Hamilton College Dean of Faculty Patrick Reynolds announced the promotion of three Hamilton faculty members to the rank of professor. Jennifer Borton, psychology; Sally Cockburn, mathematics; and Julio Videras, economics, were promoted effective Oct. 11.
Jennifer Borton joined the Hamilton faculty in 1998. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and education from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Minnesota.
Borton’s current research program involves understanding how people with defensive self-esteem cope with ego threat. Her research has been published in several journals, including the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, the Journal of Social Psychology and Self and Identity.
In February Borton presented a poster at the 15th Annual Meeting of The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in Austin, Texas. She, along with co-authors former Hamilton visiting professor Mark Oakes and Sarah Dreyer-Oren ’12, co-presented “Risk-Taking Following Ego Threat in Men with Defensive Self-Esteem.”
Sally Cockburn joined the Hamilton faculty in 1991 after earning her Ph. D. from Yale University with a doctoral dissertation in algebraic topology.
Cockburn has published papers in combinatorial optimization (“On the domino-parity inequalities for the STSP,” with Sylvia Boyd and Danielle Vella, in Mathematical Programming Series A 2006) and geometric graph theory (“Geometric Graph Homomorphims,”) with Debra Boutin, in the Journal of Graph Theory, 2012).
A paper titled “Deranged Socks,” co-authored by Cockburn and former Visiting Professor of Mathematics Joshua Lesperance, was the cover article in the April 2013 issue of Mathematics Magazine, published by the Mathematical Association of America. In April Cockburn was awarded a Carl B. Allendoerfer Award by the Mathematical Association of America for that paper.
Another paper, co-authored by Cockburn, Professor Tim Kelly and Assistant Dean for Institutional Research Gordon Hewitt, titled “Modeling Preferential Admissions at Elite Liberal Arts Schools,” was published in Research in Higher Education Journal in March 2013.
Julio Videras has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and joined the Hamilton faculty in 2002.
He has been director of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center since 2011. Prior to heading the Center, Videras had directed the Levitt Program on Sustainability, which promotes academic research on sustainable practices and the necessary policies to achieve them.
He has authored and co-authored papers that have appeared in Contemporary Economic Policy, Review of Social Economy, Journal of Economic Growth and Social Science Quarterly.
Videras’ research focuses on applied environmental economics, in particular how cultural and social factors influence the voluntary provision of the public good of environmental quality and sustainable development practices; the relationships between community composition, collective action and the supply and demand of environmental goods; and how to identify and account for sources of unobserved heterogeneity through finite mixture models. He teaches courses in microeconomics, statistics, environmental economics and social economics.
