspects of marine science, including phytoplankton, harmful algal blooms, estuarine ecology and aquatic biogeochemistry. He has published dozens of articles in leading marine-science journals, and his lab work focuses on plankton ecology, ecological functioning and trophic status of estuaries, and biogeochemical cycles of organic carbon, nutrients, and trace metals in aquatic ecosystems.
Christopher.Gobler@stonybrook.edu
James Hoffmann
Lecturer
Jim Hoffmann will teach Biology and Ecology for Stony Brook Southampton, having received a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Wisconsin, and a B.Sc. in Marine Biology from Cornell University. He previously served as Director of the Integrated Biological Sciences Program at the University of Vermont, where he also taught. His research has included evolutionary computation applied to modeling complex biological systems.
Nay Htun
Research Professor
Dr. Nay Htun was formerly U.N. Assistant Secretary General with the United Nations Development Program in charge of the Asia Pacific Bureau and the United Nations Environment Program. He established the Industry and Environment Office in Paris, was in charge of Asia Pacific and served as its Deputy Executive Director. He helped organize the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Geneva, the preparation of Agenda 21 and the Earth Summit at Rio. He graduated with a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he a Fellow and Visiting Professor. He is also Visiting Professor and Senior Advisor Asia Pacific, Lund University Sweden, and Honorary Professor Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
Seva Joukhovitski
Lecturer
Seva Joukhovitski teaches Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook
Southampton. He received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Education from Saint Petersburg State University in Russia and his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Northwestern University. He previously was a faculty member at Louisiana State University and University of California Los Angeles, and a research member at the Institute for Advance Study. Dr. Joukhovitski is experienced teaching a variety of pure and applied mathematics courses. His recent research focus was on applications of topological methods to algebra and algebraic K-Theory, and included a contribution to the proof of Bloch-Kato conjecture in motivic cohomology.
Daniel Koontz
Adjunct Professor
Mr. Koontz
will teach Music at Stony Brook Southampton, and previously served on the faculty of Southampton College. He received his Ph.D. in Music Composition from Stony Brook University as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. With a specialty in electronic and computer music, his compositions have been performed across the country and on four continents.
Shopon Mollah
Lecturer
Shopon Mollah teaches Biology at Stony Brook Southampton. He previously was Assistant Professor at Yeshiva University and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He earned his B.A. in Biology at Illinois Wesleyan University and Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at the University of Notre Dame. Having authored numerous academic publications, Dr. Mollah's research interests include: the regulating of gene expression by macromolecular associations, microRNA silencing systems, designing and modeling three-dimensional protein structures, and the evolution of protein structures and functions.
Elizabeth Terese Newman
Assistant Professor
Ms. Newman teaches environmental humanities, anthropology and archaeology at Stony Brook Southampton. Previously, she taught for the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico and Connecticut College. She has also worked for the National Park Service and the Boston Museum of Science. She received a BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University. Dr. Newman’s research interests include Environmental Archaeology with a specialty in Zooarchaeology and Mesoamerican Historical Archaeology. Currently, she is directing an interdisciplinary research project that examines the social and cultural origins of revolution in Puebla, Mexico.
Elizabeth.Newman@stonybrook.edu
Richard Orr
Adjunct Professor
Mr. Orr will teach Chemistry at Stony Brook Southampton and serves as Director of Undergraduate Labs. He served in a similar role at Valencia Community College in Florida, where he developed laboratory curricula for organic and general chemistries. He earned his M.S. from Florida A&M University in Computational Molecular Biophysical Chemistry. He has extensive training in various analytical technologies applied to environmental chemical analysis, and at Valencia, he built a 48 node Linux High Performance computing cluster he called the "Butterfly Cluster" in honor of the Monarch Butterfly project.
Richard.Orr@stonybrook.edu
Bradley J. Peterson
Assistant Professor
Bradley J. Peterson earned his Ph.D. from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab at the University of South Alabama. His research is focused on understanding the role of organisms in changing nutrient availability within their communities and how these interactions might affect community development and stability. Most of his work is with plant-animal interactions within seagrass ecosystems along the eastern coast of the U.S. Recent projects have included looking at the role of sponges in Florida Bay to control phytoplankton blooms and increase light availability to the benthic plant community, the effect of marine protected areas on changing trophic transfer from nearby seagrass foraging grounds on both 'no take' and unprotected reefs and the possibility of herbivorous fish creating nutrient 'hot spots' around patch reefs.
Bradley.Peterson@stonybrook.edu
James Quigley
Lecturer
James Quigley instructs both environmental planning and political science courses at Stony Brook Southampton, including Prospects for Planet Earth, Urban Settlements, Population Technology and the Environment, American Environmental Politics and American Government. Quigley served as Director of the Canter for Sustainable Energy at Bronx Community College, CUNY from 2003 to 2007, and Director of the New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability from 1998 to 2002. He also taught environmental studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Portland State University in Oregon. During the 1990s he worked as a researcher at the Center for the Biology of Natural System headed by the ecologist Barry Commoner. Quigley earned his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania.
Harold.QuigleyJr@stonybrook.edu
Robert Reeves
Associate Professor
Robert Reeves is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, both published by Crown, as well as short fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Kirkus Review hailed Doubting Thomas as "a zesty, classy original," and Patricia Holt of the San Francisco Chronicle called Peeping Thomas "funny, disturbing, and brilliant." Reeves, a professor and Director of the MFA in Writing and Literature Program at Stony Brook Southampton, has also taught writing at Harvard and Princeton.
Alexander Retakh
Lecturer
Alexander Retakh
formerly taught at the University of Texas at Arlington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, as a Visiting Professor, Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale and B.A. in Mathematics summa cum laude from New York University. An expert in Representation Theory and Noncommutative Algebra, Dr. Retakh has had his work published in numerous academic journals and has spoken at several universities and conferences.
Alexander.Retakh@stonybrook.edu
Alan Rice
Lecturer
Alan Rice teaches Chemistry, Physics and Mineral Resources. He has previously worked as a researcher with the American Museum of Natural History and as an instructor with the City University of New York. He
earned a B.S., M.S. and doctorate from Columbia University in Engineering
and Applied Physics and Mathematics. His work has included researching nuclear waste removal, oceanography, geophysics and seismic reflection
and refraction at sea.
Tara Rider
Adjunct Professor
Ms. Rider
is completing her Ph.D. in History at Stony Brook University and is a graduate of Southampton College, where she studied Marine Science. She has taught Long Island History and Maritime History. With a subspecialty in Women and the Seas, she has written about the role of female pirates in history.
Roger Rosenblatt
Distinguished Professor
Roger Rosenblatt's essays for Time Magazine and the PBS NewsHour have won two George Polk Awards, a Peabody and an Emmy. He is the author of five Off-Broadway plays and eleven books, including Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the national bestseller, Rules for Aging; and the novel, Lapham Rising, also a national bestseller. His second novel, Beet, is due out in January, 2008.
Roger.Rosenblatt@stonybrook.edu
Martin Schoonen
Professor
Martin Schoonen is a Professor of Geochemistry for Stony Brook's Center for Environmental Molecular Sciences. He received his Ph.D at Pennsylvania State University and joined Stony Brook in 1989. His academic interests include environmental chemistry, groundwater chemistry, geochemistry and astrobiology. Dean Schoonen's research group is currently working on three major projects: heterogeneous catalysis involving mineral surfaces; surface chemistry of iron sulfides; and the hydrogeochemistry of Long Island. He has also been the lead author of numerous articles in respected academic journals. Along with his studies in the Central Pine Barrens of Eastern Long Island, Schoonen has supervised a number of research projects of the Long Island aquifer system.
Website: pyrite.geo.stonybrook.edu
Martin.Schoonen@stonybrook.edu
Julie Sheehan
Assistant Professor
Julie Sheehan's two poetry collections are Orient Point and Thaw. Her honors include a Whiting Writer's Award, NYFA Fellowship, the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review, the Robert H. Winner prize from Poetry Society of America, the Barnard Women Poets Prize and, from Paris Review, the Bernard F. Conners prize. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies and her next collection, Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2010.
Michael Sperazza
Lecturer
Michael Sperazza teaches classes in Environmental Studies, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Geography, Geology, and Physical Anthropology. He earned a Ph.D. in Geology and a master’s in Physical Anthropology from the University of Montana. He has taught at the University of Montana and MCC-Maple Woods in Kansas City, where he was the department chair. His current research interests have focused on paleoclimatic reconstructions, understanding the driving forces of past climate change, and the analytical evaluation of the methods used to measure these data. Additionally, he is interested in the morphologic changes of early hominids and role climate has played on these evolutionary adaptations.
Michael.Sperazza@stonybrook.edu
Stephanie Wade
Lecturer
Stephanie Wade teaches composition. She earned her B.A. in Psychology from Wesleyan University, M.A. in English from City College of New York and is completing her doctorate in English from Stony Brook University. She has presented papers on rhetoric, composition and poetics at leading national academic conferences.
Lou Ann Walker
Lecturer
Lou Ann Walker's memoir, A Loss for Words, won a Christopher Award. Her other books include Hand, Heart & Mind. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Life, Allure, Parade, The Chicago Sun-Times, and The New York Times Book Review, among others. Formerly an editor at Esquire and New York Magazine, Walker has lectured on writing at Smith College and Yale University, and taught at Marymount Manhattan College, Southampton College, and Columbia University.
Joseph D. Warren
Assistant Professor
Joseph D. Warren received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research
interests include bioacoustical oceanography and zooplankton ecology. He
uses underwater sound to study a variety of biological and physical
oceanographic processes including the distribution and abundance of
zooplankton populations and their interactions with predators; acoustic
scattering from microstructure in the water column, and detecting
submerged aquatic vegetation by acoustic methods. He has conducted
research projects in a variety of environments ranging from local
estuaries and bays to Antarctica. His lab web page is http://www.msrc.sunysb.edu/~warren/.