This is the last of three introductions to new tenure-track faculty members.

Virginia Penhune (Psychology) has a PhD from McGill. Her research focuses on understanding normal learning and retention of timed motor sequences, which has applications in the rehabilitation of people with brain damage. She hopes to broaden her research to include developmental studies of motor learning in children, and to examine the gross anatomical organization of the human brain using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging).
Stylianos Perrakis (Finance) is an internationally recognized scholar who has made significant contributions to the literature of finance, economics and management science. He joins us from the University of Ottawa, where he was a full professor.

Andrew Prevost (Finance) was a senior lecturer in the Department of Finance, Banking and Property, Massey University, New Zealand, and has had several papers accepted for publication. He won an award for his doctoral thesis at Wayne State University, as well as recognition of his excellent teaching.

Martin Racine (Design Art) studied industrial design at the Université de Montréal and in Paris, at the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle. He worked in a design office for five years, then established his own freelance practice. Through his Master’s degree in communication sciences, Racine specialized in semiotics and cognitive sciences. Currently, he is completing a PhD on the career of Julien Hébert (1917-1994), the father of industrial design in Canada. At Concordia, where he started as a limited-term appointment last year, he teaches 3D design and ecological design.

Ian Rakita (Finance) started teaching in the department in 1993 after extensive industry experience. He got his MBA and his PhD from Concordia and spent 1997-1998 teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ont., where he received a commendation for teaching. He is interested in the microstructure of new and secondary equity offerings, and the resolution of capital rationing problems under uncertainty. He is the only two-time winner of the Gold Prize for outstanding paper in an annual contest sponsored by the Montreal Society of Financial Analysts.

Norrin Ripsman (Political Science) comes to us from Dalhousie University, where he has been teaching for the past year. He has a PhD in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania (1997), and his previous degrees are from the University of Toronto.

Lillian Robinson (Principal, Simone de Beauvoir Institute) is a feminist scholar who comes to us from the University of East Carolina, Greenville, N.C., with 30 years of widely varied experience: court translator, published poet and mystery writer, student at the Sorbonne, teacher at the University of Hawaii and Radcliffe. She has written five academic books, and has a PhD from Columbia University.

Eve Sanders (English) has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1995). She is a Shakespearean scholar who has also worked extensively on literacy studies and the history of reading. Her first book, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1998), won an award. She has taught at UCLA and at Washington University, and is currently working on a comparative study of the Italian and English stages in which she takes up the vexing question of why England, unlike the Continent, employed boy actors in place of women to play female characters.

Julian Schofield (Political Science) will have a PhD from Columbia University, N.Y., where he also earned a Master’s in philosophy (international relations). His doctoral thesis is on weapons and conflict. A 1995 graduate of Concordia’s Master’s in Public Policy and Public Administration program, his thesis for that degree was on nuclear proliferation. He has been lecturing in the department for several years.

Ahmed Seffah (Computer Science) joined the department last January. He has advanced degrees from the École Centrale de Lyon, where he was a lecturer and research scientist from 1992 to 1994. He did post-doctoral studies at the Université de Montréal and UQAM, and joined CRIM as a researcher for human-computer interaction, information highway applications, and software development working groups.

Eric Shragge (School of Community and Public Affairs) will be the director of the SCPA’s new Graduate Diploma in Community Economic Development Program. He spent many years in McGill’s School of Social Work, and was most recently director of the SCPA’s Graduate Diploma in Community Economic Development (CED). He has published and edited books in the field, and has worked with many community groups. He is now on a committee working to establish an immigrant workers’ centre.

Purnendu Sinha (Electrical/ Computer Engineering) has a PhD in computer engineering from Boston University, and previous degrees from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ. His research interests include design and analysis of distributed dependable and real-time algorithms, embedded systems, formal-methods-based verification and validation (V&V) of fault-tolerant and real-time protocols, fault-injection based validation, and real-time imaging.

Kate Sterns (English) has a BA (Hons) from Queen’s University, an MA from Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin. She began her career in London, where she was a script reader for the Royal National Theatre and wrote training scripts for BBC Television. Her first novel, Thinking About Magritte was published in 1992, and her radio plays The Bagel Philosopher and Once in a Blue Moon, were produced by the BBC. Her second novel, The Resurrectionists, will be published next year.

Rustam Vahidov (DS/MIS) completed his PhD at Georgia State University this summer. His research interests include decision support systems, multi-agent systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and fuzzy logic and arithmetic and their use for decision support.

Sheila Webber (Management) completed her PhD in industrial/organizational psychology from George Mason University, in Virginia. Her primary areas of research are workteams and leadership. She has two forthcoming articles in learned journals.

Peter van Wyck (Communication Studies) got his PhD from McGill in 1997; his previous degrees were from Trent University, and he was a postdoctoral fellow in the humanities at Queen’s University. He explores the semiotics of ecological threat and disaster, monuments and cultural memory, and psychoanalytic theories of culture, nature and subjectivity.