Ian Harrington

Professor and Chair of Psychology and Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-7243
• Email: IanHarrington@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald 9

I am interested the neural bases of behavior. In my teaching and in my research I am interested in exploring the relationship between brain and behavior.

As an undergraduate I was introduced to the field of neuroscience through my psychology major. As a graduate student I studied the effects of brain damage on perceptual experience. As a post-doctoral fellow I studied the ways in which individual brain cells and groups of such cells represented information about features of our perceptual surroundings.

Recently, motivated by teaching I have been doing with a colleague in philosophy, I have begun to study behavioral and physiological responses of participants as they consider courses of action in moral dilemmas. This work is motivated by an interest in understanding how unconscious brain responses influence the decisions we make. 

Specializations: Neuroscience

Rupa G. Gordon

Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Chair of Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-7360
• Email: rupagordon@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald Hall 014

Dr. Rupa Gupta Gordon received her B.S. in neurobiology from Purdue University and Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Iowa.  

Her work at Iowa focused on understanding the effects of focal brain injury on social behavior, decision-making, and memory.  

At Augustana, her research focuses on behavioral and physiological synchrony in conversation, or our ability to easily pick up on the behaviors and physiological responses of our conversational partners.  

Dr. Gordon regularly teaches Introduction to Neuroscience, Advanced Seminar in Neuroscience, Statistics, Research Methods, and Senior Inquiry.

Daniel P. Corts

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

• Phone: 309-794-7646
• Email: DanielCorts@augustana.edu
• Office: Evald Hall 8

Dr. Daniel Corts received his B.S. in Psychology from Belmont University and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at the University of Tennessee in 1999. He completed a post-doctoral position at Furman University for one year where he focused on the teaching of psychology.

Corts is now Professor of Psychology at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois where he has been for over 10 years.

While in graduate school, he focused on language and gesture production. He has since branched out to explore intentional forgetting, and has also published in the area of student development.

Corts also likes to conduct research in just about any topics his students wish to explore.

In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his two children, traveling, camping, and cooking.

Specializations: Memory, Problem solving, Decision making, Language comprehension, Cognitive science, Statistics, Program evaluation

Xiaowen Zhang

Professor of Political Science, Division Dean of Social Sciences

• Phone: 309-794-8954
• Email: XiaowenZhang@augustana.edu
• Office: Old Main 313

Xiaowen was born and raised in Beijing, China and came to the United States in 2001. She graduated from University of Southern California in 2007 with a Ph.D. in International Relations. Before joining Augustana, she was a lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of Southern California. Xiaowen's field of interests is International Relations, with an emphasis on international political economy. Her dissertation work is about how the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism impacts member countries' dispute settlement strategies.

As a faculty member of the political science department, Xiaowen teaches an intro level course on international relations and several upper-division courses in the area of international relations, such as Contemporary World Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Xiaowen is also a member of Augustana's Asian Studies Program and teaches Politics of East Asia on a regular basis.

Specializations: International Relations

Mariano J. Magalhães

Professor and Chair of Political Science, Coordinator of Student Research

• Phone: 309-794-7731
• Email: MarianoMagalhaes@augustana.edu
• Office: Old Main 314

I can pinpoint the moment I knew what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” It was an evening in late February of 1981. At the time I was 13 years old and had accompanied my father to his job. My father is a university professor and for whatever reason I went with him to one of his classes that night. I still have extremely vivid memories of that night: of my father standing in front of the class explaining the material, of students raising their hands and asking questions, of the friendly atmosphere that permeated the room.

And I remember the content. That evening my father talked about Langston Hughes and he wrote on the board the poem that became imprinted on my brain: 

“Hold fast to your dreams, for if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly”

I had fallen in love. At that moment, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I wanted to be a teacher. Unlike so many adolescents I had experienced something that would define my career later in life.

The above experience happened while in Brazil, a country where I lived for almost ten years, during, as I like to call them, my “formative years.” Not only was it in Brazil that I defined my life’s professional ambition, but also where I encountered the subject that most fascinates me and that drives my teaching and research.

I lived in Brazil during most of the country’s lengthy transition from military rule to democratic government (from 1979 to 1988). I came of age watching new political parties forming to compete for political office, politicians arguing over the content of the new constitution, ordinary people (myself included) taking to the streets when it appeared that the military would renege on it promises to bring democracy to Brazil.

I will always remember the day Brazilians witnessed the election of the first civilian president since 1960. It was a Monday afternoon in late January of 1985, and the whole country stopped to watch members of the National Congress cast their votes in an indirect election for president. I remember watching each member of the National Congress walk to the podium and cast his or her vote.

The concepts of democracy and democratization form the core of my scholarship, and more and more over the past few years have helped structure and refine the content of many of my courses, in which democracy is the core theme around which all other material revolves.

Specializations: Latin American politics, Comparative politics, Political culture, Decentralization, Brazil

James Van Howe

Professor of Physics

• Phone: 309-794-3403
• Email: JamesVanHowe@augustana.edu
• Office: Hanson 205

Specializations: Optical signal processing, Quantum optics, Ultrafast signal processing, Ultrafast optics, Nonlinear optics, Fiber optics, Laser sources, Photonics

Nathan H. Frank

Professor of Physics; Chair of Physics, Engineering, and Astronomy

• Phone: 309-794-3402
• Email: NathanFrank@augustana.edu
• Office: Hanson Science Building 206

• LinkedIn profile

• Related: Dr. Nathan Frank named top scientist of the year

I grew up in Moorhead, Minn., where I graduated from Concordia College, a small, liberal arts institution like Augustana. I am excited to share the physics perspective about our world with others while enjoying what I consider truly balmy winter weather.

At Augustana, I teach a wide variety of physics courses from the first-year level to the senior level. I especially enjoy interactions with students and participating in the revelations students have while using active learning techniques and teaching in a studio-style class. Techniques like these developed by the Physics Education Research community show significant learning gains. A studio-style classroom focuses uses student groups to perform laboratory activities, active problem solving, and puzzling through physics ideas. You should come by one of my classes if you have not been in this environment before. You learn a lot and it is a lot of fun!

I attended Michigan State University (MSU) for Ph.D. work where I performed experiments on the atomic nucleus at the former facility called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). MSU is known internationally for excellence in nuclear physics research, which is why MSU is the home of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), which will be the primary location for my future research.

I am fascinated by this field since I find the challenge in determining the structure of very tiny things (roughly 10 to the negative 15th power meters for nuclei) incredibly interesting. My specific area of research focuses on nuclei that are so unstable that they emit at least one neutron upon formation. Learning the properties of atomic nuclei helps us to understand the fundamental structure of the universe.

My research program is a continuation of my graduate work that involves undergraduate students that ranges from new assembly and testing of new devices, simulation of our experiments, data analysis, and presentation of results. Multiple experimental devices include the Charged Particle Detector Telescope project funded by a Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant and a new MRI grant to build a cutting-edge neutron detector to improve our experimental capabilities. The result will be a neutron detector that will be the best in the world. There is always something new and exciting to work on in my lab!

During my time at Augustana, I have been the first author or co-author on more than 50 published papers, some of which have undergraduate students as co-authors. In addition, my research students have presented their work at national conferences in numerous poster and oral presentations. This research involves other investigators in the MoNA Collaboration, which consists of primarily undergraduate, liberal arts institutions. Both Augustana College and multiple grants from the National Science Foundation support my research program, which may be found on my LinkedIn page or CV.

While I am keeping busy with professional work and spending time with my family and friends, I do my best to have fun and find physics in everything I do.

Specializations: Nuclear physics, Nuclear experimentation

Lee Carkner

Professor of Physics

• Phone: 309-794-3405
• Email: LeeCarkner@augustana.edu
• Office: Hanson Science Building 208

Lee Carkner received his B.S. in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1992 and completed his PhD in Astrophysics at Penn State University in 1998.  His thesis explored the topic of X-ray emission from very young, sun-like stars.  Dr. Carkner joined the faculty at Augustana in 1999 and is currently Professor of Physics and Astronomy and director of the John Deere Planetarium.  As director, he gives planetarium shows to thousands of public school students and members of the general public each year.

Specializations: Astronomy, Night sky, Planetarium, Space science

Heidi Storl

Professor of Philosophy, William F. Freistat Chair for Studies in World Peace

• Phone: 309-794-7572
• Email: HeidiStorl@augustana.edu
• Office: Old Main 228

Specializations: Neurophilosophy, Clinical ethics, German phenomenology