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Randall Sophomore Advisors

Click here to view the schedule and appointment information for Randall Advisors.

Named in honor of Otis Randall, Professor of Mathematics at Brown and Dean of the College from 1912 to 1930, the Randall Sophomore Advisor program develops and supports comfortable and constructive advising relationships between faculty members and sophomores.

Randall advisors are a group of knowledgeable, caring faculty members who listen, consult, and make suggestions and referrals regarding sophomores' academic plans and concerns. They are interested in undergraduate education and are willing to discuss academic choices and challeneges in light of students' extracurricular activities, proposed concentrations, and overall life plans.

Eric Chason
Associate Professor, Engineering
Eric Chason is associate professor in the Division of Engineering at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1985, after which he performed post-doctoral work at Gakushuin University, Tokyo and was a staff member at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. He is an active member of the American Physical Society and Materials Research Society. On the undergraduate level, he has taught EN41 (Introduction to Materials Science) and EN145 (Properties and Processing of Electronic Materials). His research has focused on the evolution of surfaces and thin films during materials processing. Part of this work has involved the development of real-time in situ thin film diagnostics for measuring film stress, morphology and microstructure.

Gail Cohee
Director, Sarah Doyle Women’s Center
Gail Cohee holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Women's Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. Before becoming Director of the Sarah Doyle Women's Center in 2001, she taught courses in British literature, literature by women, and women's studies at Emporia State University in Emporia, KS, and at Skidmore College, the College of Saint Rose, and Siena College in New York. At Brown, she teaches courses through the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women; her research fields include early modern British literature, women writers, and women's studies. She has published in Spenser Studies, reviewed books for Renaissance Quarterly and Feminist Teacher, and contributed to Brown University's online Women Writers’ Project, providing the introductory materials for Mary Fage and Jane Anger (wwp.brown.edu/). She is a former member of the Governing Council of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), and co-edits the peer-reviewed journal Feminist Teacher.

Ruth Colwill
Associate Professor, Psychology
Ruth Colwill, a faculty member at Brown since 1989, enjoys helping students to think through problems and to find ways to achieve their dreams. Her own undergraduate work was at the University of York, England; she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. Her research into cognition and cognitive development, learning, memory and neural development explores the nature of the processes involved in how and what animals learn and remember, leading to an understanding of the evolution of the human mind and the function of the human brain. She has published papers on memory, goal-directed behavior, and Pavlovian conditioning. Professor Colwill teaches a first-year seminar on "Animal Minds" and an animal behavior research methods course at Roger Williams Park Zoo. She is active with various community organizations that educate both children and adults about dog behavior. At home, she treasures the tranquil moments she can spend learning the language of scent hounds on walks through the woods with her long-haired dachshunds.

David Cutts
Professor, Physics
Dave Cutts has been on the Brown faculty since 1973. A native of Providence, he received his Ph.D. at Berkeley following undergraduate studies at Harvard. His area of research is the study of the fundamental laws of nature through experiments in particle physics, and for this work he has participated in and planned experiments at the Rutherford Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, SLAC, CERN and Fermi National Accelerator Lab (Fermilab). Presently he is active with the D-Zero Collaboration at Fermilab, which is studying proton-antiproton collisions at the highest center-of-mass available in the world. Being the energy frontier, Fermilab is a great place to discover presently unknown heavy particles such as those which would solve the Dark Matter puzzle. Among many interests Professor Cutts also enjoys astronomy and appreciates new ways of teaching. He is a PI of the CRISTALS project, which seeks to develop a new web-based facility emphasizing the connections between topics and encouraging explorations across the boundaries between disciplines. He served as the Physics Department Chair from 1998-2004. An avid gardener, he enjoys working with growing things both in Providence and in Little Compton.

Leo Depuydt
Associate Professor, Egyptology
A native of Flandres, Leo Depuydt studied Greek, Roman, and other early civilizations in Leuven (Belgium), Cincinnati, Jerusalem, and Tübingen (Germany), served in the Belgian army, and worked at a Benedictine monastery in Bruges before receiving his doctorate in 1990 from Yale, where he also taught as a senior lector in Syriac and Coptic. He has authored or co-authored ten books and written about a hundred articles and reviews on ancient and medieval manuscripts, languages, and history, primarily Egyptian. He has been at Brown since 1991. Believing with Socrates that knowledge is virtue, he studies subjects only after making sure they are useless, especially Brown’s premier "orchid" (beautiful but useless) subject: Egyptology.

Vladimir Golstein
Professor, Slavic Studies
Vladimir Golstein is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages. He holds his M.S. in Computers from Moscow Institute of Management, his B.A. in Philosophy from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Prior to coming to Brown he taught at Oberlin College (1990-93) and Yale University (1993-2003), where he has taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses that explore Western and Russian literary traditions. Professor Golstein's scholarly interests embrace Russian culture, religion, philosophy, and poetry, of the past two centuries. He is the author of Lermontov's Narratives of Heroism (Northwestern University Press, 1998) and numerous articles on nineteenth-and twentieth century Russian authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tsvetaeva, and Bulgakov. He is currently completing a monograph on the conflict of generations in Russia.

Barrett Hazeltine
Professor Emeritus, Engineering
After undergraduate and master’s degrees at Princeton, Barret Hazeltine received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he was a member of the group that became Computer Engineering. At Brown since 1959, Professor Hazeltine worked in the Office of the Dean of the College, providing undergraduates with academic support, advising and advocacy for nearly twenty years.

Professor Hazeltine taught for eight years at universities in southern Africa and has also visited universities in Asia. He teaches management and engineering; one course deals with technologies appropriate to the Third World. Particularly interested in startup organizations – both businesses and non-profits – and in how technological choices affect people’s lives, Professor Hazeltine has also been active in promoting entrepreneurship among undergraduates. He enjoys bicycling, canoeing, hiking and has a garden plot at the UEL Community Garden

Evelyn Hu-Dehart
Professor, History
Evelyn Hu-DeHart is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown. She joins Brown from the University of Colorado at Boulder where she was Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies and Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. She has also taught at the City University of New York system, New York University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Arizona and University of Michigan, as well as lectured at universities and research institutes in Mexico, Peru, Cuba, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. Evelyn Hu-DeHart often describes herself as a multicultural person who speaks several languages (including English, Chinese, French, and Spanish) and moves easily among several cultures. Her professional life has focused on what Cuban historian Juan Perez de la Riva calls "historia de la gente sin historia." She was born in China and immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was twelve. She has written two books on the Yaqui Indians, and is now engaged in a large research project on the Asian diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Julie Strandberg
Senior Lecturer & Artist-In-Residence, Theatre, Speech & Dance Julie Adams Strandberg, Co-Founding Artistic Director/Curator of The American Dance Legacy Institute, is Artist-In-Residence and Founding Director of Dance at Brown University. She develops repertory, documentaries, curricular materials & programs on American Dance. These resources provide students, educators, scholars, & the general public with on-going access to dance masterworks and dance artists. She is interested in American dance as it reflects the inherent multi-culturalism of the USA and the role of dance in the K-University curricula. She directs musicals, produces concerts & festivals, & has choreographed over 40 works for professional & college dance companies. She is Associate Artist Director of the New York State Summer School of the Arts School of Dance and was on the faculty of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival from 1992-1995. She directed the Brown University productions of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," and Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story;" choreographed the Trinity Square Repertory Company productions of "Ghost Dance" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum;" directed "Tabou: Parisian Cellars in the 50's and 60's" and "The Life and Times of Joseph Beuys" for The Rhode Island School of Design; and directed The Harlem Dance Foundation's "Santa Claus and The Unicorn," an original, multi-generational musical. She is a graduate of the Ethical Culture Schools and has a B.A. from Cornell University and an M.S. from The Bank Street College of Education.

Elizabeth Taylor
Senior Lecturer, English Dr. Elizabeth S. (Beth) Taylor directs the Expository Writing Program in the Department of English at Brown. She teaches creative nonfiction -- literary journalism, historical narrative, memoir, radio nonfiction, and "Writing the Southeast Asian War."

She received her B.A. in American Studies at Smith College, earned her PhD in American Literature from Brown, then taught at Harvard for five years before returning to Brown in 1994.

A former feature writer, and now book reviewer, for the Providence Journal, her most recent essays include: "Apprenticing Nonfictionists" in The Journal of Teaching Writing; "Itches and Scratches" in Brown Alumni Magazine; "Fighting pacifism" in Friends Journal; "Quaker in Vietnam: Rick Thompson (1943-1973)," a Pendle Hill pamphlet; "Crossing the Line: Finding Butch," in the journal War, Literature, and the Arts; "Lost to Vietnam: Choices and Impact" in the anthology, Friends and the Vietnam War, and on the web site "Writing Vietnam."

A freshman and sophomore advisor for several years, she is also an undergraduate advisor in English, with a particular interest in mentoring students interested in all forms of nonfiction writing. She and her family live in Providence.