By Aneri Pattani, News Correspondent
College of Arts, Media & Design
Tracy Strain, Professor of Practice in Media and Screen Studies
Huntington News: Can you briefly explain your experience prior to arriving at Northeastern?
Tracy Strain: I am a filmmaker who specializes in making documentaries. Most of the documentaries on which I’ve worked have been for public television, including the one on which my company is presently working for an American Experience program about the construction of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York. I run a small production company based in Boston’s Fort Point Channel neighborhood called The Film Posse. Back in February, our 90-minute American Experience documentary “Silicon Valley,” which tells a story of the early history of that famed tech region, premiered on PBS.
HN: What is your main goal to accomplish at Northeastern this year?
TS: My main goal this year is to help foster the emergence of the cinematic voice of each of my students. I also have been asked to develop some new documentary classes and though production skills and techniques are important, I plan to focus on storytelling. That’s what gets funded and what we respond to as audience members — good stories. I look forward to meeting colleagues in other fields and hopefully we can collaborate in the future.
D’Amore McKim School of Business
Nancy Sirianni, Assistant Professor of Marketing
HN: What is your main goal to accomplish at Northeastern this year?
NS: I hope to bring my passion for marketing and customer-centric strategy into the classroom and to inspire students to place the customer at the heart of their strategic business plans. Without satisfied customers, business cannot sustainably thrive.
HN: For what product would you like to design a marketing campaign? Why?
NS: I tend to think more about services than products, so I’ll say Zappos.com. They are an innovative company that fundamentally understands that people can buy shoes anywhere on the Internet — it’s high quality, personal customer service that creates true customer loyalty. Zappos is constantly growing and I’ve heard their CEO Tony Hsieh say that they might even get into the airline business someday. I believe Zappos’ commitment to customer service would be a game-changing addition to the travel industry and I’d love to help them design a marketing campaign for that launch.
College of Computer and Information Science
David Choffnes, Assistant Professor
HN: Can you briefly explain your experiences prior to arriving at Northeastern?
David Choffnes: After growing up in Chicago, I attended Amherst College for my undergrad, where I majored in physics and French. Since the job market for francophone physicists dried up in 2002 when I graduated, I was left with no choice but to pursue a career in the textbook-authorship business with Deitel & Associates. In two years, I worked on three books, two of which I coauthored. After that, I decided it was time for me to stop writing about others’ work and start making my own to write about. Fortunately, Northwestern saw fit to entertain that notion, and that is where I pursued my PhD in Computer Science. Afterward, I was a postdoc at the University of Washington — also Huskies — before taking the long trip back across I-90 to my current position in CCIS at Northeastern.
HN: What is your main goal to accomplish at Northeastern this year?
DC: My main goal is to engage students in computer science, be it in the classroom or one-on-one via research projects. Topics in this field affect us every day — every time you tweet, send an e-mail or type a Google search, you are interacting with dozens of services that computer science brought to life. One of the best parts about this field is how easy it is to apply your knowledge and research to the real world. Students I’ve worked with have built mobile apps, modified BitTorrent to measure ISP (mis)behavior and even changed the way the Internet sends traffic from one point to another. At Northeastern, I hope to involve students in similarly impactful projects.
Bouvé College of Health Sciences
Alice Bonner, Associate Professor in the School of Nursing
HN: Can you briefly explain your experiences prior to arriving at Northeastern?
Alice Bonner: Prior to coming to Northeastern University School of Nursing, I was the Director of the Division of Nursing Homes at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services within the Department of Health and Human Services. I commuted from Massachusetts to Baltimore, Md. for two years and had the opportunity to work with colleagues in the federal government on implementation of several sections of the Affordable Care Act and other nursing home policy issues. Prior to that, I was the Director of Health Care Safety and Quality at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. I have been a gerontological nurse practitioner taking care of nursing home residents and their families for over 20 years. Previously, I was on the faculty at the Graduate School of Nursing in Worcester, Mass.
HN: What is your main goal to accomplish at Northeastern this year?
AB: My primary goal at Northeastern is to contribute to ongoing enhancements to the curriculum with respect to gerontological nursing and health policy as it relates to older adults. I am looking forward to working with faculty and students in the nursing programs and the Center for Health Policy as well.
College of Science
Jeffrey Agar, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
HN: Can you briefly explain your experiences prior to arriving at Northeastern?
I was an assistant professor at Brandeis. Prior to that, I completed my undergraduate at the University of Michigan, my graduate studies in inorganic chemistry at the University of Georgia and my post-doctoral studies in ALS at McGill.
Jeffrey Agar: What is your main goal to accomplish at Northeastern this year?
Develop a ‘kick ass protein mass spectrometry class’ for Spring 2013 that gets students prepared for tomorrow’s jobs or graduate school. Write a bunch of grant proposals and manuscripts together with my new colleagues. Take advantage of the outstanding mass spectrometry equipment Northeastern has invested in, and in particular, get my own equipment up and running. Walk around the symphony district and listen to the music coming from the windows. Learn to play ‘Over the Rainbow’ on my ukulele.
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Tim Cresswell, Professor of History and International Affairs
HN: Can you briefly explain your experiences prior to arriving at Northeastern?
Tim Cresswell: I grew up in a Royal Air Force family all over the world – in Berlin and Singapore, as well as in England. I think I must have developed a travel bug, as following my undergraduate course in geography at University College London, I decided to come to the USA for the first time and do post-graduate study in geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, I undertook doctoral research with the well-known humanistic geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan. My thesis became my first book, “In Place/Out of Place,” and I landed a job back in the U.K. in Wales where I lived for 13 years with my American wife — we met in Wisconsin — and growing family. In 2006, we moved to London shortly after our third and final child, Madison, was born. I worked at Royal Holloway, University of London as a Professor of Human Geography from 2006 until now. In that time I have researched and written about the key geographical ideas of place and mobility within the framework of cultural geography and, more recently, the inter-disciplinary project known as geo- or spatial-humanities.
HN: What is your main goal to accomplish at Northeastern this year?
TC: To get to know the place and as many people as I can. There is a no geography program at Northeastern, so it is a challenge for me to fit my own interests into those scholars across disciplines. I think this is good for me and I like the interdisciplinary nature of work at Northeastern. My aim is to find people from as many disciplines as possible with an interest in thinking spatially. From there I plan to start an interdisciplinary graduate program in the geo- or spatial- humanities linking existing work in both public humanities and digital humanities to a wider intellectual framework of thinking with and about space and place. I want Northeastern to become a leading center for this kind of research and I want to get as much of that accomplished in one year as I can.
