Dana Ferraris, Rebecca Gibson, Chloe Irla, Erin Watley and Ting Zhang have joined the McDaniel faculty
McDaniel College announces that five new full-time faculty members have recently joined the college. Dana Ferraris, Rebecca Gibson, Chloe Irla and Erin Watley have been promoted to their positions, while Ting Zhang is a new full-time faculty member.
Dana Ferraris of Eldersburg, Md., is an associate professor of chemistry at McDaniel. A synthetic medicinal chemist, he spent over 15 years doing drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. He has been involved in two projects related to cancer therapy and is training research students at McDaniel on how to make small molecules that one day may be optimized into cancer drugs. He also worked with McDaniel chemistry instructor Steve Robertson on an outreach program for the sciences in Carroll County high schools. Courses he is teaching include “Organic Chemistry I” and “Organic Chemistry II,” as well as labs.
Prior to joining McDaniel as a visiting professor, he taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Stevenson University and The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Ferraris earned a bachelor’s degree from Lafayette College and a M.B.A. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University.
Rebecca Gibson of Codorus, Pa., has been promoted from lecturer to assistant professor of education. Her background as a reading specialist has impacted her research interests, including early intervention and beginning literacy learners. She is especially interested in vocabulary acquisition in children, the role of nonfiction texts in primary classrooms, and emergent/beginning writing development and instruction in young learners.
She is teaching courses in both the education department and in the master’s degree program for reading specialists at McDaniel. Gibson holds a bachelor’s degree from Albright College, a M.Ed. from Towson University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.
Chloe Irla is a 2007 alumna of McDaniel and a former visiting professor in art and art history. As assistant professor of art and art history, she teaches digital art and design courses, such as “Digital Imaging,” “Computer Graphics” and “Design I.”
Irla of Baltimore (21214) maintains an interdisciplinary studio practice grounded in both traditional and alternative approaches to painting. Her body of work produced over the last seven years has been heavily reliant on the integration of digital print and web-based media and the collection of data through self-tracking. Her ongoing, multimedia project titled “Blaze Breakers” is rooted in the investigation of the color blaze orange in the context of rural and urban space and place.
In addition to her bachelor’s degree from McDaniel, she has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art.
Erin Watley of Owings Mills, Md., has been promoted from visiting professor to assistant professor of communication and cinema. Involved in both media and intercultural research, her focus is on the critical application of communication theory by identifying and critiquing intercultural issues and media as part of the daily experience. Her experience is in teaching about the complexities of intercultural communication in globalized societies and she has worked to help students address intercultural conflicts by developing and applying critical intercultural dialogue techniques.
Watley received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, a master’s degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico.
Ting Zhang joins McDaniel as an assistant professor of computer science. Her research interests include localization, networking and distributed data, with a current focus on fast and efficient techniques targeting social, sensing, storage and search applications. At McDaniel, she is teaching the “Art of Programming” and network security.
Zhang received a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. She earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Qingdao Technological University in China and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Beihang University in Beijing, China. She currently resides in Ellicott City, Md.
McDaniel College, founded in 1867 and nationally recognized as one of 40 “Colleges That Change Lives,” is a four-year, independent college of the liberal arts and sciences offering more than 70 undergraduate programs of study, including dual and student-designed majors, plus 25 highly regarded graduate programs. Its personalized, interdisciplinary, global curriculum and student-faculty collaboration develop the unique potential in every student. A diverse, student-centered community of 1,600 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students, McDaniel offers access to the resources of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and is the only American college with a European campus in Budapest, Hungary. www.mcdaniel.edu
