Jaswal has a B.A. from Mills College and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). After earning her Ph.D., she engaged in postdoctoral work at Yale University and was a research fellow at Stanford University. Jaswal’s experiences in instructing and conducting research with students at these universities led her to pursue a position in academia. “I spent a lot of time supervising younger students in labs and had a lot of fun with that, and decided that I wanted to find a position where I could combine doing research with students and teaching,” she said. Jaswal will be co-teaching “Introductory Chemistry” this fall with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karena McKinney and “Biochemistry” in the spring with Biology Chair Patrick Williamson.
Jaswal’s research interests primarily concern protein folding: “I am interested in understanding how proteins get folded and how they stay in their shapes once they are folded because proteins are very dynamic and they do unfold a certain percentage of the time.” She further noted that understanding protein folding is key to comprehending neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and mad cow disease, in which proteins are either unable to maintain their shapes or cannot form their correct shapes.
When asked what she thought about Amherst so far, Jaswal replied, “I really enjoy [working with] my colleagues in the Chemistry department. I’m also starting to get to know professors from other departments.” Jaswal also enjoys living in faculty housing because it provides a community atmosphere. “My kids love being with the other kids over there,” she added.
Meanwhile, Liao is happy to join the Mathematics department. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Finance, with a minor in Statistics, from the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from Pennsylvania State University. She is essentially a statistician whose main research interests involve nonparametric testing against high-dimensional alternatives. Liao will be teaching “Introduction to Statistics” and “Introduction to Calculus” this fall, and “Introduction to Statistics” and “Regression Modeling and Design of Experiments” in the spring.
Liao’s transition from finance to statistics is worth noting. After graduating from college, she worked in the world of financial investments for two years. She left the business realm, however, and went on to do graduate work at Penn State once she realized that she had entered the wrong profession. “I thought I loved it, but it turned out that I didn’t really enjoy it all that much,” Liao explained. “The life there is very challenging, but the focus is very narrow. I enjoyed it in the very beginning, but somehow, as time went on, I found that I would like to have a bigger impact on this world. [At Penn State], I fell in love with Statistics. Many of my friends have asked me how I foresaw the financial crisis, [because I had transitioned away from finance just in time], and I’ve told them that I didn’t, that I just followed my heart.”
Regarding Amherst, Liao could not be happier. “I love it here,” she noted. “I envy students at Amherst and hope that they know how lucky they are. When I first came to Amherst, I felt that it was like a big family. I really like working here.”
Melillo earned his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in History from Yale University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2006, he completed his postdoctoral work at the University of San Francisco, and held visiting professorships at Oberlin College in Ohio and Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. This fall, Melillo will be teaching “Commodities, Nature and Society” and “Global Environmental History of the Twentieth Century.” The former focuses on the social and environmental histories of sugar, silver, silk, coffee, tobacco, sneakers, microchips, units of bandwidth and human body parts, and analyzes the complexities of globalization. The latter serves to examine the environmental history of the world from 1900, with an emphasis on the developing world. In the spring, Melillo will be teaching “Environmental Issues of the Nineteenth Century” and “Spain and the Pacific World, 1571-1898.”
Melillo’s interest in two fields as diverse as History and Environmental Studies stems from family influence dating back to his childhood. “My dad’s an ecologist and my mom’s a historian, so I intertwined two limbs of the family tree and came up with this,” he explained. “I was actually a biology major as an undergraduate, until my senior year when I realized that I had taken enough history courses to be a history major. I’ve always been looking for ways to combine [history and environmental studies] and this has been really exciting because it provides people with a unique way of explaining the world, especially, I think, as we see the emergence of more and more excitement surrounding the environment.”
As for his adaptation to Amherst thus far, Melillo stated, “I’m really happy to be here. I grew up on Cape Cod, so it’s kind of a homecoming for me to come back to Massachusetts. It’s really nice to be in a tenure-track position where I know I can put down roots and stay around for a while.”
The College welcomes other new faculty members this fall: Kasumi Yamamoto, Visiting Associate Professor of Japanese; Eric K. Wubbels, Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music; Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Visiting Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Art and the History of Art; William B. Ouimet, Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology; Doreen Lee, Karl Loewenstein Fellow in Political Science and Jurisprudence; Amelie Hastie, Associate Professor of English; Yasmine Hasnaoui, Five College Lecturer in Arabic; Próspero N. Garcia, Lecturer in Spanish; Betsey Garand, Resident Artist in the Department of Art and the History of Art; Wallace Fu, Laboratory Instructor in Chemistry; Jonathan T. Chow, Five College Fellow in Political Science; and Christina Carlsund-Levin, STINT Fellow in Physics.