3 Faculty Awarded Tenure

The Wesleyan University Board of Trustees affirmed the promotion with tenure, effective July 1, 2009, of the following members of the faculty. These appointments do not conclude tenure announcements for the 2008-2009 academic year, and more may be forthcoming.

Norman Danner, associate professor of computer science, was appointed assistant professor of computer Science in August 2002. Before coming to Wesleyan he was the VIGRE assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CPATH CB Collaborative Grant, a Mellon Foundation Grant and a Wesleyan University Ethical Reasoning Course Grant.

Danner’s teaching interests focus on open-source software development. His research interests are primarily focused on the development of practical programming languages with guaranteed resource usage and low-latency networks for anonymous web-browsing.

Danner earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Indiana University.

Fernando Degiovanni, associate professor of romance languages and literatures, was appointed an assistant professor of romance languages and literatures at Wesleyan in 2002 and has been a member of the Latin American Studies Program. He came to Wesleyan from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was a teaching assistant while a Ph.D. candidate. He has received a Council for Scientific Research Fellowship, a Wesleyan University Project Grant and a Center for the Humanities Grant. He is the author of the book Los textos de la patria: nacionalismo, políticas culturales y canon en Argentina, as well as several scholarly articles and reviews.

He specializes in issues of nationalism, cultural politics and canon formation in Argentina, focusing on the first popular series of national “classic” authors in early 20th century. His research explores the ways in which opposing intellectual projects attempted to build and impose contrasting versions of the Argentine cultural tradition in times of massive immigration and democratic institutionalization.

Degiovanni received his Profesor en Letras Modernas and a Licenciado en Letras Modernas from the University of Cordoba in Argentina, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Greg Voth, associate professor of physics, was appointed an assistant professor of physics at Wesleyan in July 2002. Prior, he was a visiting assistant professor and postdoctoral research associate at Haverford College. He received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award in 2006, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2005, and the Andres Acrivos Dissertation Award in 2001 from the American Physical Society. He is the co-author of the article “Fluid particle accelerations in fully developed turbulence” published in Nature, as well as primary or co-author of several other scholarly papers. He also has a patent pending on an “Apparatus and Method for Real Time Image Compression for Particle Tracking.”

Voth’s research involves experimental studies of the dynamics of soft-condensed matter and fluid systems. Current experiments include those that use high-speed video imaging to measure particle trajectories in granular and turbulent flows.

He earned a B.S. with honors from Wheaton College, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University.

“Please congratulate these faculty members on this important occasion and express your appreciation to them for their scholarship and teaching, their fine colleagueship and their commitment to the students who attend Wesleyan to receive a very fine liberal arts education,” says Wesleyan President Michael Roth .