I am Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University for the Spring 2015 semester, while on sabbatical from CUNY.  This is my second jaunt at NYU, since I was also Visiting Professor there in 2011, and I am hopeful this visit will be as productive as my last.

NYU faculty profile

I am a professor at the City University of New York, where I have held a faculty position since 1995.  (I have taken various leaves of absence for various appointments at other universities.) The City University is the nation’s largest urban university system, with over 250,000 students spread over 11 senior colleges and more, with the doctoral programs centered largely at the Graduate Center, which borrows much of its faculty from the colleges.

The College of Staten Island is one of the senior colleges of the City University of New York, situated on an ample wooded campus surrounded by Willowbrook Park and the Greenbelt nature preserve.  I am Professor of Mathematics at the college, and this is where I do all my undergraduate and masters-degree level teaching at CUNY.  The mathematics department has research strengths in many areas, including probability, topology, logic and set theory and also applied mathematics, housing the CUNY High Performance Computing Center.  Most of our undergraduate mathematics majors aim to become mathematics teachers, and almost all of our masters-level mathematics students are current high school teachers gaining their certifications.  I was appointed to the mathematics faculty at the college in 1995, and served as Assistant Professor 1995-1998; Associate Professor 1999-2002; tenure granted 2000; and full Professor since 2003.

I am also on the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center, which is home to most of the university’s doctoral programs and is in many ways the center of research life at CUNY. Located in midtown Manhattan just across the corner from the Empire State Building, the Graduate Center forms the main part of the Advanced Learning Superblock, joined by Oxford University Press and the NYPL Science Library.  The Mathematics program has diverse research strengths, including a remarkably large faculty in mathematical logic, as does the program in Computer Science.  The CUNY Graduate Center Philosophy program is one of the world’s top-rated universities in the area of mathematical logic (and a few years ago was rated number one in this category).  We offer a vigorous schedule of logic seminars at the Graduate Center, with many distinguished visiting speakers and audiences filled with faculty and students from around the NYC metropolitan region.

I am a member of the Graduate Center doctoral faculty in three areas:

• Professor of Mathematics, doctoral faculty, since 1997.
• Professor of Philosophy, doctoral faculty, since 2013.
• Professor of Computer Science, doctoral faculty, since 2002.

I regularly teach graduate courses at the Graduate Center and supervise the dissertation research of my Ph.D. graduate students there.  I am also currently a member of the Executive Committee of the mathematics program.

I held a Visiting Fellow position at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge during March — April and June 2012, where I participated in the workshop on Logical Approaches to Barriers in Complexity II, March 26-30, 2012, a part of the program Semantics and Syntax: A Legacy of Alan Turing.

This visit was extremely productive mathematically for me, and it was at the Isaac Newton Institute that I proved the main part of my theorems on embeddings of countable models of set theory.

I held the position of Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University during July-December, 2011.  This was an extremely productive time for me in my research, particularly with regard to my work on the multiverse conception in set theory.  In addition, I taught a course on the Philosophy of set theory while at NYU.

I held the position of Guest Professor at the University of Vienna, Kurt Godel Research Center, in June 2009.

While on sabbattical from CUNY, I held a Visiting Professor position at the Universiteit van Amsterdam at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation during April–August 2007. During the two years previous to this, I was an NWO-sponsored Bezoekersbeurs Visiting Researcher there, during June–August 2005 and June 2006.  While in Amsterdam, I worked with Benedikt Löwe, particularly on our work concerning the modal logic of forcing.

I held a Mercator Gastprofessor position from the DFG at Universität Münster, Institut für mathematische Logik, during May to August, 2004.

I held the position of Associate Professor at Georgia State University in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics during the 2002 – 2003 academic year.

During the 2000 – 2001 academic year, I held the position of Visiting Associate Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Just after earning my Ph.D. there the year before, I held a post-doctoral Visiting Assistant Professor position at the University of California at Berkeley during the academic year 1994 – 1995.  I had by that time already been offered my position at the City University of New York, but was able to defer the start of that position from 1994 to 1995 in order to accommodate the Berkeley position.