New Faculty: Profiles

An opportunity to learn more about our new faculty members.

Marilyn Asselin, PhD, RN-BC, Assistant Professor, College of Nursing

Areas of clinical specialty: Staff development, organizational and leadership development, continuing professional development

Areas of scholarship/research: Knowledge utilization, learning among nurses in acute care, transition to practice (RN re-entry, RN to BS)

Statement about self: The major focus of my nursing career has been on the education and professional development of nurses in an acute care practice setting. I have held hospital based positions as clinical educator, director of education, associate vice president and interim vice president for patient care services. In these positions, my focus was on leading the implementation of changes to promote a professional practice environment, leadership development and recruitment and retention strategies.

My research has focused on how acute care nurses, at different points in their careers, learn and transfer knowledge to practice. In my dissertation work, I examined ways in which gaining new knowledge resulted in changes in nurses' thinking or acting in a clinical situation. I have continued to study learning among nurses focusing on three different points of entry: new graduates, re-entry nurses and experienced nurses with new baccalaureate degrees. Courses:  NUR 623: Application of Nursing Knowledge to Practice; NUR 409: Nursing Leadership; NUR 611: Translating Knowledge to Practice.

Al Bavon Ph.D., Associate Professor, Policy Studies

Dr. Al Bavon is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Policy Studies at UMass Dartmouth. Prior to coming to UMass Dartmouth, Dr. Bavon was on the faculty of the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX. He brings an expertise in program evaluation, policy analysis, planning, and public sector productivity improvement to the Policy Studies department, where he will be teaching courses such as Public Management, Statistical Analysis, Program Evaluation, and Performance Measurement.

He has published articles in the International Journal of Public Administration, Public Works Management and Policy Journal, Journal of Developing Areas, Journal of Public Management and Social Policy,  African Social Science Review and Evaluation and Program Planning as well as a number of monographs related to his more than 10 years of public service in Florida's state government. He is particularly interested in evaluating the outcomes of public policies and programs. He has consulted for various organizations such as the U.S. Department of State, Tarrant County, TX, and several municipalities in Texas. He is a visiting scholar at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration.

Geoffrey Cowles, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Fisheries and Oceanography

Geoffrey Cowles received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2001.  Following completion of his thesis, he joined the mathematics department at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland where he performed research in the field of computational hydrodynamics in support of the America’s Cup Challenger Alinghi. Dr. Cowles joined UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) in 2003 where he presently holds a faculty position in the department of Fisheries Oceanography.

His research interests are centered on the application of numerical methods to scientific problems in fluid and ecosystem dynamics.  They include both scheme development, focused on implicit time stepping and adaptive methods, as well as applications, including sediment transport, larval dispersal, individual based modeling, and the use of ocean circulation models to improve estimates of fish movement. He teaches graduate courses in ecosystem modeling and computational approaches in non-hydrostatic ocean dynamics.

Maria Glória de Sá, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty director of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives

Maria Glória de Sá, assistant professor of sociology and faculty director of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, received a Ph.D.  in sociology from Brown University in 2003. Her research interests intersect the fields of immigration, race and ethnicity as they relate to Portuguese-speaking groups in the U.S. with a particular focus on the adjustment process of Portuguese-Americans. Her dissertation titled "The Portuguese of the U.S. from 1880 to 1990: Distinctiveness in Work Patterns across Gender, Nativity and Place" examined historical, gender and spatial work patterns among the Portuguese in the U.S. She has also investigated income and educational achievement among the Portuguese, ethnic and racial identification among Cape Verdeans and patterns of interaction between Portuguese and Brazilians in Southeastern Massachusetts.  Her recent publications include "The Labor Force Participation of Portuguese Immigrant Women in the U.S.," "The Educational Achievement of the Portuguese in the U.S. and the Role of Intellectuals in Fostering Education"  and "Culture or Context? Portuguese Americans and Social Mobility" (forthcoming with David Borges).

Monica J. Hanson, PhD, RNC, WHNP, Assistant Professor, College of Nursing

I received my PhD in Nursing from Boston College in 2004. My dissertation research was a secondary analysis using the Youth Risk Behavior Survey to identify health enhancing and health compromising behaviors in female high school students experiencing dating violence. My research interests include health care for adolescents and secondary analysis. 

Prior to Joining the College of Nursing, I held a number of full time positions in both public and private universities. I taught health assessment, nursing theory, nursing research,  community health, and professional role content in the RN to BSN Program at Central Connecticut State University from 2003-2005. Next I taught similar content at Quinnipiac University in the BSN program.  Most recently I taught at the University of Hartford in the RN to BSN program and in the Masters program adding health policy to previously taught content.  I am teaching Holistic Health Assessment and Scholarly Inquiry in Nursing this semester.

Peter Hughes, Ph.D., Full-Time Lecturer, Charlton College of Business

Peter Hughes received his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool in 1967 for research done into the energy loss processes occurring in decaying high-temperature plasmas. He has an MBA from Bryant University, and an earlier background in Electrical Engineering.  He has held positions within business organizations as Senior Scientist, Manager of Design Engineering, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Product Manager, Program manager on major military contracts, and Manager of Programs, supervising several program managers. He previously taught in the MBA program at Bryant for a period of seven years, and most recently worked for eleven years as a visiting lecturer at UMass Dartmouth.

Susan Hunter, PhD, RN, Assistant Professor, Nursing

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Adult and Child Nursing in the College of Nursing. Prior to this appointment, I worked as a visiting lecturer in the college while completing my doctorate. In May of 2007 I received my Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing degree from the University of Rhode Island.

I have been a practicing clinical nurse for the past fifteen years, with a focus on adult health and chronic illness. My teaching experience has included the medical-surgical classroom and clinical courses and the nursing research course in the undergraduate program. I have also taught nursing theory during select semesters at the graduate level.

My research interests include nurse-client interaction, mutuality, subjective well-being, chronic illness, and traumatic spinal cord injury. My recent dissertation work was a qualitative study with traumatic spinal cord injury individuals living in the community that looked at their experiences of living with injury.

Ed King, Ph.D., Full-Time Lecturer, Physics

Ed King received his PhD in physics from UMass Amherst in 1991.  The thesis was on a high-energy physics experiment conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In addition, he has worked on high-energy physics experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Lab and Cambridge Electron Accelerator. He is currently teaching introductory physics courses and an advanced solid state physics course and will teach a physics of music course in the spring.  In addition to physics and music, his interests include technology applied to education.

Yifei Li, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Yifei Li received his B.Eng. in Optoelectronics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 1996. He received his MS (July 2001) and Ph.D.(Sept. 2003) in Electrical Engineering both from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. From 2003 to 2007, he was a research faculty with the Center for Microwave/Lightwave Engineering, Drexel University.

At present, he is an assistant professor in the ECE department of UMass Dartmouth. His research interests include: high dynamic range RF/photonic links, tunable microchip lasers, hybrid lidar/radar, fiber radio system, coherent optical communications, and laser nonlinear dynamics. Recently, his original work in hybrid optical/digital processing of microwave signals won him the European Microwave Association (EuMA) Young Scientist Prize (1st prize) in the 12th Colloquium on Microwave Communications held in Budapest, Hungary.

Kari Nyren Mofford, M.S., Librarian

Kari Nyren Mofford earned her B.A. in English Literature from Wheaton College in 1993 and a M.S. in Library Science from Simmons in 1999. She recently worked as Instruction Coordinator/Information Technology Librarian at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston from 2001-2007.  She is currently serving as Co-Chair in NELIG (New England Library Instruction Group) and this year she co-presented  at two conventions; The Teaching Professor Conference in Atlanta about faculty-librarian collaborations and the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching in Michigan about creating Information literacy programs with librarians.  She also facilitated a roundtable at the ACRL Conference (American College and Research Libraries) in Baltimore on library instruction.

Stephanie O’Hara, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, French

Dr. Stephanie O’Hara is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Prior to joining the faculty at UMass Dartmouth in the fall of 2007, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of French at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2004-2007), and Lecturer in French at Iowa State University (2003-2004). She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2003 and her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1995.

This fall, Dr. O’Hara is teaching French 201, Intermediate French 1, and French 331, Masterpieces of French Literature. She is a specialist of early modern French literature, with a particular emphasis on the seventeenth century. Her research and teaching interests also include women’s studies, early modern European history, and the theory and practice of literary translation. She is currently at work on two major projects. One is a book manuscript entitled The Rhetoric of Poison Onstage and Offstage in Early Modern France. The other is a translation of the first European midwifery treatise written and published by a practicing midwife: Louise Bourgeois’ Various Observations concerning sterility, miscarriages, fertility, births, and diseases of women and newborn children (1609).

Guillermo Paz-y-Miño C, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Biology

Guillermo Paz-y-Miño C. Ph.D., University of Missouri-St. Louis, Evolution, Animal Behavior, Ecology, 1998. Assistant Professor, Worcester State College, Kalyan Ghosh Center for Science & Technology, 2004-2007. Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Biological Sciences, 2002-2004. Visiting Professor, University of Memphis, College of Arts and Sciences, 2000-2002. Research Associate, Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine, Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, 1999-2000.

Teaching: Biology of Organisms. I have broad interests in evolution, animal behavior (cognition), and conservation biology. My research focuses in three areas: (1) the link between different levels of social organization and the cognitive abilities of animals; (2) the association between socio-sexual behaviors and the communication of signals for the recognition of kin (role of memory in kin recognition); (3) the application of behavioral paradigms in conservation biology. I work -or have worked- with different biological systems, including birds, mammals, and nematodes. Research projects conducted in my laboratory include: mental processes such as transitive reasoning (i.e. the ability of animals to infer that if A is dominant to B, and B is dominant to C, it follows that A is dominant to C; numerous research topics derive from transitive reasoning: habitat foraging, social inference, complex thinking), visual perspective taking (i.e. ability to use an animal’s own visual perspective and the visual perspectives of others to assess, understand and predict the behavior of con- and hetero-specifics), as well as behavior reading (i.e. ability to assess and predict future behaviors of a conspecific based on its body language). These studies entail basic science (origin and evolution of the nervous system to be understood from the behavioral and psychological perspectives) and direct benefit to human health (i.e. mental disorders, visual attention, deterioration of cognitive capacities associated with aging). My research articles on animal and human cognition have appeared in Nature, Animal Behaviour, Ethology, Mind and Brain of Scientific American. I coordinate study and research abroad experiences in evolutionary biology for college and graduate students, and participate in public lectures on human evolution, Darwinism, and biodiversity conservation. I am the editor of The Conservation Behaviorist (Animal Behavior Society) and author of eighty editorials on science, technology and the environment.

Andrew J. Revell, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Psychology

Andrew J. Revell comes to the UMD Department of Psychology from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH; Bethesda, MD) where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow for the past three years studying neurobehavioral health, gene-environment interactions, and advanced statistical modeling. He completed his PhD at The Pennsylvania State University in Human Development and Family Studies, with a minor in Gerontology. With NIMH funding as a pre-doctoral fellow, his dissertation investigated apolipoprotein E-epsilon 4 and other risk factors for Alzheimer’s type dementia longitudinally.

Dr. Revell has a Masters degree in Clinical-Adult Psychology from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE), where he also completed the Teaching sequence and a Certificate in Gerontology. Clinical practicums were completed in the hospitals affiliated with Saint Louis University and Washington University at St. Louis. As a graduate research assistant in the SIUE School of Nursing, he assisted in the dementia screening program through the Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders. Dr. Revell was then employed by the Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State University. He holds a bachelors degree in Psychology from Truman State University.

At UMass Dartmouth, Dr. Revell is teaching courses in Child Psychology and Research Methods. He will maintain research collaborations with Penn State, the Veterans Head Injury Study through NINDS and the Department of the Navy, and NIMH. A new collaboration with the Duke University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center is underway.

Heather M. Shaw, MFA, Full-time Lecturer, Design

Heather Shaw earned her undergraduate degree in Visual Design from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and her MFA degree from the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Shaw specializes in design for dynamic media in both Digital Media and Graphic Design departments. She continues her professional practice and consults for Nieshoff Design in Lexington, MA (her previous position as creative director).

Shaw’s work encompasses a wide range of design for static, dynamic, and interactive media, specializing in museums, universities, and non-profits. She has worked for clients such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MIT, and Perkins School for the Blind. Her current work and research explores concepts narrative, sequence, and behaviors for interactive media.

Cathy Smilan, Ed.D., Assistant Professor, Art Education

Cathy Smilan earned her Doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction in Art Education from Florida Atlantic University in 2004. She was employed as an instructor at FAU for three years before joining the Faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth this fall. Her research interests include authentic visual arts integration, museum partnerships in education, and the role of art educators as leaders in the move toward developing a creative citizenry. Her creative inquiry in ceramics has most recently explored the vessel and intricate knitting and weaving motifs.

In addition to scholarly and creative inquiry, Dr. Smilan consults in the areas of art integration curriculum development, and evaluation of art education programs and museum partnership.

Her recent creative and scholarly publications include:

• Brown, S. and Smilan, C. (2007). Integrating art and music in the inclusive classroom. In S. Darling & M. LaRoque (Eds.), Integrating curriculum within the inclusiveK-3 classroom. Boston: Allyn-Bacon.
• Smilan, C. and Keppel, P. (2007). Report of the MIENC Conference “anthem for change: Music in education reform”. The NEC Journal for Learning Through Music. Boston: NEC.
• Smilan, C. (2007). Jade Teapot (hand-built ceramic). Mad Hatter’s teaparty exhibit. Armory Arts Center. West Palm Beach, Florida. March, 2007.
• Smilan, C. (1994). Manufactured Distraction (mixed media on canvas). Cover Art for The Peter Van Huffel Quintet - Silvester Battlefield (2007).