Given the terrible California budget, SDSU has a much reduced group of new faculty this year, and is especially pleased to be able to introduce 12 new faculty members to campus, including two new faculty members in the College of Sciences. 

College of Sciences

Department of Biology
Elizabeth Dinsdale, Ph.D. (James Cook University 2005) Dinsdale obtained a Ph.D. identifying how people with different backgrounds viewed coral reefs. In 2005, she started using metagenomes, which provide an unparallel description of environmental microbes and viruses. The metagenomic analysis from the Northern Line Islands, Central Pacific, identified that the microbes increase in abundance and virulence on coral reefs associated with high levels of human activity, contributing to the decline of coral reef worldwide. She profiled the functions of microbial and viral communities (~ 1.2million sequences) from nine different biomes, which was published in Nature in 2008. She is exploring microbes and viruses associated with a range of reef organisms, including
sharks. She is currently identifying viruses in oxygen minimum zones off the coast of Chile.

Jeremy Long, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech 2004) Long is a marine community ecologist interested in consumer-prey interactions mediated by chemical signals. Through a combination of laboratory and field experiments, Dr. Long attempts to understand how these interactions scale up to affect communities and ecosystems – in the open ocean, intertidal zones, and salt marshes. Presently, he studies 1) the evolution of defenses in seaweeds in the Gulf of Maine, 2) the impacts of trampling on intertidal species in national parks, and 3) the causes and consequences of long-term changes in rocky shore communities on the east and west coasts of the U.S.

Other new faculty members by college:

• College of Education
• College of Engineering
• College of Health and Human Services
• College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts