Appendix

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Anthropological archaeology; issues of human-environment interaction, ritual ecology, and indigenous heritage in the Peruvian Andes

Rebecca Bria (PhD, Vanderbilt University, 2017) is an anthropological archaeologist whose research in the Peruvian Andes examines how communities emerge and transform through human-environment interactions. She is also deeply invested in issues of culture heritage, and she works with indigenous Andean communities to cocreate heritage events, educational programs, and museum installations that explore how people in the Andean countryside perceive and value their past and landscape. In addition, she has innovated digital archaeology and ethnography methods by designing and implementing tablet-based field recording systems and other databases. Her different endeavors have received funding from multiple sources, including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the American Association for University Women (AAUW), and the Philanthropic Educational Organization. She has published her research in Advances in Archaeological Practice, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, and Open Rivers. She was previously a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Paleoecological context of Plio-Pleistocene biological and behavioral adaptations of the human lineage

Joshua Robinson (PhD, Emory University, 2014) is an archaeologist with research interests in the paleoecological context of Plio-Pleistocene biological and behavioral adaptations of the human lineage. He has previously held a postdoctoral position with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and, most recently, a teaching position in the South Carolina Honors College at the University of South Carolina. He has conducted fieldwork and museum research across eastern and southern Africa, including in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, and South Africa. He is currently involved in two major projects. First, as a research member of the Ledi-Geraru Paleoanthropology Research Project in Ethiopia, he maintains the fossil and geological geospatial database and reconstructs the ancient environments and diets of early members of the genus Homo. Second, he is examining the behavioral transition from the Middle to the Later Stone Age during the late Pleistocene in southern Africa. The Middle and Later Stone Ages are a critical period of human evolution where various populations of Homo sapiens, as well as other transitional or archaic hominins, likely exchanged genes, ideas, and technology. He examines the ecological contexts of these key morphological and behavioral transitions through the geochemical analysis of fossil animal and human tooth enamel to develop records of what they ate and drank in the past. He has published his research in the Journal of Human Evolution, the Journal of Archaeological Science, and Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Evolution, genomics, and anatomy

Evan Kristiansen is joining the Biology Department after receiving his PhD from the same department this summer. He received his BS and MS in biological sciences from the University of the Pacific. His MS thesis was on the phylogeography of a highly variable butterfly species, and his PhD dissertation focused on the adaptive significance and genomic loci associated with mimicry in a hybridizing species of North American butterflies. As a teaching fellow, he taught diverse courses and discovered his passion for teaching undergraduates; he has served as a mentor for over ten undergraduate researchers at BU and UoP. He’s an author on several publications, including a 2018 paper featured in the journal Evolution and the Laboratory Manual for BU Human Anatomy Laboratories.

Assistant Professor of Biology and Physics

Starts 1/1/20

Areas of Expertise: Biophysics and nanotechnology

Joe Larkin is an assistant professor in the departments of Physics and Biology at Boston University. He received his PhD in physics at Northeastern University in the laboratory of Meni Wanunu and trained as a postdoctoral researcher with Gürol Süel in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego. He is an experimental biophysicist interested in understanding how group behaviors arise in populations of bacteria. He began his research career developing nanoscale tools for single-molecule analysis. With these systems, he measured transport of individual proteins and optically sequenced single DNA molecules with unprecedented sample loading efficiency. In the next phase of his research career, he transitioned to studying cell-to-cell communication in bacteria, specifically in bacterial biofilms, where cells stick together in a self-produced matrix and form tissue-like assemblies. He was part of the group that first studied electrical communication within these communities, which can enhance fitness by coordinating metabolism across the population. He investigated the signal transmission process from a statistical physics perspective, showing that at the single-cell level, the biofilm electrical signaling network resides near a phase transition between a weakly and fully connected network, enabling highly efficient signal propagation. He has received the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Areas of Expertise: Computational complexity, data privacy, foundations of machine learning

Mark Bun comes to BU following a PhD (2016) in computer science at Harvard University. From 2016 to 2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and a Google Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley. He completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics and computer science at the University of Washington. His research is in theoretical computer science, including data privacy, computational complexity, cryptography, and the foundations of machine learning.

He is particularly well known for his use of polynomials (continuous functions) as a tool for investigating the fundamental properties of Boolean (discrete) functions. He has also developed new algorithms for querying data sets in a privacy-preserving fashion, in ways that provably preserve data privacy while minimizing the amount of error that is necessarily introduced into the results. He has over 20 publications to his credit, including a best paper award and multiple papers that have been invited to special journal issues. He was a co-organizer of the Mathematical Foundations of Data Privacy at Banff International Research Station in 2018. He also serves on the technical program committees of top-tier venues such as the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) and CRYPTO (organized by IACR, the International Association for Cryptologic Research).

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Areas of Expertise: Programming languages, differential privacy, formal verification

Marco Gaboardi comes to BU from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, where he was an assistant professor. His research is in the area of programming languages, with a focus on formal verification and program analysis, and their applications to differential privacy, secure protocols, resource consumption guarantees, and machine learning. His recent projects, funded by the National Science Foundation, involve computing over distributed sensitive data, and programming tools for adaptive data analysis. He is a 2019 recipient of an NSF CAREER Award.

He received his PhD in computer science (2007) from the University of Torino, Italy, and National Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine, France, and obtained his MSc (2004) and BSc (2002), both in computer science, from the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. He was a research associate at the University of Torino (2008–2009), University of Bologna (2010), and University of Paris Nord (2011). He was a Marie Curie Fellow at Bologna and UPenn (2011–2013). From 2013 to 2015, he was a lecturer and fellow at the University of Dundee, UK. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University (2015) and the Simons Institute at Berkeley (2019). He has taught courses on programming languages, differential privacy, data mining and machine learning, and secure internet programming.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Starts 1/1/20

Areas of Expertise: Distributed data processing, data streaming, graph analytics

Vasiliki Kalavri comes to BU from the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in the systems group working with Professor Timothy Roscoe. Her research is on distributed stream processing and large-scale graph analytics. Before ETH, she completed her PhD (2016) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her PhD thesis, titled “Performance Optimization Techniques and Tools for Distributed Graph Processing,” received the IBM Innovation Award 2017. During her PhD, she spent time at Telefonica Research Barcelona and TU Berlin, Germany.

She received her MSc (2012) in computer science from KTH and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, and her MEng (2010) in electrical and computer engineering from National Technical University of Athens, Greece. She is a code contributor to Apache Flink, an open-source platform for distributed stream processing, and she coauthored a book on the subject. She also spent time at Ververica, a company that provides an Apache Fink–based platform to manage event-driven applications. She has taught several courses and tutorials on big-data analytics and stream processing. She was cochair of the Applications and Data Science track of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid) 2019.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Classical drama and poetry, advertising

Viviane Klein is a classicist who loves reading, seeing, staging, and teaching ancient drama. She earned her BA in classics from Brown University and her MA and PhD from Boston University. She also holds an MS in advertising from BU. She has taught a wide range of courses on language, civilization, literature, and drama at both Boston University and Boston College. Her research focuses on the ways in which themes and devices from Greek and Roman theater pervade and influence other ancient and modern art forms. Her projects have explored Horace’s use of dramatic material in the Sermones and Epistles, the chorus in Sophocles’ Ajax, mute characters in the plays of Plautus and Terence, parallels between Roman comedy and modern television sitcoms, and the striking similarities between the comedic formulas employed by Greek satyr drama and the American cartoon Animaniacs. In addition to her academic work, she has written several plays inspired by classical literature.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Political theory, creativity and democracy, performance

Katherine (Katie) M. Robiadek earned her BA in political theory & constitutional democracy from Michigan State University, an MA in political science from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a PhD in political theory from University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is a political theorist who loves to discuss the role human imagination plays in justice and the good life. With broad interests in the history of ancient through contemporary political thought, her current research focuses on Renaissance, or early modern, political theory. Specifically, she studies the ways European writers from the period—like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Cervantes, and Spinoza—value human creativity as a basis for political equality. In her scholarly work, she argues that this praise for the worth of human creativity then affected the theoretical development of more democratic forms of European and American republicanism.

Her work on creativity and democracy also infuses her approach to teaching, which emphasizes practicing both critical- and creative-thinking skills as especially useful for civic life. Moreover, she has made an effort to hone such skills herself through the art of dance and choreography, with recent forays into improvisational theater and a renewed interest in experimenting with different forms of written poetry.

Assistant Professor of Economics

Areas of Expertise: International economics, urban economics

Yuhei Miyauchi received his BEng in 2010 and an MA in economics in 2012, both from the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 2018. In 2018–19, he was a research scholar (postdoc) at the Japan Program of the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. A broad economist, his primary field is international economics, but he has written in econometrics and urban economics as well. He has written papers on firm agglomeration and on using cell phone records to analyze commuting patterns.

Assistant Professor of Economics

Areas of Expertise: Empirical microeconomics, labor economics

Linh Tô received her BA in mathematics and economics from Macalester College in 2007 and her PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2019. Her research is in empirical microeconomics, broadly defined, with particular interests in labor economics, public economics, and behavioral economics. Her work combines sophisticated theoretical models with careful empirical analysis. She has written on the labor market impact of maternity leave policies and on labor supply decisions by taxi drivers.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Health economics, labor economics, public finance

Steven White received his SB in economics and mathematics from MIT in 2011 and his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2019. He has taught courses at Harvard, including in the Harvard Kennedy School, and at Boston University, in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and finance. His research specialties are health economics, labor economics, and public finance.

Assistant Professor of English

Areas of Expertise: Modern and contemporary poetry, little magazines and the avant-garde, digital publishing, performance art, translation

Sophie Seita is an interdisciplinary researcher, artist, writer, and translator. Her text- and archive-based practice spans poetry, performance, lecture-performance, video, translation, multimedia, and queer-feminist collaborations. She regularly gives talks about her academic and creative practice and works internationally on various projects. Before coming to BU, she held a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, where she was one of the convenors of the interdisciplinary network “Re-”. During her PhD, she was a visiting scholar at Columbia and NYU, was involved with the Blue Mountain Project at Princeton (a digital modernist magazine archive) and with Archive of the Now (a digital archive of poetry recordings), and cocurated the 2016 Segue Series as well as the simultaneous and live-streamed “unAmerican Activities Transatlantic Reading Series” between New York and London (2013–2015).

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Twentieth-century American literature, world Englishes, transpacific Asian/American studies

Hyo Kyung Woo’s teaching and research interests include 20th-century American literature, world Englishes, and transpacific Asian/American studies. After completing her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, she spent two postdoctoral years at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and another year as a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University. She is currently working on a manuscript, Korean Englishes, Uneven Asias, and the Transpacific Literary System, 1895–1945. It argues that between 1895 and 1945, new routes of global literary circulation emerged along with hierarchies of languages in transpacific regions, and some colonial Korean intellectuals considered a transpacific space an alternative route of circulating anticolonial texts against Japanese rule. By examining the English-based, anticolonial literary practices of colonial Korean intellectuals, this project ultimately argues that Korean Englishes were a product of the triangular interplay between local, regional, and global politics. She teaches courses on Asian American literature, contemporary American literature, postcolonial literature, and graphic novels. She is particularly interested in teaching multicultural writing and minority voices across the world. Finally, she is a big fan of K-pop and Japanese manga.

Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy

Areas of Expertise: Political economy of development, gender and politics, quantitative methods

Rachel Brulé joins the Pardee School from NYU Abu Dhabi, where she has been an assistant professor of political science since 2014. She earned her PhD in political science from Stanford but has a highly interdisciplinary background, including a BA in international relations and African studies from Mount Holyoke College, an MSc in forced migration from Oxford University, and an MSc in development management from the London School of Economics. She specializes in comparative politics with a substantive focus on gender, South Asia, political economy, and both formal and informal institutions. Her work combines qualitative, quantitative, and experimental methods, and she has published in top journals in both political science and development economics. Her book, Women’s Representation and Resistance: Positive and Perverse Consequences of Indian Reforms for Gender Equality, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

She will add significantly to the Pardee School’s engagement in issues of how gender interacts with politics and economic development, as well as the school’s methodological range. She also has deep and ongoing experience in the study of Indian politics, society, and economy. In short, she is a fine example of the Pardee School ideal—pursuing interdisciplinary, rigorous research that is based on deep knowledge of a region and that addresses questions of contemporary policy relevance. To quote from her cover letter, “My aim is to inform the design of policies that promote citizen well-being while considering potential unintended consequences, and thereby make progress toward achieving political, economic, and social equality, particularly for women and other underrepresented groups.”

Professor of the Practice of Global Development Policy

Areas of Expertise: Sustainable development, international development, international organizations

Janine Ferretti joins the Pardee School after a long career in international development and environmental policy, both in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and official international organizations. Most recently, she served as Chief of the Environmental and Social Safeguards (ESG) Unit in the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a major multilateral development bank that serves the Americas and Caribbean. She led the team that devised the IDB’s first set of ESG guidelines in 2006, and over the last year she led the effort to update and strengthen those guidelines. As Chief of the ESG Unit, she was in charge of making sure those principles were honored in practice, by evaluating environmental and social risks of IDB-financed projects throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, promoting sustainable infrastructure development, and ensuring respect of human rights and property rights of indigenous people and other communities affected by IDB projects. Prior to joining the IDB, she was Executive Director of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a trilateral commission created at the same time as NAFTA to adjudicate environmental issues arising between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. She was in charge of developing and implementing a comprehensive program that included policy research, development of trinational agreements and action plans, capacity building, dissemination of environmental information, and independent investigation into nonenforcement of environmental laws. Earlier in her career, she was the Executive Director at Pollution Probe Foundation, one of Canada’s leading environmental NGOs.

She brings extraordinary knowledge and experience of policies to promote sustainable development, governance mechanisms within international organizations, and Latin American development. She was among the earliest environmental activists to focus on the link between development policy and environmental sustainability, as well as an early leader in advocating the use of trade policy as an instrument to promote both goals. She is an excellent fit with the needs of the Pardee School, due to her ability to link environment and development policy, her deep knowledge of development finance, her experience in NGO management, and her varied leadership roles both within and outside formal international organizations.

Assistant Professor of International Relations

Areas of Expertise: Latin American history, transnational adoptions, gender and human rights

Rachel Nolan earned her PhD in history at New York University in 2018, after which she spent a year as a member of the Columbia University Society of Fellows. Previously, she worked as an international reporter for the New York Times following her graduation from Harvard. Her dissertation focused on international adoption from Guatemala, which was second only to China as source of adoptions in absolute numbers at its adoption peak. Drawing on an extraordinary set of documents obtained from both state records and private adoption lawyers in Guatemala, her dissertation describes in unprecedented detail the often sordid business of international adoption, which in many cases has devolved into criminal activity including kidnapping and human trafficking. Her work addresses issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and state violence in drawing a picture of the big business of North-South adoptions. She has also published translations and reported for Harper’s and the New York Times on the expulsion of Haitians from the Dominican Republic, Zika, and El Salvador’s punitive abortion laws. In the best Pardee School tradition, she pursues interdisciplinary, rigorous research that is based on deep knowledge of a region and addresses questions of contemporary policy relevance. She will contribute to Pardee’s offerings on Latin America, gender and development, and human rights.

Professor of the Practice of International Security

Areas of Expertise: National security policy, nuclear and cyber deterrence, leadership, defense planning

Lieutenant General Jack Weinstein (USAF, retired) joins the Pardee School after a 36-year career in the US Air Force, primarily in nuclear and space operations. In his final post, he was Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, where he reported directly to the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Air Force. In that position, he was responsible for the readiness and deployment of all USAF strategic nuclear forces. Previously, he was Director of Air, Space and Cyberspace Operations at Air Force Space Command, a position that combines responsibilities over intelligence operations, space-based weapons and support systems, and cyber operations. He has successfully led strategy, policy, planning, operations, budget, and administrative activities from the unit level to the Pentagon. In a career marked by challenging and diverse assignments, he was repeatedly hand-selected to turn around failing or marginally led organizations. Perhaps most notably, he was named commander of USAF’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force under US Strategic Command following a cheating and drug scandal at an ICBM facility that threatened the readiness and safety of the wing. By all accounts, he successfully turned around the organizational culture. He also has extraordinary experience in military planning and budgeting. In planning, he was the lead representative of the USAF in the preparation of the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, a key national security document. Working in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans and Programs from 2009 to 2012, he was in charge of assembling the annual and five-year budgets for USAF strategic forces.

At the Pardee School, he will teach classes on deterrence, national security policymaking, organizational leadership, and cyber and space policy. He will also be a valuable mentor and resource to students across the University—not only those with an interest in security studies or in ROTC but also to students in computer science, engineering, and the natural sciences whose futures may involve working for or with government entities. He will also contribute significantly to public debates on issues of national security, nuclear strategy and readiness, and space and cyber operations.

Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies

Areas of Expertise: African American history; gender, urban, social, and intellectual history

Paula Austin specializes in African American studies; gender, social, and intellectual history; and urban studies. She received her PhD and MPhil at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is a coeditor of Radical Teacher and her work has been published in the Journal of African American History. Her forthcoming book with the NYU Press, I Know My Own Mind: New Negro Youth in the Nation’s Capital, concentrates on the urban experience of Black youth and families, as well as the Black social scientists and reformers who studied them. She has previously taught at California State University, Sacramento, and Eugene Lang College.

Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture

Areas of Expertise: Chinese art and material culture, medieval Buddhist art and architecture, digital imaging technologies

Anne Feng comes to BU after completing a PhD in the Department of Art History from the University of Chicago. A specialist of Chinese art, she claims a wide range of scholarly interests including Buddhist art and architecture, Silk Road visual culture, and premodern urban history. Her dissertation, titled “Water, Ice, Lapis Lazuli: Aquatic Imagery in Medieval Buddhist Art and Architecture,” examined images of water and waterscapes on the painted cave walls at Dunhuang in western China. She received a Fulbright-IIE Fellowship for dissertation research in China in 2014–15 and an Andrew W. Mellon COSI Curatorial Fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016–17. She completed her dissertation with the support of a Franke Institute for the Humanities Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago in 2017–18. She spent 2018–19 at Harvard University on a postdoctoral fellowship.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Areas of Expertise: Phonological theory; language documentation, conservation and linguistic fieldwork (Papua New Guinea)

Kate Lindsey earned her BA from the American University and her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University, with a dissertation on the phonology of the Ende language. Ende is a language of southern Papua New Guinea on which Lindsey has been conducting fieldwork for the last year. She has demonstrated sophistication in phonological theory as well as broad crosslinguistic knowledge of sound patterns; and she has been publishing her work in the venues appropriate for a theoretical phonologist. She also has a great deal of experience in matters related to language documentation, conservation, and linguistic fieldwork. She has the potential to inspire current and prospective students and to involve them in her ongoing research projects.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics

Areas of Expertise: Dynamical systems, pattern formation theory, functional analysis

Ryan Goh earned a PhD in mathematics in 2016 at the University of Minnesota, supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship. He solved major problems in pattern formation theory, including a 50-year-old problem about triggered fronts in the Cahn-Hilliard equation and a 20-year-old problem on fronts in the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation. Subsequently, he held an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2016–9), developing a multifaceted research program about pattern formation, infinite-dimensional dynamical systems, coherent structures, partial differential equations, and functional analysis.

He has made fundamental contributions to the physical understanding of vortex solutions in the Boussinesq equation, their stability, coherent structures in fluids, and Liesegang patterns in chemistry. His impactful articles have appeared in the Archives of Rational Mechanics and Analysis, Journal of Nonlinear Science, Journal of the London Math Society, Physical Review E, SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems, and Nonlinearity (as a 2016 Highlights article). He has also published on other applications of dynamical systems, to stochastic dynamics, VLSI systems, and bone-morphogen protein dynamics in embryos. He will be teaching courses in calculus, differential equations, dynamical systems, and his many other areas of expertise, and he has plans to continue to lead REU projects.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics

Starts 1/1/20

Areas of Expertise: Statistical machine learning, computational biology, data science

Jonathan Huggins was awarded a BA in mathematics from Columbia University (2014) and earned his PhD in computer science at MIT (2018), with a thesis titled “Scaling Bayesian inference: theoretical foundations and practical methods.” In a broad research program that spans theory and applications, he develops state-of-the-art statistical and machine learning methods that scale for truly large data sets. A primary hallmark of his work is that his methods are simultaneously provably accurate and computationally powerful enough to handle large, realistic data sets. Indeed, he simultaneously establishes the theoretical foundations and underpinnings of his methods using an impressive array of techniques from probability, statistics, asymptotics, and machine learning, and he applies his new methods to central problems in biology, including cellular differentiation, RNA sequencing, dendritic trees, and dendritic synaptic connectivity, as well as to other major scientific problems in data compression, pattern discovery, Markov processes, and sampling methods. Most recently, in the past year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Chan School of Biostatistics at Harvard University, he has branched out further into computational biology, carrying out pathbreaking research to develop cell-free DNA measurement methods. He is the author of over 20 original research articles, and these have appeared in the most prestigious statistics, probability, machine-learning journals and refereed conference proceedings, including multiple articles in each of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the International Conference on Machine Learning, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, and Bernoulli. At Boston University, he also has an appointment as a Data Science Faculty Fellow, since major aspects of his research program lie at the heart of modern data science.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Areas of Expertise: Philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, linguistics

Samia Hesni works in the areas of philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College’s law, jurisprudence, and social thought program, she received her MA from Tufts and PhD from MIT. She has already published an article in Mind (a top-tier journal in philosophy), after winning that journal’s prize for the best graduate student essay in social and political philosophy, and has a forthcoming co-translation of Newton’s “De Motu Corporum, Liber Secundus” (1685) with a coauthored commentary. She has given over 20 presentations in the US and abroad and was a visiting fellow at the Australia National University this past summer. She will help expand our department’s offerings in such areas as the philosophy of gender and political philosophy; she is particularly interested in how language can be used to undermine and resist implicit structures of subjugation and oppression and is also interested in such topics as the metaphysics of social kinds, the phenomenology of racial passing, and the role of social situatedness and standpoint in philosophical methodology. She has also been involved in a wide range of teaching and outreach activities, having taught philosophy in such diverse contexts as a high school great books curriculum, a prison education program, and the City of Cambridge’s foster care system.

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Areas of Expertise: American politics and public policy; media, political communication, and public opinion

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner earned his BA at the College of William & Mary in 2011 and was awarded his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017 after defending his dissertation “Local Accountability: The Role of Attribution, Institutions, and Communication.” Since 2017, he has held a postdoctoral research associate position at the Boston Area Research Initiative, based at Harvard and Northeastern University. A student of American politics, his areas of specialization include local politics and policy, and media and political communication, as well as surveys and public opinion. He has already published six papers and has several forthcoming in top journals in American politics. In 2015, he received the Norton Long Young Scholar Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association.

His teaching experience includes a standalone course on political science scope and methods at MIT, where he was also a teaching assistant for several other courses. In addition, he has been an instructor for methodological workshops at the College of William & Mary, Harvard, and MIT. At BU, he will teach courses at both the undergraduate and PhD levels on a range of topics within the American politics and public policy subfields. This fall, he is teaching an experimental learning course that applies data analysis to local government policy.

Assistant Professor of Romance Studies

Areas of Expertise: Mesoamerican studies and colonial Latin American literature, including intersections of early modern European antiquarianism, Spanish humanism, and native traditions in colonial Mexico; Nahuatl linguistics; translation

David Horacio Colmenares González, assistant professor of Spanish, is a graduate of the PhD program in Latin American and Iberian cultures at Columbia University. He earned an MA and MPhil from Columbia and a third MA in philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). He earned his BA from the Universidad Iberoamericana de Puebla (Mexico). He has conducted groundbreaking research on the cultural interaction of 16th/17th-century European and Mesoamerican culture in the area of religion. His densely researched and thoroughly innovative study of “How the Aztecs got a Pantheon. The Creation of an Ancient Religion in New Spain” studies how characterizations of Aztec deities were shaped by classical mythology, Spanish and Italian Renaissance humanism, and indigenous 16th-century Mexican scholars, and was recognized with the Ángel del Río Prize at Columbia. As an experienced literary translator and passionate student of hermeneutics—one who reads closely visual, oral, and written texts and studies how one culture “translates” another—he will contribute not only to the Romance studies BA and PhD programs in Spanish but also to Latin American studies. His interest and expertise in art history, codicology, the history of religion, and translation make him one of the most interdisciplinary of scholars.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Theory and practice of language teaching, 19th-century French literature, literature in translation, French culture through gastronomy

Carrie O’Connor, lecturer in French, earned her PhD in French studies from Louisiana State University in 2015 with a dissertation titled “Metamorphoses of the Pygmalion Myth in French Literature 1771–1886.” She earned a BA and BS from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and an MA in French language, literature, and civilization from Middlebury College. She has taught as a part-time faculty member at a number of Boston-area institutions including Tufts, Bentley, Northeastern, MIT, and (since 2017) Boston University. She has a wide range of experience not only in the teaching of French language and culture but also in the coordination of multisection language courses and in study abroad, as instructor and assistant director of the LSU program in France. Her educational background not only in literature and culture but also in accounting and global business have prepared her to teach a variety of courses at Boston University. As part-time lecturer in the Department of Romance Studies, she has already given an innovative advanced language course anchored in the theme of gastronomy and drawing on the resources and facilities of Global House and food studies in Metropolitan College.

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Areas of Expertise: Sociology of race, ethnicity, and migration

Hebatalla (Heba) Gowayed received her BA from American University in Cairo, her MA from Columbia University, and her PhD in sociology from Princeton University. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. She is a sociologist of race, ethnicity, and migration who conducts global and comparative research on how low-income people traverse social services, immigration laws, and their associated bureaucracies.

She is making pathbreaking and timely contributions to our understanding of the experiences of Syrian refugees in the United States and worldwide. Her project, “Refuge: Syrian Refugee Incorporation and the Production of New Minorities,” documents how newly resettled Syrian refugees rebuild their lives and how these experiences are shaped by the divergent public policy contests of the US, Canada, Germany, and Italy. A related project, focused on “The Cost of Borders,” shows the economic costs borne by refugees, such as paying smugglers and other transportation costs. Her work has appeared in journals including Gender & Society, Sociological Forum, and Ethnic & Racial Studies. She is also an award-winning teacher, having received awards for her undergraduate teaching at Princeton.

Lecturer of Neuroscience

Areas of Expertise: Cell and molecular neuroscience and neuropharmacology

Kristen Bushell comes to BU’s Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience from Stonehill College, where she discovered her passion for undergraduate education through teaching the organic chemistry labs. She received her PhD from Boston University School of Medicine in 2010 as part of the BUMC Pharmacology Department in collaboration with the BMC Department of Surgery and Goldman School of Dental Medicine. Her graduate studies focused on the transcriptional regulation of proinflammatory cytokines in macrophages found in gastrointestinal inflammation. As an undergraduate at Virginia Tech and then later at Wyeth, she participated in research projects studying the synthesis of cannabinoids to understand the structure activity relationships of cannabinoid receptors and the resulting impact on the endocannabinoid signaling pathway for non-opioid treatments of chronic and neuropathic pain. In addition to a broad background in the basic sciences, she has a special interest in neuropharmacology, inflammatory processes of disease, and the role of gut-brain axis in disorders of the nervous system.

Lecturer of Neuroscience

Areas of Expertise: Behavioral neuroscience, neurogenetics and neuropharmacology

Kyle Gobrogge joins the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience while teaching as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University. He began his scientific career at Michigan State University, where he examined the genetic and environmental influences underlying sex differences in behavior using human twin and rodent models with the guidance of his mentors and collaborators Dr. Kelly Klump and Dr. Marc Breedlove. He went on to earn both an MS and PhD in neuroscience at Florida State University, during which time he conducted studies investigating the neurobiology of aggression in the socially monogamous prairie vole in Dr. Zuoxin Wang’s laboratory.

Following his studies on aggression, he was awarded an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate the behavioral consequences of manipulating octopamine neurons in male drosophila at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Neurobiology under the direction of Dr. Edward Kravitz.

In order to expand upon his behavioral neurogenetics research in flies, he transitioned to the Department of Psychology at Tufts and the Neuroscience Program at the Tufts University School of Medicine. During his time in the laboratories of Dr. Klaus Miczek and Dr. Jamie Maguire, he employed cutting-edge opto- and chemo-genetic techniques to manipulate corticotrophin-releasing hormone neurons during social defeat and drug administration paradigms in male mice. He completed a third postdoctoral fellowship at Boston College in the Department of Psychology under the guidance of Dr. Alexa Veenema, where he dissected the neuronal circuitry underlying social play behavior in male rats.

As a teacher-scientist, he uses evidence-based pedagogical methods to enhance best teaching practices to foster effective student learning in both lecture and laboratory curriculum. Through his teaching, research, and publications, he aims to develop a better understanding of the neurobiology programming motivated and dysregulated behaviors.

He has received many awards and prizes for his work as an educator and as a researcher, of which he is most proud of receiving the 2008 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Fellowship of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Cell and molecular biology

John Tullai joins the program from the Biology Department at Boston University, where he has been teaching and conducting research as a research assistant professor. He began his scientific career training at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where he investigated the protein biochemistry, enzymology, and cellular aspects of the regulation of the peptide-metabolizing enzyme EC 3.4.24.15, an enzyme with important neuroendocrine regulatory roles in mammalian reproductive control and cardiovascular function. He was the first to establish that the enzyme’s activity is regulated by PKA phosphorylation; he also delineated its subcellular trafficking with novel fractionation methodologies.

Following these studies, he was awarded an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service award as a fellow in Professor Geoffrey Cooper’s laboratory here at BU. These studies integrated experimental and systems biological/genomic methodologies to study the transcription regulation of phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt-mediated survival signals and induction of apoptosis in human glioblastoma multiforme cell models (GBM, among the most deadly forms of brain cancer). During his tenure with Dr. Cooper, Dr. Tullai expanded his interests and role in undergraduate education in the Department of Biology at Boston University. In addition to instructing Introductory Biology, Cell Biology, and Carcinogenesis, he accrued extensive laboratory teaching experience in the Systems Physiology course, including authoring the course lab manual.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Japanese language and linguistics pedagogy, intercultural communication, Korean language

Myeongok Lee joins the Japanese program in World Languages & Literatures as a full-time lecturer. She received her BA from Sophia University, Tokyo, her first MA in organizational communication from Western Kentucky University, and, more recently, her second MA in Japanese linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Vassar College, and Kanda Gaigo Career College in Japan. She is fluent in Japanese and Korean, and developed the first Korean language program she taught at Western Kentucky University. She has also worked in the corporate world in various capacities, in companies such as Fujitsu, Kobe Aluminum Automotive Products, and Oriental Land Company. She is a member of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese and has received training in new language pedagogical methods.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Arabic language, theory of second language acquisition and translation

Salima Slimane joins the Arabic program in World Languages & Literatures as a full-time lecturer. She received her BA in arts and education from the University of Batna, Algeria. She taught English in Algeria in university and corporate settings, and has extensive pedagogical experience in teaching Arabic and French at all levels in the Boston area for a number of years. She has taught at Boston University, University of Massachusetts Boston, Roxbury Community College, the Boston Language Institute, and the Brookline Adult Center. She has also worked as a translator and interpreter.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Creative writing, poetry, writing pedagogy

Brandy Barents holds degrees from James Madison University (BA in English) and Boston University (MA in creative writing, poetry). Since 2007, she has been teaching Writing Program seminars such as Boston in Film and Literature, Boston Poetry Now, and Theater Now, all of which connect students with the contemporary arts scene in the city. For BU’s Creative Writing Program, she has taught creative writing and poetry workshops, and for BU’s MET College, she taught The Sounds of Poetry and Boston Zeal, Insanity, and Lawlessness. She has also served as the director of the Favorite Poem Project, as facilitator of the Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture Series and the Summer Institute for Teachers, and as a poetry reader for Slate. Her own poetry has appeared in The American Literary Review, Barrow Street, and The Country Dog Review.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Children’s literature, genre fiction, creative writing, writing pedagogy

Amy Bennett-Zendzian has degrees in English from Cornell University (AB) and Boston University (MA), and also holds a dual MA/MFA in children’s literature and writing from Simmons. She is an ESL specialist and has been an instructor and writing consultant at Boston University since 2009 and at other colleges in the Boston area since 2004. In addition to writing pedagogy, her main areas of interest are fairy tales, children’s and young adult literature, and fantasy and science fiction. Her essay on the gift economy in The Hunger Games appeared in the edited collection Critical Insights: The Hunger Games. She is a published poet and a book reviewer for The Horn Book Guide, as well as a voice actor, director, and playwright whose works have been produced around the Boston area.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: American studies, space and place, consumer culture, writing pedagogy

Stephanie Kolberg holds a PhD in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in American studies from California State University, Fullerton. She also holds a BA in psychology from the University of California at Davis. Her scholarly interests include space and place and consumer culture. Her most recent essay, “Exploring the Leisure Gap in Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Cards,” was published in the edited collection, Pop Culture Matters. Her work has also been published in the Journal of Consumer Culture, and in City Dreams, Country Schemes: Community and Identity in the American West. She has taught courses at the University of South Florida, SMU, Boston Architectural College, MCPHS University, and Boston University on such topics as suburban history, gender, place, tempo and technology, and artificiality.

Lecturer

Areas of Expertise: Creative writing, journalism, writing pedagogy

Elizabeth Hyde Stevens holds an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and a BA in art-semiotics from Brown University. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney’s, Salon, Explosion-Proof, The Awl, The Millions, Rolling Stone, RogerEbert.com, Fast Company, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Her 2013 book, Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson, was praised by INC, the AV Club, Brain Pickings, WGBH, and the Boston Globe. Her past teaching includes writing seminars at Brooklyn College, Gotham Writers Workshop, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Harvard Extension School. Her current research interests include the bench-to-bedside development of pharmaceuticals and the future of augmented reality in video games.