The Advisory Board of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study is a distinguished group of faculty members from across the University of Notre Dame that provides strategic programming support to the Institute. The Advisory Board serves the NDIAS in three primary ways: it assists during the final stages of the fellowship selection process, it helps determine the Institute’s annual theme, and it offers guidance on the Institute's strategic plan. Advisory Board members are appointed by the Director of the NDIAS and serve for two-year terms.
Current Members
Diogo Bolster
Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences
Frank M. Freimann Collegiate Chair in Hydrology
Bolster's research focuses on the impacts humans have on the earth and its resources, specifically targeting environmental fluid flows and contaminant transport across a wide range of scales from groundwater flows in porous media to more confined flows in enclosed spaces such as buildings.
Kevin G. Grove
Assistant Professor of Theology
Grove's research interests include memory, Christology, St. Augustine, and the theological writings of Basil Moreau. He was ordained a Holy Cross priest at Notre Dame in 2010 and served in two Michiana parishes before beginning his doctoral studies in Cambridge, England. Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame, he was a post-doctoral researcher at L'Institut Catholique in Paris, France, and then a research fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
Scott Howard
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering
Howard's research focuses on how the interaction of photons and tissue can be used to aid diagnosis and fundamental research in biological fields. He leads a research group that is finding ways to image chemical information in complex environments (such as biomedical and trace explosive detection applications) that exceed the limitations of current techniques. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Bruce Huber
Professor of Law
Huber teaches and conducts research in the areas of environmental law, natural resources law, property, and energy law. His particular areas of expertise include energy regulation, public land and resource management, and the interaction between law and politics. His scholarship in these fields has been published in journals such as the California Law Review, the Harvard Environmental Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal.
Elisabeth Köll
Professor of History
William Payden Collegiate Chair
Köll's research focuses on the managerial, legal, and financial evolution of firms and entrepreneurship in China from the 19th century to the present. Her new book, Railroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019), addresses the emergence of railroad infrastructure and how technology transfer, railroad construction, and management have contributed to China’s economic and political development as a modern nation-state.
Dianne Pinderhughes
Professor Africana Studies and Political Science
Pinderhughes is a Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow and Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Political Science. Her research addresses inequality with a focus on racial, ethnic, and gender politics and public policy in the Americas, explores the creation of American civil society institutions in the twentieth century, and analyzes their influence on the formation of voting rights policy.
Jason Rohr
Professor of Biology
Ludmilla F., Stephen J., and Robert T. Galla College Professor and Department Chair
Rohr's research interests encompass ecology and public health. He is particularly interested in how anthropogenic changes, mainly pollution, climate change, and alterations to biodiversity, affect wildlife populations, species interactions, and the spread of both wildlife and human diseases.
Mark Sanders
Professor of English and Africana Studies
Director of the Initiative on Race and Resilience
Sanders specializes in 20th century African American literature and culture, focusing on the links between American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. His research seeks to recover lost or ignored historical voices that describe the African American experience.His research interests include American and African American poetics, race theory, the African American novel, African American autobiography, and Afro-Cuban literature and culture.
Walter J. Scheirer
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Scheirer's research is primarily focused around the problem of recognition, including the representations and algorithms supporting solutions to it. He is particularly interested in features and learning-based methods that apply to both vision and language, thus breaking away from the persistent compartmentalization of recognition tasks. His work explores open set recognition, extreme value theory models for visual recognition, biologically-inspired learning algorithms, and stylometry.
Jeff Speaks
Professor of Philosophy
Chair of the Department of Philosophy
Speaks works primarily in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He came to Notre Dame in 2006 after teaching for three years at McGill University. His latest book, The Greatest Possible Being (Oxford University Press, 2018), discusses what can be known about God by reason alone.
Ernesto Verdeja
Associate Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies
Verdeja's research and teaching interests include large-scale political violence, transitional justice, forgiveness and reconciliation, and trials, truth commissions, apologies, and reparations. He is also the Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, a non-profit organization founded in 1982 to promote research and policy analysis on the causes and prevention of genocide and political violence.
Rebecca Whelan
Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Whelan's research lab is motivated by the need to detect and treat ovarian cancer in its early stages, when therapeutic intervention is most effective. Her lab approaches the problem of ovarian cancer detection with a diverse tool kit drawn from bioanalytical chemistry, molecular biology, bioinformatics, and nanoscience, and it has an abiding interest in fundamental analytical method development as well as biomedical and clinical application.
Emeritus Members
Mark McKenna
Professor of Law
John P. Murphy Foundation Chair
McKenna teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property and privacy law. He is widely recognized as a leading intellectual property scholar, having published in many of the most prestigious journals in his field. Though his core area of expertise is trademark law, he has written broadly on nearly every area of intellectual property, including utility patent, design patent, copyright, and the right of publicity.
David Anderson Hooker
Associate Professor of the Practice of Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding
Hooker has worked with communities, governments, and international NGOs and civil society organizations on post-conflict community building, environmental justice, and other issues of public policy and social justice. He has managed multi-party conflicts, conducted workshops, and consulted across the U.S. and around the world. Hooker is also a lawyer who has represented the State of Georgia as an assistant attorney general.