Indiana University Bloomington is welcoming 307 new full-time faculty from 35 countries this fall, continuing its commitment to being a community of scholars that attracts and retains an excellent faculty.
Of the incoming faculty members, 54 percent are men and 46 percent are women. Among them, 26 percent are tenured or tenure-track faculty and librarians; 7 percent are lecturers, clinical professors or professors of practice; 35 percent are in a research position; and 31 percent are visiting professors. About one-third are faculty of color.
“We are thrilled to welcome our new cohort to the IU Bloomington faculty community,” said Eliza Pavalko, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. “The expertise of these individuals will further improve research and student learning on our campus, and the international diversity of the group brings knowledge from around the world to students right here in Indiana.”
Inside IU Bloomington caught up with individuals from the incoming class to ask them about what brought them to IU, their hopes for the fall semester and what they love about Bloomington so far.
Julia Fukuyama, assistant professor of statistics, College of Arts and Sciences
Julia Fukuyama is an applied statistician with an focus on biology. Before coming to IU, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Computational Biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She’ll be teaching exploratory data analysis this fall.
Q: What about IU appealed to you?
A: From a professional standpoint, IU is great because it has a really nice statistics department. It’s pretty new and fairly small, but that’s actually exciting to me. Everyone here does amazing work, and they are really friendly and generous people. The biology department here is also really strong and has people who are doing work with the microbiome, which is an application area I’ve looked at before.
Q: How are you hoping to impact statistics students this semester?
A: The course I’m teaching this semester is exploratory data analysis, which kind of sounds broad and vague, but it’s a really cool course. It’s all about teaching best practices for how to learn true things about the world from data, which is kind of an art and takes a lot of practice. I’m planning on going through a lot of examples and having students get their hands dirty with real data sets so they’ll be able to do this on their own with problems that they’re interested in.
Q: What do you think of Bloomington so far?
A: The landscape here reminds me of Virginia, where I grew up. I look out any of the windows in the house we’re renting and just see layer after layer of trees. I think when you’re a kid you get some kind of impression of what landscape is supposed to look like, and for me it’s all about trees.
I’m also excited about all of the arts here. I’m going to try to go to as many concerts at Jacobs as I can, and I already have a couple of films at IU Cinema on my calendar.
Andréa Stanislav, associate professor of studio art, School of Art, Architecture + Design
Andréa Stanislav has joined the School of Art, Architecture + Design as a studio art faculty member and area coordinator for sculpture. She has taught at University of Minnesota, was a Freund Teaching Fellow at Washington University and was an artist in residence at IU in 2001.
Q: What brought you back to IU?
A: A lot of things really began for me here at IU as an emerging young artist. The exhibition I worked on with graduate students as the artist in residence for what is now the school’s Grunwald Gallery was the beginning of a body of my work that centered on engagement with the community. My time at IU was also the first time I had taught outside of graduate school, and it really made me have an epiphany about wanting to teach.
I also have an interest in Russia and Eastern Europe, and I spend my summers in St. Petersburg working on public art projects. The Russian and Eastern European Institute on campus was a big draw for me. I’m a connector by nature, so I’m excited to connect students and my academic community to this part of the world. I also work collaboratively with musicians, so I’m hoping to partner with some of the world-renowned musicians in the Jacobs School of Music.
Q: What opportunities does joining the recently formed School of Art, Architecture + Design present?
A: I think IU is really ahead of the curve in terms of a restructuring of visual arts, design and architecture and bringing these disciplines together under one roof to start interdisciplinary conversations. These collaborations are going on outside of academia, so it makes sense to have a program that reflects what is actually happening in the world. We’re at a point where there is a need for new definition of what the visual arts can be, and I’m excited to be part of that open conversation here at IU.
Q: How does it feel to be back in Bloomington?
A: There’s something about this region and this area that for me is conducive to art making. I feel a kind of grounding here, and I’ve always felt at home in Bloomington. I think just like people we know, there are places in our lives that speak to us in particular ways and that we get a particular charge from, and this is definitely one of those places for me.
