Rutgers: Office of Undergraduate Education

For Students

For Faculty

CARMEN TWILLIE AMBAR, Dean of Douglass Residential College and Douglass Campus, is the 9th woman to lead Douglass and the youngest dean appointed in its history. A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Dean Ambar holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Foreign Service from the Edmund A. Walsh School at Georgetown University, a master's degree in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a law degree from Columbia School of Law. Previously she served as an attorney in the Office of the Corporation Counsel for the City of New York, and as an Assistant Dean at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

In her role as Dean of Douglass she has emphasized women's global leadership by developing a cadre of leadership programs, establishing the human rights house, the Middle East Coexistence House, and promoting substantial increases in study abroad funding. Additionally, she has spearheaded efforts to encourage young women to pursue careers in math, science, and technology. She was appointed by Governor Jon S. Corzine and former Governor James McGreevy to three state-wide commissions: New-Jersey Advisory Commission on the Status of Women, State of New Jersey's Economic Development Authority, and New Jersey Schools Development Authority. Dean Ambar also has served as the Chair of the Board of Public Leadership Education Network.
ARTHUR D. CASCIATO (Ph.D., University of Virginia), Director of External Fellowships and Post-graduate Guidance, joins Rutgers from the University of Pennsylvania where he was adjunct associate professor of English and, since 2000, served as the Director of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. Before coming to Penn, he was an associate professor at Miami University of Ohio, and he has also taught American literature and writing at Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, and Northeastern University. He has co-edited two books, Waiting for Nothing and Other Writings by Tom Kromer, and Critical Essays on William Styron, as well as published articles on the novels of Theodore Dreiser, John Barth, and Pietro Di Donato. A poem about Di Donato called "Pete the Red" by Dr. Casciato is forthcoming from Italian Americana, and his most recent conference presentation was entitled "Everything I Know about Being Italian American, I Learned from Mad Magazine." He is also co-founder and first book review editor of the Oxford University Press journal American Literary History. During his seven-year tenure as fellowships director at Penn, the undergraduates he advised were awarded three Rhodes and five Marshall Scholarships. He is looking forward to helping Rutgers undergraduates achieve similar success.

KATHLEEN HULL (Ph.D., Drew University) joins Rutgers as Director of the Byrne Seminars, coming from New York University where she taught since 1996. Dr. Hull earned her B.A. (The History and Philosophy of Science) from McGill University; M.A. (Philosophy) from Johns Hopkins University; and Ph.D. (Theological and Religious Studies) from Drew. At NYU, she taught small, interdisciplinary undergraduate courses - including a favorite seminar, Boredom, Self and Society. Hull's research and publications are primarily in American Philosophy and pedagogy; she won the Peirce Prize for her work on Charles Sanders Peirce, founder of American Pragmatism, and most recently offered a paper at an international Peirce conference in Poland (Summer 2007). She's currently exploring the nature of mathematical imagination and various forms of genius, using tools from Peirce's semiotics. In 2002 she received a Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence from NYU; in 2001 she was winner of the National Education Association's Art of Teaching Prize for her essay on how to inspire college students with a love of learning.

MARIE LOGUE (Ph.D., Rutgers) joins the Office of Undergraduate Education as the assistant vice president for academic engagement and programming. Dr. Logue has been a Rutgers academic and student affairs administrator for twenty-five years. As the associate dean for student development at Rutgers College for many years, she worked closely with students and faculty developing co-curricular programs and activities. This experience will serve her well as she and her staff assist the campus deans and the faculty in the development of new structures that bring faculty and students into active engagement with each other. Dr. Logue and her staff welcome undergraduate students in all schools at Rutgers to participate in the new learning communities and the other active learning experiences sponsored by this office.

RICK LUDESCHER joins the Office of Undergraduate Education as the George H. Cook Campus Dean. He joined the Food Science Department in 1988, and has served that department as undergraduate program director and as graduate program director. He is a physical chemist (Ph.D., Oregon) who studies the physical properties of foods and other biomaterials using luminescence (fluorescence and phosphorescence) techniques; his research seeks to understand the molecular basis for food stability and quality. He teaches courses in the physical properties of foods and in the chemistry of food proteins and has won teaching awards at the department, school, university, and national levels. He is married and has a son as well as two well-loved but poorly trained Jack Russell terriers. Although he tries to keep fit by walking regularly, he spends most of his spare time reading and collecting books. He is excited to be the first Cook Campus Dean and looks forward to working with faculty, staff, and students to develop novel and innovative programs that enrich and enhance the campus community.

MATT K. MATSUDA (Ph.D., UCLA) joins the Office of Undergraduate Education as the College Avenue Campus Dean. A member of the Rutgers History Department since 1993, Professor Matsuda has been an undergraduate vice chair and a project director at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He teaches and researches Modern European (particularly French) and Asia and Pacific comparative questions and has written books about memory and historical thinking, empire and emotions, and is currently working on a general study of civilizations and encounters in the ocean-world of the Pacific. He is a recipient of undergraduate teaching awards at both UCLA and Rutgers and has been a guitarist and performer on the indie underground music scene. He looks forward to participating with students and faculty in creating programs that fully engage the scholarly, artistic, and scientific talents of the Rutgers community.

BARRY V. QUALLS (Ph.D., Northwestern) is vice president for undergraduate education and professor in the Rutgers English Department. He has also served as dean of humanities for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New Brunswick. He is the author of The Secular Pilgrims: The Novel as Book of Life (Cambridge) and of articles and reviews on 19th-century English literature and on the Bible and its literary impact. His teaching interests focus on Victorian literature and on biblical literatures. His particular focus as a member of the Rutgers community has been the ways graduate and undergraduate education work together constructively in a research university; he also has worked to establish closer working relationships between the state's public schools and its flagship public research university. In this context he has served as chair of the Provost's Committee on Undergraduate Education in the Context of a Research University; as chair of the University Committee on the Undergraduate Curriculum, which produced the curriculum report "Rutgers Dialogues"; and in 2004-2005 as chair of the University Task Force on Undergraduate Education, which produced a major restructuring of undergraduate education at Rutgers' New Brunswick Campus. He is the winner of both the Warren I. Sussman and Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New Brunswick awards for outstanding teaching, and of the Douglass Medal for service to Douglass College. In 2006 he was named New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

JEFFERY L. RANKIN, alumnus of the Brigham Young University College of Engineering, is entering his twenty-fourth year of service at Rutgers University. He was appointed to the faculty of the Chemical Engineering Department in 1984 and was promoted to Assistant Dean for First Year Engineering in 1988. He continues to serve in that capacity, along with teaching duties in the Chemical Engineering Department and the Engineering Honors Program. Dean Rankin has twice received outstanding teaching awards (Rutgers College Parents Association in 1989 and Engineering Governing Council in 2006), and directed the development of the unique Barr Hall First Year Engineering House on Busch Campus. In fall 2007 he assume the role of Campus Dean for Busch Campus to focus on developing fuller interaction and engagement among undergraduate students and their faculty, including further development of living-learning communities among science and professional school students.

STEPHEN REINERT (Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles) is Dean of the Study Abroad Program and an associate professor in the Rutgers Department of History. At UCLA, he earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine History, as well as an M.A. in Turkic languages. Dean Reinert's research focus is Balkan, Byzantine, and Ottoman history and culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He is particularly interested in religious debates between Christians and Muslims, in the framework of the expanding Ottoman Empire, on which he has published a variety of studies. His other works relate to Late Antique historiography, Crusades, the Battle of Kosovo Polje (1389), and the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I. He is currently completing a monograph on the Crusade of Nicopolis (1396), and is likewise researching a comprehensive new biography of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425). At Rutgers, Dean Reinert has taught widely on western medieval, Byzantine, classical Islamic, and Ottoman history - including a popular seminar on "Dracula: Facts and Fictions." His fascination with study abroad stems from the two Fulbright fellowships he held, as a graduate student at UCLA, to Greece and Austria.

KATHLEEN M. SCOTT (Ph.D., Yale) joins the Office of Undergraduate Education as the assistant vice president of instructional support. She is also director of the Rutgers Science Explorer program and Professor of Cell Biology and Neuroscience. Dr. Scott earned her doctorate at Yale University, and has served on the Rutgers faculty since 1978. She is Director of the Math and Science Learning Center and Principle Investigator of the Rutgers NSF-funded Graduate Teaching Fellows program, "Building a Learning Community in Mathematics and Science through Educational Partnerships." She currently teaches an introductory course, Moving Bodies, to non-science majors at Rutgers. Dr. Scott is also a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution, where she is currently working on the muscular anatomy of the pygmy hippopotamus.

LEA P. STEWART (Ph.D., Purdue) joins the Office of Undergraduate Education as the Livingston Campus Dean. Professor Stewart, a faculty member in the Department of Communication since 1981, has been chair of the department, director of the Ph.D. Program in Communication, Information and Library Studies and currently serves as Director of the Center for Communication and Health Issues. She also holds a joint faculty appointment with the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies. Her research focuses on health communication with an emphasis on issues relevant to the transition to college including the socially situated nature of dangerous drinking. This work has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Education with its prestigious model program award for the RU SURE Campaign. At Rutgers, Professor Stewart has received both the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research. She believes that students are the source of great ideas for the university and looks forward to working with students to make Livingston a great place to live and learn.

CARLA YANNI (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is assistant vice president for undergraduate academic affairs and associate professor in Rutgers Department of Art History. In 2005-2006, she was a member of the steering committee for the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, and is pleased to be joining the Office of Undergraduate Education this fall. Her area of scholarly expertise is nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. She considers architectural history to be more than the study of great monuments and architects. Rather, she includes the intellectual, social, and cultural meanings of buildings. She promotes the study of architectural history as a way of understanding a society's values. In 2000, Johns Hopkins University Press published her first book, Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. Her second book, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, was published by University of Minnesota Press in spring 2007. During the academic year 2002-2003 she was a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She grew up in Rochester, New York, and graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1987. In 1994 she earned the doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.

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