Visiting Scholars at Illinois Tech

Cynthia J. Jameson

Cynthia J. Jameson is a professor emeritus of chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) who is currently working with the research group of Professor Sohail Murad at Illinois Institute of Technology. She received her B.S. in chemistry at the University of the Philippines and came to the United States as a Fulbright-Hays scholar, and then completed her Ph. D. in physical chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Herbert S. Gutowsky. She started as an assistant professor in 1968 and spent 38 years on the faculty at UIC before retiring. Her research included many areas of physical chemistry, with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and theoretical chemistry as her main tools. For many years her lab was only one of two devoted to gas phase nuclear magnetic resonance, using a great variety of nuclei to explore intermolecular effects and rovibrational averaging on the chemical shift and to study nuclear spin relaxation in gases. Her later work was on fundamental studies of adsorption and diffusion using NMR of small molecules in the nanopores and channels of crystalline materials. She has published 237 research articles and book chapters, and she served as the Miller Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a visiting scientist at Oxford University and Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and in the Department of Material Sciences at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She was an exchange scientist in the National Academy of Sciences’ InterAcademy Exchange Program at the Academy of Sciences of the former East Germany. She served for one year as a National Science Foundation program officer in the Experimental Physical Chemistry program and for three years in the Grant Selection Committee for Physical and Analytical Chemistry of the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada. As professor emeritus, she continues to be research active.

In addition to research and teaching/mentoring, she has been active in UIC’s Women in Science and Engineering System Transformation program. As architect and coordinator of the postdoctoral institute under this program, she prepared the plan of workshops for the entire two years of the postdoc program, provided the sources for self-study, and organized each workshop by identifying the presenters, panelists, and reviewers and convincing them to contribute their professional time to the workshops. The goal of the series of workshops was to prepare postdocs for an academic career, including preparing for the job search, preparing an application package, giving a job talk, negotiating an offer, becoming an effective teacher, preparing a research proposal, and starting and managing a new lab, among others. Altogether, 18 workshops were completed and were attended by female postdocs in STEM at UIC. She also co-authored a faculty search toolkit for faculty search committees. She was selected UIC’s Woman of the Year in 2008 and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Senior Scientist Mentor 2010–12.

Chris J. Nicholls

Chris J. Nicholls visited Illinois Tech for three months during summer 2023 to collaborate with John G. and Jane E. Olin Endowed Department Chair in Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering Louis N. Cattafesta III and his research group. The project concerns the investigation of fluidic devices—fluid valves with no moving parts—using state-of-the-art optical flow diagnostic techniques and post-processing methods developed by Cattafesta’s group.

Felicia Caponigri

Felicia Caponigri is an American lawyer and comparative cultural heritage, art, and fashion law scholar. Her research and scholarship focus on the cross-pollination between fashion and heritage, and what effects this cross-pollination has for intellectual property law, cultural heritage law, and related business activities and initiatives.

A member of the Indiana bar, Caponigri received her Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Notre Dame Law School and her Ph.D. in Cultural Heritage from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Caponigri is the former director of international and graduate programs and the program director of the intellectual property and technology law program at Notre Dame Law School, where she also co-taught Art and Cultural Heritage Law and designed and taught her signature course Fashion Law. Caponigri is the founder of Fashion by Felicia LLC, which facilitates collaborations on fashion and heritage between Italy and the United States.

Caponigri's work has been published in, among others, the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, the Italian art law journal AEDON, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, the Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law, the Notre Dame Law Review Online, and the Rivista Trimestrale di Diritto Pubblico. She has lectured at conferences around the world, including at the Luxury Law Summit in London, the AALS Annual Conference, the Young Comparativists Committee Conference of the American Society of Comparative Law, the Michigan Junior Scholars Conference at Michigan Law School, and at the INTA Trademark Scholarship Symposium, among others. She has guest lectured at numerous universities and centers in the U.S. and abroad, including at the Center for Art Law in Brooklyn, the Newberry Library in Chicago, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, and universities in Italy including the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, the Università degli Studi di Firenze, and the Università di Padova. She co-directs a research project and Summer School Italian Hours and American Days/Law and Cultural Heritage Across the Atlantic based at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.

While she serves as a visiting scholar at Chicago-Kent College of Law during the 2023–24 academic year, Caponigri is involved with Chicago-Kent’s intellectual property program and is working on two research projects. One project, “Iconic Copies,” explores the copyright/trademark interface as applied to so-called “iconic” designs in the fashion industry, while another project explores the color pink and its ability to exist as both a trademark and broader indicator of a multitude of cultural meanings for specific luxury brands.  

Judge Woosang Na

Judge Woosang Na was born on May 26, 1973, in Gwangju, South Korea. He entered Seoul National University in 1992, majored in Korean language and literature, and graduated in February 1998. He has worked for information technology companies such as LG-CNS since 1998. After passing the judicial examination in 2006, he was commissioned as a judge of the Uijeongbu District Court in 2009 and has served as a judge since. While serving as a judge at the Seoul Northern District Court, he has been a visiting scholar at Chicago-Kent College of Law since February 2023.

Felicia Caponigri

Felicia Caponigri is an American lawyer and comparative cultural heritage, art, and fashion law scholar. Her research and scholarship focus on the cross-pollination between fashion and heritage, and what effects this cross-pollination has for intellectual property law, cultural heritage law, and related business activities and initiatives.

A member of the Indiana bar, Caponigri received her Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Notre Dame Law School and her Ph.D. in Cultural Heritage from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Caponigri is the former director of international and graduate programs and the program director of the intellectual property and technology law program at Notre Dame Law School, where she also co-taught Art and Cultural Heritage Law and designed and taught her signature course Fashion Law. Caponigri is the founder of Fashion by Felicia LLC, which facilitates collaborations on fashion and heritage between Italy and the United States.

Caponigri's work has been published in, among others, the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, the Italian art law journal AEDON, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, the Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law, the Notre Dame Law Review Online, and the Rivista Trimestrale di Diritto Pubblico. She has lectured at conferences around the world, including at the Luxury Law Summit in London, the AALS Annual Conference, the Young Comparativists Committee Conference of the American Society of Comparative Law, the Michigan Junior Scholars Conference at Michigan Law School, and at the INTA Trademark Scholarship Symposium, among others. She has guest lectured at numerous universities and centers in the U.S. and abroad, including at the Center for Art Law in Brooklyn, the Newberry Library in Chicago, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, and universities in Italy including the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, the Università degli Studi di Firenze, and the Università di Padova. She co-directs a research project and Summer School Italian Hours and American Days/Law and Cultural Heritage Across the Atlantic based at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.

While she serves as a visiting scholar at Chicago-Kent College of Law during the 2023–24 academic year, Caponigri is involved with Chicago-Kent’s intellectual property program and is working on two research projects. One project, “Iconic Copies,” explores the copyright/trademark interface as applied to so-called “iconic” designs in the fashion industry, while another project explores the color pink and its ability to exist as both a trademark and broader indicator of a multitude of cultural meanings for specific luxury brands.

Judge Woosang Na

Judge Woosang Na was born on May 26, 1973, in Gwangju, South Korea. He entered Seoul National University in 1992, majored in Korean language and literature, and graduated in February 1998. He has worked for information technology companies such as LG-CNS since 1998. After passing the judicial examination in 2006, he was commissioned as a judge of the Uijeongbu District Court in 2009 and has served as a judge since. While serving as a judge at the Seoul Northern District Court, he has been a visiting scholar at Chicago-Kent College of Law since February 2023.

Marta Silveira Peixoto

Marta Silveira Peixoto is an architect with a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from PROPAR, the Architecture Research and Graduate Program of UFRGS, and the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Today, she is a full professor at the Department of Architecture and at PROPAR, UFRGS, where she teaches design and the history of architecture. She is a member of the Interior Design Committee of Docomomo International and the Twentieth Century Committee of ICOMOS Brasil. She has written for architecture magazines and journals, and is one of the editors of Docomomo Brazil Magazine. She also coordinates research projects and a research group with professors, graduates, and undergraduate students. Since 2019 she has had a CNPq (a federal agency that fosters academic research in Brazil) productivity grant as a researcher.

Research summary: Marta is currently dedicated to research focused on the themes of modern architecture interiors, residential architecture, and modern heritage.

Junko Taguchi

Junko Taguchi is a practical, research-based architecture pedagogist focusing on advocacy, public dialogue, and youth education in the built environment. During and after she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo, she was trained in architecture preservation and education projects in Japan, from urban regeneration to disaster recovery. One of her significant contributions was year-round education program development for children in architect Toyo Ito’s NPO. She has since moved to Nagoya, Japan, where she works as an associate professor at the Faculty of Urban Science at Meijo University. Her commitment extends to the publication of architecture education charters by international organizations such as the UIA Architecture and Children’s Work Programme and Docomomo International. Based on the Docomomo education charter, she is now conducting a case study with Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Center, and Docomomo Chicago, developing a workshop for teenagers on preserving modern heritage on the South Side of Chicago.

Davide Galleri

Davide Galleri is an architect and a Ph.D. student researcher in the field of architectural preservation. His Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Naples Federico in Italy is about investigating the preservation approaches to modern Chicago’s heritage by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in a comparing view with Italian conservation theory and practice.  He has been granted a Fulbright scholarship through the Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher program in the 2023–24 academic year to attend a six-month period in the United States. He has won academic prizes at a national level. His master’s degree in architecture focused around the restoration of the “Casa del Portuale” by Aldo Loris Rossi in Naples, Italy, which was awarded as the most valuable thesis in the field of Architectural Conservation for the 2018–21 academic years by the Italian Scientific Society for Architectural Conservation. He won the National Prize for Young Architecture Critics, awarded by the Italian Association of Architecture and Critics in 2018. He has written and published scientific papers mainly involving the conservation of modern architecture and urban heritage and has also presented them at national and international conferences. He has worked on architectural conservation projects involving mainly historical and modern buildings and accessibility design for people with disabilities.

Krishan Hirimuthugoda

Krishan Hirimuthugoda is a research scholar and a visiting researcher in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition’s Clinical Nutrition Research Center at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he has been pursuing his two-year overseas fellowship of post-doctoral research since 2022 from Sri Lanka. He has completed his doctorate degree in public health, epidemiology, biostatistics in 2021 and his master’s in public health, epidemiology, biostatistics in 2015 from Post Graduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Hirimuthugoda is a medical doctor holding an M.D. from Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is focusing his research interest on the fields of clinical nutrition, food safety, and food law. The fellowship at Illinois Tech has allowed him to engage in clinical research practicing the design of research studies, executing clinical research protocols, including imaging-assisted vascular protocols, wearable devices for continuous glucose monitoring, analyzing data, presenting research, and writing publications in high impact journals. While following the fellowship, he has been continuing his law degree at Open University of Sri Lanka since 2022. The work he is pursuing at Illinois Tech extends his public health expertise where he intends to return to Sri Lanka to pursue a career as a consultant epidemiologist. Fun fact: Hirimuthugoda is the national record holder of “double hat-trick” goal shooter of grass hockey since 2001 in Sri Lanka.