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New chairs in four departments


Four Carolina faculty members have been appointed as chairs of their departments effective July 1 for five-year terms.

They are:

* John G. Akin;

* Bard D. Ehrman;

* Vidyadhar Kulkarni; and

* Rachel Rosenfeld.

Akin

Professor of economics, John Akin teaches classes in the economics of health in developing countries, health economics policy, and public economics policy.

In that regard, one of his areas of research is the evaluation of data from eight Chinese provinces to see how the health of specific groups of Chinese people has been affected by social and economic changes.

He also uses data collected in developing countries to evaluate the behaviors of adults and their children in seeking health services. One of the types of questions often evaluated is whether a small fee for certain types of health care will cause the poor to avoid using important care.

Akin has served as an advisor to international organizations, such as the World Bank; to governments of developing countries, including Indonesia and Uganda; and on health sector funding options. He aided in the development of the World Bank's official policy on health financing, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on fiscal capacity of local governments.

A book Akin co-authored, The Demand for Primary Health Care in the Third World, was selected as one of the ten most important health economics books by the editors of Health Policy and Planning in 1986.

He was selected as plenary speaker at "International Congress of World Federation of Public Health Associations" in Mexico City in 1987.

He earned his doctoral degree from the University of Michigan.

Ehrman

Professor of religous studies, Bart Ehrman teaches classes in the New Testament and the History of Early Christianity. He has been the recipient of a Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship, awarded for undergraduate teaching; a Phillip and Ruth Hettlemann Prize; and an Undergraduate Students' Teaching Award.

The primary focus of his research is the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and Greek manuscripts.

Ehrman has served as editor, and on the editorial boards, of a number of publications, among them The New Testament in the Greek Fathers, New Testament Tools and Studies, and Studies and Documents.

Among his books are The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 2nd edition; Jesus: Apocalyptic Prohpet of the New Millennium; After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity; and The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader.

Ehrman has been elected to terms as president and vice president of the Southeast Region's Society of Biblical Literature, has served on the executive committee of the Southeast Council for the Study of Religion, and chair of New Testament Textual Criticism Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, among many other affiliations. He has been a member of Carolina Speakers Bureau since 1996.

He received his advanced degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Kulkarni

Vidyadhar G. Kulkarni is the Norman L. Johnson distinguished term professor in the Department of Operations Research.

Although his is primarily a graduate department, this year Kulkarni has initiated a joint undergraduate program with the Department of Statistics called Mathematical Decision Sciences. He teaches Stochastic Models in Operations Research, Telecommunications Systems, and Supply Chain Management.

He has done work using operations research models to control the congestion in the Internet, improve the efficiency of inventory systems and supply chains, compute warranty costs, and improve the performance of large databases. Kulkarni was issued a patent in 1995 for his Internet traffic congestion control algorithms.

He counts among his publications 1999's Modeling, Analysis, Design and Control of Stochastic Systems, and 1995's Modeling and Analysis of Stochastic Systems, both textbooks.

Kulkarni has volunteered in elementary schools to spark young students' interest in mathematics; he has served as an editor and referee for various professional journals; and he has assisted campus organization run more efficiently by using operations research.

He received his master's and doctoral degrees from Cornell.

Rosenfeld

A professor of sociology and fellow of the Carolina Population Center, Rosenfeld has been a member of the faculty since 1981. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on social inequality,

the labor force, gender, and statistics.

Her research interests include higher education, early adult work and family lives in advanced industrialized countries (including comparisons of the former East and West Germanies), and the contemporary U.S. women's movement.

Rosenfeld is the author of Farm Women: Work, Farm, and Family in the United States, and co-editor of Reconstructing the Academy.

She was the first recipient of the Katherine Jocher-Belle Boone Beard Award for distinguished scholarship on gender from the Southern Sociological Society, and also earned the Sociologists for Women in Society Award for Outstanding Mentoring. At Carolina, she received the first Department of Sociology graduate student mentor award.

She has served on many editorial boards, including American Sociological Review, of which she was deputy editor. Currently she is president-elect of the Southern Sociological Society, becoming president in 2001.

Rosenfeld received her doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has taught at McGill University and the University of Chicago.


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