Meet Our Faculty
In this section, we showcase just a few of our many outstanding faculty members.
ENGINEERING
Joan Brennecke, Keating Crawford Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Brennecke is internationally known for her research in the development of solvents, specifically supercritical fluids and ionic liquids. She directs Notre Dame’s Energy Center , which was recently awarded a $2.8-million U.S. Department of Energy grant for research aimed at dramatically improving how the country uses and produces energy.
The author of numerous groundbreaking articles on the use of supercritical fluids and ionic liquids, Brennecke’s 1999 paper in the journal Nature launched a totally new area of molecular thermodynamics—one made up entirely of ions—to exploit ionic liquids. Her work has been recognized by her selection into the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in 2012.
The Graduate School has honored Brennecke for the close attention she gives to the development of her many graduate students—all while maintaining tremendous research productivity—and for her leadership in interdisciplinary projects across the Colleges of Science and Engineering. Read More
Thomas Corke, Clark Professor of Engineering Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
The founding director of Notre Dame’s Center for Flow Physics and Control and director of the Hessert Laboratory for Aerospace Research, Corke specializes in the study of fluid mechanics. His specific research interests are hydrodynamic stability, transition of laminar flow to turbulent flow, aeroacoustics, computational fluid dynamics, applied turbulence control, unsteady flows, wind engineering and atmospheric diffusion, and wind tunnel design.
Corke’s research on plasmas includes a new type of plasma sensor designed for use in hypersonic Mach number, high enthalpy flows. It has been emulated worldwide for flow control applications. He also is the author of Design of Aircraft, which has been adopted as the capstone design text in more than a dozen aerospace departments across the United States and in numerous programs around the world. Read More
HUMANITIES
Margaret Anne Doody, The John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature in the Department of English and Ph.D. in Literature Program
Margaret Anne Doody, the University’s John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature and the first director of its Ph.D. in Literature Program, is known internationally for her critically acclaimed The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers University Press, 1996). With a career rooted in the study of the eighteenth century, Doody is also the author of many articles on Swift, Sterne and Austen, and of book-length studies of Samuel Richardson and of Frances Burney, as well as The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press 1985; reissued 2010). A recent book, Tropic of Venice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), takes a city as a text. In 2007, Doody received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project tracing the roots of the Enlightenment in the Renaissance, dealing with thinkers such as Pico and Paracelsus. Her book in progress is an enquiry into when and how we began to think positively of change as a good thing. The working title is Love, Change, and Chaos: The Coming of the Enlightenment.
Doody is also the author of the popular “Aristotle Detective” series of novels, translated into many languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, and Greek. Another novel, The Alchemists, has also enjoyed international popularity. Read more on her faculty profile or writer’s website.
Brad Gregory, The Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern European History
Gregory, who came to Notre Dame in 2003 after earning early tenure at Stanford University, is a historian of late medieval and early modern Christianity, and of intellectual history in early modern Europe. His research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholics, Protestants, and radical Protestants in England, France, the Low Countries, and Germany.
Widely regarded as the brightest and most promising Reformation-era scholar of his generation, Gregory’s first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 1999), won six book awards.
Gregory’s current major project, The Unintended Reformation, from the Harvard University Press, analyzes the multiple intertwined, complex ways in which the unresolved doctrinal disagreements and concrete religio-political disruptions in the Reformation era not only shaped the emergence of the modern Western world, but continue to exert diverse influences in the early twenty-first century. Learn more
Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History
A distinguished scholar of American religious history, Professor Mark Noll has become a prominent participant in the national dialogue between evangelical and Catholic scholars. His numerous works include God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2008), The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans Publishing Company (August 1994), and America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Noll received the National Humanities Medal in 2006.
Noll is currently at work on a book manuscript that will combine two large narratives about the Bible in American history: first, the rise and decline of a biblical civilization defined mostly by activistic, British-origin Protestants; and, second, the ever widening diversity of Bibles, biblical uses, and other sacred Scriptures in a liberal America open to Christian believers of all kinds as well as the adherents of many other authoritative religious texts.
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Cyril O’Regan, the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology
Cyril O’Regan, the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology, specializes in systematic and historical theology. His specific teaching and research interests are in the intersection of continental philosophy and theology, religion and literature, mystical theology, and postmodern thought. O’Regan has written The Heterodox Hegel, Gnostic Return in Modernity, and Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative. He has published numerous articles on such topics as the nature of tradition, negative theology, the sources of Hegel’s thought and Hegel as a theological source, and on figures such as John Henry Newman and the 20th- century Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Read More
SCIENCE
Ani Aprahamian, Freimann Professor of Physics
The research of Freimann Professor of Physics Ani Aprahamian is in the area of experimental nuclear physics. She focuses on nuclear structure effects (shapes, masses, decay lifetimes, and probabilities) and how they can influence stellar processes. This research is a part of the new National Science Foundation’s Joint Institute of Nuclear Astrophysics frontier center and addresses the fate of nuclei under extreme conditions, such as accretion disks of binary neutron star systems or shock fronts of core collapse supernovae. The experiments are carried out by studying nuclei via radioactive ion beams at Notre Dame using the TWINSOL facility, as well as facilities at Michigan State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory.
Aprahamian is a former member of DOE/NSF Nuclear Science Advisory Committee and a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received many scientific honors and awards, and has numerous widely published scientific papers on questions in nuclear structure and nuclear astrophysics. Learn More
David Lodge, Biological Sciences
Professor of Biological Sciences David Lodge is a world-renowned expert on invasive species. An ecologist, Lodge examines the impacts of global environmental changes on drinking water, recreation, fisheries, biodiversity, and other ecosystem goods and services. Much of his research has a strong focus on ecological forecasting to better inform environmental risk assessment, policy, and management.
Director of Notre Dame’s Center for Aquatic Conservation , Lodge served as the first chair of the national Invasive Species Advisory Committee and was the lead author of the Ecological Society of America’s paper calling for a stronger government response to the problem of invasive species. Nationally, Lodge has taken a lead role in the response to the threat of Asian carp establishing in the Great Lakes by showing with environmental DNA evidence that the carp are much closer to the Lake Michigan than previously thought. He has testified in federal court about his group’s discoveries using advancements in genomics.
Lodge is the principal investigator in one of nine strategic research investments (SRI)—together, given an $80 million infusion of research funds—as part of Notre Dame’s ongoing expansion of research. Lodge’s SRI, the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative, will tackle the interrelated problems of invasive species, land use, and climate change, focusing on their synergistic impacts on water resources. Learn More
Marvin Miller, George and Winifred Clark Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Prof. Marvin Miller is one of the world’s leading research scientists and educators in the field of synthetic organic chemistry and associated biomedical areas of investigation. While winning both graduate and undergraduate teaching awards, he has maintained one of the most visible, highest regarded, and best funded research programs in Notre Dame’s history. The current focus of his laboratory’s work is the global tuberculosis (TB) epidemic, from which nearly 2 million people die worldwide annually. Laboratory members are working to identify cost effective anti-TB agents. In the spring of 2010, Miller received a $1.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to further this research.
While typically maintaining a group of 20 to 25 students and postdoctoral fellows, Miller has built up a prolific scientific publication record encompassing over 250 journal articles and other publications, along with students as frequent co-authors. He is the owner of 20 patents and is a frequent speaker at scientific conferences. Read more at his faculty profile or see the original news story.
SOCIAL SCIENCE
Nicole McNeil, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Nicole McNeil is a rising star in the field of cognitive psychology. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences awarded her a multi-year, $760,000 grant for a study that examines how small changes in the structure of arithmetic practice—for example, the format in which problems are presented during practice—affect the development of children’s mathematical thinking. McNeil went on to win a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to recognize scholars who are at the outset of their careers in scientific research.
McNeil’s work focuses on the mechanisms that propel and constrain the development of problem solving, quantitative reasoning, and symbolic understanding. Interested in theoretical issues related to the construction and organization of knowledge, as well as practical issues related to learning and instruction, she is the director of the Department of Psychology’s Cognition, Learning, and Development Lab .
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Christian Smith, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology
Director of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Research and the Center for the Study of Religion and Society
Specializing in the sociology of religion and social theory, Professor Christian Smith is one of the top sociologists of religion in this country, due in large part to the enormous amounts of data-rich research he has conducted and continues to produce.
Among other projects, Smith is the principal investigator for the Science of Generosity Initiative and the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) —both major national data-collection efforts. Established in 2009 with a $5-million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Science of Generosity is designed to stimulate scientific research on the practices of philanthropy, volunteerism, and altruism in human life and society.
Smith joined the Notre Dame faculty in fall 2006, coming from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as the Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Sociology. He is the author of several books, including Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2003).
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Read Christian’s Blog
Michael Zuckert, The Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science
One of America’s most eminent scholars of American political thought and constitutional studies, Michael Zuckert is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University and former chair of the Department of Political Science. Zuckert’s scholarship focuses on political philosophy, American constitutional law and theory, and American political thought. Author of Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, The Natural Rights Republic, and Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy, he most recently co-edited The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle with Derek Webb in 2009. Zuckert co-authored and co-produced the public radio series Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson: A Nine Part Drama for the Radio and was senior scholar for Liberty!, a six-hour public television series on the American Revolution. He also was lead scholar for two other PBS series, one on Benjamin Franklin and another on Alexander Hamilton.
Zuckert is currently completing a book titled Completing the Constitution: The Post-Civil War Amendments, co-authoring a book on Machiavelli and Shakespeare, and has been commissioned to write the volume on John Rawls for a new series on Twentieth Century political philosophy. In May 2010, he was honored for distinguished scholarship at the Association for the Study of Free Institution’s annual conference in May 2010 at Princeton University.
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