The faculty mentoring program for new faculty is intentional, inclusive, relational, and holistic. It follows a cohort model, with tenured faculty members working with small groups of new faculty. These cohorts meet regularly, observe each other’s classes, and engage in dialogue about key issues at Rhodes and in higher education. Here are the faculty serving as mentors to the new faculty cohort this year:
"I teach a wide range of courses in European history and the history of Western culture, including ones that encourage students to look for the connections between different countries and societies. I believe that no part of the human experience is off-limits for the historian’s study. Therefore, I try to bring an array of stories, documents, and resources to my classroom in order to give students a deep sense of what it was like for people to live at a particular moment in time, including music, literature, film, art, and other kinds of sources. As a result, I try to get my students outside their own heads and into the minds of other people who lived in the past."
Becky Klatzkin (Psychology Department and Neuroscience Program) came to Rhodes in 2011 with a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on understanding the psychological and physiological mechanisms underlying stress-eating in women. She teaches a range of classes including Neuroscience, Introduction to Psychology, and Clinical Neuroscience.
"My post doctoral research work (at St Jude children’s Research hospital) includes structural and thermodynamic Studies of the Winged-helix DNA Binding Domain of the Proto-Oncoprotein Qin using solution Nuclear Magenetic Resonance spectroscopy, and Isothermal calorimetry. The DNA binding winged helix domains of the Qin and human FOXG1B are identical. We study the solution structure of cQin-WHD and describe structural and dynamic changes that occur upon DNA binding."
Dr. Shaolu Yu is an urban geographer. She holds a B.S. in Resources, Environment, Urban Planning and Management (Qufu, China), an M.S. in Urban Geography (Beijing, China), and a Ph.D. in Geography (University of Connecticut, U.S.A). Trained as an urban geographer in an interdisciplinary background and participating in projects in urban studies in China, the U.S., and Canada, she has developed a comparative and global perspective and a mixed method approach in her research on cities. Her papers have been published in the journals Annals of Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Urban Geography, Geographical Review, and The Journal of Transport Geography.