Trinity College

Distinguished Group includes Three Men and Three Women

HARTFORD, Conn. – Six faculty members at Trinity College have been promoted to the rank of professor, Rena Fraden, dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs, has announced. All of the appointments are effective on July 1.

The new professors are:

• Jean Cadogan who is an associate professor of fine arts and has been a member of the Trinity faculty since 1987. According to her faculty profile, she “is probably happiest exploring the streets, churches and museums of Florence on an early summer morning.” She is a specialist in Italian art of the 14th and 15th centuries and, as a former museum curator, Cadogan is fascinated by the physical attributes of works of art – materials, technique, condition – as well as their social function as indicators of social behavior and cultural values.

Cadogan’s research has primarily been in late medieval and early Renaissance Italian art; the history of graphic arts; and the history of painting technique. She has a B.A. from Wellesley College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Among her honors and awards are a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, 2000, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Museum Professionals, 1991. In addition, she was a J. Paul Getty Museum Visiting Scholar, spring 1986.

• Pablo Delano who is an associate professor of fine arts and has been a member of the Trinity faculty since 1996. A native of Puerto Rico, Delano moved to the United States to attend the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and the Yale University School of Art, from which he received an M.F.A. degree in painting. He worked in New York City between 1979 and 1996 as a freelance photographer and a professor of photography. He particularly emphasized the Caribbean and Hispanic communities.

Delano’s book of photographs, Faces of America, was published in 1992 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. He has been commissioned to create permanent, site-specific works of public art in the medium of photography by the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. A book of black and white photographs focusing on the diversity of Trinidad and Tobago, entitled In Trinidad, was published in 2008 by Ian Randle Publishers.

• John Mertens who is an associate professor of engineering. He joined the Trinity faculty in 1990 following the completion of his Ph.D. from the Thermal Sciences Division of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. His key areas of research include: air pollution; combustion; chemical kinetics; non-equilibrium processes; and optical diagnostics primarily using shock tube experiments. He teaches a wide variety of mechanical engineering courses, as well as courses for non-science majors, and contributes to courses in Public Policy and Environmental Science.

Mertens was a visiting scholar at The Aerospace Corporation in 2006, a visiting scholar with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford in 2004, and had a Connecticut NASA Summer Fellowship in 2001.
He received his B.S. from California State University, Chico, and his M.A. in addition to his Ph.D. from Stanford.

• Joan Morrison who is the Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of Biology. She’s been at Trinity since 2000 and holds a B.A. from College of Wooster, an M.S. from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida.

Her research involves studies of birds living in human-impacted landscapes. Her specialty is birds of prey and she has studied such birds in Florida and Chile. Before arriving at Trinity, Morrison worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service in Alaska, Colorado, Washington, and New Mexico.

According to her faculty profile, her ongoing research projects include a study of red-tailed hawks living in Hartford, and monitoring a population of Crested Caracaras in Florida. She has also examined the structure of avian communities in urban parks in Hartford.

Morrison is “strongly committed to conservation and environmental education” and is a co-chair of the Campus Sustainability Task Force. As part of her research, she coordinates bird-banding programs with students at local middle and elementary schools.

• Taikang Ning who is an associate professor of engineering and joined the Trinity faculty in 1986. He is chair of the Engineering Department. He has a B.S. from National Chiao-Tung University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. All of his degrees are in electrical engineering. He served as the campus director of the NASA Connecticut Space Grant College Consortium from 1992-2005, and is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Nin says he “strongly believes in the value of [a] well-rounded liberal arts education and its benefit to [the] engineering discipline.”

Ning has been awarded six NASA EPSCoR Grants: On-Board Image Segmentation and Processing for Airborne Remote Sensing, 2002; Real-Time Parallel Image Processing Design with FPGA for Remote Sensing, 2003: PI in biomedical signal and image analysis component in Trinity’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 2003; Mobile Vision System for Real-Time Remote Monitoring, 2004; Tracking the moving boundary of streamed images using level sets and field programmable gate array, 2005; and Nonlinear Modeling and Spectral Analysis of Helicopter Vibrations Generated by Servo-Flap Rotor Blades, 2006.

• Susan D. Pennybacker who is the Borden W. Painter, Jr., ‘58/H’95 Associate Professor of European History and has been a faculty member at Trinity since 1983. She has a B.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Pennybacker specializes in modern British and European history. She has also taught at Wesleyan University, New York University, The City College of New York and the University of the Western Cape in Capetown, South Africa.

She was awarded a highly competitive fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for the fall 2008 semester. The title of Pennybacker’s project was “Political exile in postwar London: the South Africans,” which is part of a book that she has written on political exile in London after World War II. Her project focused on dissenting exile communities of the former British Empire and the ways in which they affected the metropolitan outlook in London in the post-war era.

Pennybacker also has directed the Hartford Studies Project at Trinity since the early 1990s, and is past president of the Northeast Conference of British Studies. Her chief research interests include: racial politics, 1930s to the present; internationalism and global politics, 1890 to the present; modern London: political culture and the arts; South African exile in Britain and Africa, 1945 to the present; and Britain and Africa, 20th century.