Faculty Recruitment

DSI works with deans and department heads to recruit new faculty to their schools and departments. The institute has been directly involved in helping to recruit 28 new faculty to Columbia in 16 schools, departments, institutes, and colleges across campus, including: Barnard, Business, Cancer Dynamics, Engineering, International and Public Affairs, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Nursing, Political Science, Public Health, and Sociology. Support for the faculty ranges from partial salary support, startup costs, research funds, or access to DSI resources and affiliation with DSI.

Kellen Funk | Associate Professor, Columbia Law School

Funk’s first book, currently in revision, is The Lawyers’ Code: The Transformation of American Legal Practice; it explores how New York’s enactment in 1848 of the first American civil practice code granted significant power to lawyers in the management of litigation and codified rules of civil procedure that were adopted by other states and the federal courts. After graduating from Yale Law School in 2014, Funk clerked for U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the Southern District of Texas and then for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Tamar Mitts | Assistant Professor, School of International

and Public Affairs

Mitts is a political scientist who uses data science and machine learning to examine the dynamics of conflict and political violence, with a focus on the causes and consequences of radicalization and violent extremism. Her current research examines the behavior of Islamic State supporters on social media. She studies how supporters respond to experiences of antiMuslim hostility in the West, how they react to online propaganda, and whether they are sensitive to counter-extremism programs aiming to reduce radicalization. These projects draw on new data on the online behavior of over a million users linked to the Islamic State on Twitter.

Maxim Topaz | Elizabeth Standish Gill Associate Professor of

Nursing, School of Nursing

Topaz finds innovative ways to use the most recent technological breakthroughs, like text or data mining, to improve human health. He is one of the pioneers in applying natural language processing on data generated by nurses. His current work focuses on developing natural language processing solutions to advance clinical decision making. He was involved with health policy (national and international levels), leadership (e.g. Chair of the Emerging Professionals Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association), and health entrepreneurship. Gerard Torrats-Espinosa | Assistant Professor of Sociology,

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Torrats-Espinosa’s research draws from literature on urban sociology, stratification, and criminology. He focuses on understanding how the spatial organization of the American stratification system creates and reproduces inequality. His current research agenda investigates how the neighborhood context, particularly the experience of community violence, determines the life chances of children; how social capital and social organization emerge and evolve in spatial contexts; and how place and geography structure educational and economic opportunity in America and elsewhere.