New faculty members from the Department of Nutrition & Food Science and Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics.
Image Credit: Lauren Castellana; Edwin Remsberg Inc.
The College of Agricultural and Natural Resources welcomed a number of new faculty members prior to the start of the 2014 fall semester. Each Friday we're introducing a few of these newcomers and providing some details about their work and/or research interests.
This week, we meet two assistant professors from the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics and one assistant professor from the Department of Nutrition and Food Science.
Dr. Jorge Holzer: Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
Dr. Jorge Holzer focuses his research on renewable resource economics and applied microeconomics with a special interest in fisheries economics and management. He is currently working on various topics related to the adoption of electronic reporting technology by commercial crabbers in the Chesapeake Bay and investigating the optimal design of buyback programs for fishing rights. Holzer is teaching courses this semester including AREC 200 (The Chesapeake Bay Ecosystem: Intersection of Science, Economics, and Policy) and AREC 785 (Advanced Economics of Natural Resources). Holzer received his Ph.D. from the department for which he now works – Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland. He has a B.S. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Catholic University of Chile, and an MBA from the University of Oxford.
Dr. Shaik Rahaman: Assistant Professor, Department of Nutrition and Food Science
Dr. Shaik Rahaman’s research is dedicated to understanding the fundamentals of inflammatory and wound-healing diseases – specifically atherosclerosis and fibrosis – at the molecular level. His work on this subject has been featured in several prestigious publications including Cell Metabolism and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Rahaman’s goal is to better understand why people develop diseases like atherosclerosis or fibrosis and help to identify treatments. Most recently, Rahaman worked as an assistant professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. He earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology/Microbiology from Jadavpur University in India and received his M.S. and B.S. from the University of Calcutta.
Dr. Mary Zaki: Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
Dr. Mary Zaki is an economist whose research focuses largely on how households shop, to put it simply. Zaki is specifically interested in studying low income and fragile populations, looking into how they budget for food and other necessities, what types of credit are available to them and how they utilize these forms of credit. She also plans to study policies addressing food insecurity such as school lunch/breakfast programs and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Her faculty position with the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics includes an Extension appointment through which Zaki hopes to develop a program for portions of the population without steady incomes, like the homeless. Zaki earned a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University and worked previously at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, DC.
