Appendix

Assistant Professor of Biology (Starts 1/1/21)
Areas of Expertise: systems biology and genomics

Ana Fiszbein earned her PhD in molecular biology and biotechnology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2016 and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ana studies the mechanisms, modes of action, and evolution of mammalian gene regulation. She uses systems biology and bioinformatics approaches to investigate molecular processes underlying the crosstalk between transcription and RNA processing. As a postdoc, she characterized the phenomenon of Exon-Mediated Activation of Transcription Starts (EMATS), in which the RNA splicing of internal exons impacts the spectrum of promoters used and expression levels of the host gene. These mechanisms have a profound impact on gene regulation with implications for evolution, disease, and differentiation. She has 14 publications and one patent, has spoken at a number of professional conferences, and was the recipient of a Pew Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has teaching experience in molecular biology and RNA processing and has held leadership roles in chairing conferences and the MIT Postdoctoral Association. At BU, she plans to investigate fundamental aspects of gene regulation using an interdisciplinary genomics-based approach.

Assistant Professor of Biology
Areas of Expertise: marine biology, microbiology, biogeochemistry

Jeffrey Marlow earned his PhD in geobiology from the California Institute of Technology in 2015 and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Jeffrey studies greenhouse gas fluxes in marine environments, focusing on microbial methane metabolism in rocks and sediments. He integrates fieldwork and laboratory studies, using diverse approaches that include deep-sea exploration, microscopy, metabolomics, and geochemical analyses. He is widely published in both the scientific and popular press, has organized and spoken at conferences, and has received a number of awards, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award. At BU, he plans to develop novel strategies to investigate microbial populations in their native state, focusing on metabolic activity and interactions. Focusing on hydrocarbon seeps, he will pursue novel metabolisms, interrogate geobiological and climate feedbacks between organisms and host rocks, and work to explore how single-cell observations scale to regional and global impacts on carbon cycling. Jeffrey is highly active in promoting science literacy through outreach and popular science writing. He is the founder of Ad Astra Academy, which introduces students from disadvantaged communities across the world to deep-sea and planetary exploration.

Lecturer
Areas of Expertise: organic and medicinal chemistry

Alexis Courtney, who received a PhD at Boston University in 2019, is joining the Chemistry Department after a postdoctoral fellowship at Smith College studying the use of nucleic acids as enzyme mimics. She received her BS in forensic science from Bay Path University, where she found her passion for teaching while tutoring organic chemistry. Her PhD dissertation focused on the use of flow chemistry as a synthetic, biological, and educational tool in Professor Aaron Beeler’s research group at BU. During graduate school, she helped design a chemistry-themed piano for the “Play Me, I’m Yours” project and has been featured in Chemical & Engineering News with a fellow graduate student for their annual chemistry-themed Halloween costumes. In 2016, she was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Fellow Award for her dedication to teaching chemistry, and, in the 2017/18 school year, she was part of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Program (SoTL) run by BU’s Center of Teaching & Learning. She has also developed a flow chemistry experiment focusing on innovative technology and real-world applications for use in the organic chemistry laboratory course.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Areas of Expertise: geometry processing, hex meshing, optimal transport, harmonic and bounded distortion mappings

Ed Chien comes to BU from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, where he was a postdoctoral associate in the Geometric Data Processing Group. His research applies tools and insights from differential geometry and topology to solve key problems in graphics, computational engineering, and machine learning. Before MIT, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Bar-Ilan University. He earned his PhD in mathematics from Rutgers in 2015 and his AB in mathematics and physics from Dartmouth College in 2009. Ed has performed fundamental research characterizing the topology of hexahedral meshes used in Finite Element Method (FEM) modeling and has contributed to several novel machine-learning applications of optimal transport. His work aims to further these important lines of research with mathematically rigorous results and computationally effective algorithms. He was an international program committee member for the Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP) in 2019, served as a program committee member for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in 2020, and as a reviewer for many top-tier publication venues. He has published in top venues in his field, including NeurIPS, Eurographics, SIGGRAPH, and SGP.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Areas of Expertise: artificial intelligence and applied machine learning 

Bryan Plummer, prior to joining BU as a research assistant professor in September 2019, was a postdoctoral associate in the Image and Video Computing Group at BU and has been working with Professor Kate Saenko since April 2018. His research falls within the umbrella of artificial intelligence with a focus on visual recognition scene understanding, interpretable machine learning, and understanding the relationship between vision and language. He earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2018 and his BS in computer science from UIUC in 2013. Bryan’s primary research interests are in machine learning, computer vision, vision-language understanding, and robotics. He has a strong publication record at top-tier conferences in machine learning and computer vision, such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and AAAI, with over 1,000 citations of his work to date. He brings significant potential for building industry collaborations and impact, with more than a dozen patents filed based on his work. He’s also shown a commitment to outreach, especially efforts for promoting STEM education in underrepresented groups in computer science.

Senior Lecturer
Areas of Expertise: climate change, sustainable development, energy

James G. Baldwin earned his PhD in geography from the Department of Geography at BU in 2009. He has been serving as faculty in the Department of Earth and Environment since 2008, teaching a wide variety of classes in geography, environmental science and policy, and international relations. From 2013 to 2017, he was an adjunct assistant professor at Bentley University. His research employs quantitative tools to address policy-relevant questions related to energy, climate change, and the interactions between people and the natural environment. His research contributions have been published in journals such as Ecological Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics, Energy and Environmental Research, Journal of Regional Science, and Land Use Policy. Additionally, his work modeling carbon dioxide emissions was featured in the US Third National Climate Assessment. An enthusiastic educator, James has dedicated himself to undergraduate and graduate teaching as well as student mentoring and research supervision at all levels.

Assistant Professor of Earth & Environment (Starts 1/1/21)
Areas of Expertise: environmental governance, human dimensions of environmental change, social-ecological systems

Abigail Sullivan is an environmental social scientist studying environmental governance. Prior to joining BU, she was an assistant research scientist and faculty fellow at Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute. Her research focuses on unpacking the dynamics of institutions and collective action in aquatic and terrestrial social-ecological systems. By analyzing factors that influence collective action in communities facing environmental change, she provides insights into how people can optimally design institutions for adaptation to environmental change. She has explored a variety of human-environment issues, including the complexities of emerging issues in community forestry in Nepal, climate change adaptation in the Colorado River Basin, and aquatic invasive species in midwestern US lakes. She received her PhD in environmental social science from Arizona State University, an MS in ecology and environmental science from the University of Maine, and a BS in environmental science from Unity College. She was a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University’s Decision Center for a Desert City. She has taught courses on human-environment theory and research methods and has been a dedicated research mentor to students tackling interdisciplinary questions at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Assistant Professor of Economics
Areas of Expertise:  development economics, political economy, labor economics

Siddharth George received his BSc in econometrics and mathematical economics from the London School of Economics in 2011 and his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2019. He was an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College in 2019–20 before joining Boston University. He has also worked in the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Singapore (2011–12) and the Office of the Chief Economic Advisor of India (2015–16). His research interests are in development economics, political economy, and labor economics, and he has explored the economic effects of political dynasties in India since 1862.

Associate Professor of Economics
Areas of Expertise: development economics and empirical labor economics

David Lagakos received his BA in mathematics and economics from the University of Rochester in 2001, an MA in economics from UCLA in 2005, and a PhD in economics from UCLA in 2008. After a year as a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, he became an assistant professor at Arizona State in 2009. In 2013, he moved to the University of California, San Diego, as an assistant professor and was promoted to tenured associate professor in 2016. David’s research lies at the intersection between economic growth and development. His work combines creative data collection, elegant modeling, and rigorous quantitative work to answer important questions that the previous literature has struggled to address. The unifying theme across his papers is a focus on the very large economic issue of explaining income differences across countries.

Associate Professor of Economics
Areas of Expertise: international economics, specifically the economics of international trade and multinational firms

Natalia Ramondo received her BA in economics from Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1997, her MA in economics from Universidad Torcuato di Tella in 2000, and her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2006. She was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas from 2006 to 2010, a Kenen Fellow at Princeton University from 2009 to 2010, and an assistant professor at Arizona State University from 2010 to 2013. In 2013, she became an assistant professor of economics in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, and was promoted to tenured associate professor in 2017. Natalia is a trade economist whose research is focused broadly on issues of globalization, particularly with respect to the role of multinational firms. Natalia is part of a new wave of economists using quantitative models and detailed data sets to understand the welfare gains (and losses) from various forms of economic openness. Her research is theoretically rigorous, timely, and relevant for policy.

Assistant Professor of English
Areas of Expertise:  African American literature, diasporic studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, Caribbean literature

Ianna Hawkins Owen’s current book project, Ordinary Failures, offers new theorizations of the keyword “diaspora” through an examination of negative effects in Black literary and visual culture. Ianna is also currently working on a first video game, write back soon, and a first graphic novel. Currently a senior fellow at the independent Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies and a Marion and Jasper Whiting fellow, Ianna has been a President’s Postdoctoral fellow in English at the University of California, a Ford Foundation fellow, a Woodrow Wilson fellow, a cochair of the Asexuality Studies Interest Group of the National Women’s Studies Association, and an intern at the Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn, New York. Ianna was an assistant professor of English at Williams College before joining the BU faculty in fall 2020.

Assistant Professor of International Relations (Starts 1/1/21)
Areas of Expertise: technology and development, financial technologies, regulation

Jonathan Greenacre comes to the Pardee School from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he was the Hitachi Center Faculty fellow. He holds a PhD in law and a master’s in law and finance from the University of Oxford and bachelor’s degrees in political science, history, and law from the University of New South Wales. Jonathan’s work addresses important issues in law, development, and technological change, including the regulation of mobile money. The rapid spread of mobile money in many developing economies has offered enormous benefits in terms of digital financial inclusion, bringing banking and payment services to populations that were previously underserved by formal financial institutions. At the same time, these services create new vulnerabilities for users and for financial systems. Jonathan has been an active participant in debates on how policy should manage these trade-offs. He has consulted for a variety of governments and organizations, including the United Nations, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. He is also a prolific scholar, having already published over a dozen journal articles and book chapters and coedited a Cambridge University Press book. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Regulation of Mobile Money, which is under contract from Cambridge University Press. He will anchor Pardee’s growing offerings on technology in international relations and development.

Assistant Professor of International Relations
Areas of Expertise: international law, history of international law and organizations

Andrei Mamolea is an expert on international law and organizations, and he received his PhD in international history from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2018 and also holds a JD from Duke University. Since completing his PhD, he has been a researcher affiliated with the University of Copenhagen and McGill University. Andrei is a historian of international law and organization and has done archival work in five languages in multiple countries in Europe and Latin America, as well as in the United States and Canada. His dissertation, titled “The League of Nations and International Law, 1919–1945,” tracks the ways in which international law developed in the early 20th century in the context of a new breed of institutions, including the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the League of Nations. He has also worked on the evolution of the laws of war and, more recently, on the ways in which Latin American states contributed to the development of international law. At the Pardee School, Andrei will teach courses on international law and organization, as well as the history of international relations.

Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy
Areas of Expertise: diplomacy, humanitarian crises, global health

Ambassador Mark Storella is a 36-year veteran of the US Foreign Service, with an extraordinarily varied career, working in eight foreign countries across four continents, representing his country in the United Nations, and leading refugee policy in the Department of State in Washington. He has served as ambassador to Zambia, deputy chief of mission in Brussels and Geneva, and deputy assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, among other positions. In that last position, Mark was the highest-ranking career diplomat in that office; he was responsible for the Asia/Middle East portfolio (including the Syrian, Iraqi, and Rohingya refugee crises) and was in charge of the State Department’s $2 billion budget to address those crises. He has also led and participated in multilateral diplomacy on multiple occasions, including humanitarian crises; served as US representative to the UN Human Rights Council; and coordinated US efforts to help refugees and internally displaced persons in Iraq. During much of his career, he was engaged in multilateral diplomacy, both in international organizations and in crisis resolution. He also has considerable teaching experience, having taught for a total of three years in the diplomacy program at Georgetown University and having headed the Foreign Service Institute’s Leadership and Management School. At the Pardee School, he will teach a variety of courses on diplomacy, including new ones on humanitarian crises and global health diplomacy.

Professor of History
Areas of Expertise: African American history, history of racism and antiracism, American intellectual history

Ibram X. Kendi is a National Book Award–winning historian and #1 New York Times bestselling author. Ibram is a contributor to the Atlantic and CBS News. He is the author of four books, including The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize; Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction; and How to Be an Antiracist, which was named to several Best Books of 2019 lists, including in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time, and NPR. His next monograph is tentatively titled Bones of Inequity: A Narrative History of Racist Policies in America.

Lecturer
Areas of Expertise: 20th-century United States history, political history, business history, diplomatic history

David Shorten is a historian of the 20th-century United States and studies connections between and among business and finance, politics, and US foreign relations. He completed his PhD at BU in January 2020. His doctoral dissertation examined how financiers expanded their international investment portfolios in the early 20th century and spurred a movement among antimonopoly reformers in Congress to free foreign policy decision making from the grips of “special interests.” His work has appeared in the Washington Post’s “Made by History,” History News Network, and Essays in History.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics
Areas of Expertise: mathematical neuroscience, applied mathematics

Gabe Ocker earned his BA in applied mathematics and neuroscience from Oberlin College in 2010 and his PhD in mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. He has arrived at BU with five years of experience as a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle (2015–2020). His research is centered on neural and synaptic mechanisms of plasticity. While his thesis work was largely theoretical, he collaborated with experimentalists at the Allen Institute to help produce a publicly available data set of neural activity in the mouse brain. His research continues to be primarily theoretical, aiming to create mathematical models of spiking and connectivity in neural systems. At the same time, he is developing statistical tools to test these models on the extensive data sets that are now available. To carry out his research program, he uses a wide range of mathematical tools, drawn from physics (statistical mechanics and field theory), dynamical systems, geometry, and Bayesian statistics. He has 12 papers in refereed research journals, including some in top journals such as the Journal of Neuroscience and Nature Neuroscience. In addition, he has three papers under review or revision as well as 39 abstracts, and he has given 23 research talks.

Assistant Professor of Physics
Areas of Expertise: particle physics, actively involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland

David Sperka graduated with a BS in physics, astrophysics, and mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009 and received his PhD in experimental particle physics from Boston University in 2014 under the supervision of Associate Professor Tulika Bose. During his PhD research, he was awarded a CMS Collaboration Achievement Award for his work on the real-time data collection (trigger) software. He is joining the BU Department of Physics faculty after having spent time as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida and as a research assistant professor at BU. David is a leader in the development of the trigger systems. His current research involves using machine learning and heterogeneous computing to allow the CMS trigger system to better study the Higgs Boson and to search for undiscovered particles and forces. He is a world expert on studies of the Higgs Boson, having led the Higgs Combination and Properties and Exotic Higgs physics analysis groups within the CMS Collaboration. He also currently leads the Exotic Higgs Working Group within the cross-collaboration LHC Higgs Working Group. Recently, he has also performed several searches for new force particles that are predicted by models of dark matter.

Rachel Meade earned her BA at Bard College in history and Latin American & Iberian studies in 2010 and went on to complete her doctorate at Brown University in political science in 2019 after defending her dissertation titled “Mobilization through Antagonism: Populist Polarization in the US and Argentina.” Since 2019, Rachel has held a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. Rachel has teaching experience and expertise in political behavior, policy, and populism.

Assistant Professor of Political Science
Areas of Expertise: comparative politics, political theory, qualitative research methods, politics of the Middle East and Africa

Marcus Walton earned his BA at Washington University in St. Louis in Near Eastern studies in 2010 and went on to complete his doctorate at Brown University in political science in 2019 after defending his dissertation titled “Resources and Resources: The Origins of Entitlement in Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa.” Since 2019, Marcus has held a postdoctoral fellowship position at the Public Affairs Research Institute and a lecturer position at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Department of Organisational and Institutional Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is an expert in Middle Eastern and African politics, as well as comparative politics.

Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Area of Expertise: human cognitive neuroscience

Rachel Denison specializes in cognitive and computational neuroscience. She utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), computational modeling, and visual psychophysics to investigate attentional and perceptual mechanisms in the human brain. This work examines how the human brain makes sense of the dynamic world in real time. Through the use of multiple, noninvasive experimental techniques, this research allows people to better understand how perceptual and attentional mechanisms select particular moments and events for greater cognitive processing. Her research has also developed highly sophisticated neural models of how computations in specific brain regions support these mechanisms. Prior to accepting a position at BU, Rachel was a postdoctoral researcher at New York University where she completed an NIH-supported postdoctoral research fellowship (NRSA). She has won numerous awards, including a Marshall Fellowship and induction in Phi Beta Kappa, and has lectured widely on her research. Her research has been published in a broad range of top journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Journal of Neuroscience.

Assistant Professor of Romance Studies
Areas of Expertise: authorial roles within the cultural production of the Spanish Middle Ages, language anxiety within multilingual societies, Spanish paleography, translation studies, digital humanities

Anita Savo teaches courses on medieval Iberian literatures and cultures, with an emphasis on cross-cultural exchange among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Her research interests include medieval theories of authorship, translation and pseudotranslation, Mediterranean studies, the history of the book, and medievalism in the 19th century. She is currently preparing her first book, Portraying Authorship: Juan Manuel and the Rhetoric of Authority, which traces the development of notions of authorship in the works of Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348). She is also working on a project about depictions of Arabic speech and speakers in medieval Castilian literature. Her publications include articles and book chapters on religious polemic in Juan Manuel, translation and pseudotranslation in the Poema de Alfonso Onceno, and 19th-century editions of medieval texts.

Lecturer
Areas of Expertise: language pedagogy, didactics and methodology of teaching foreign languages, German language, 20th-century and contemporary German literature

Petra Hundemer-Friedman joins the German program in the Department of World Languages & Literatures as a full-time lecturer; previously, she was a part-time instructor in the German program for six years. She completed studies in German, German as a foreign language, English, and Spanish at Trier University and at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and received an MA in English from California State University, Chico, and a second MA in German as a foreign language from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. More recently, she also received a diploma of qualification in teaching standards for German as a foreign language at Goethe-Instituts abroad. She has taught the German language at the Center of Foreign Languages at Mainz University, as well as courses in German language, literature, and culture at the Middlebury College School of German in Germany program. At the Goethe-Institut Boston, she has been an instructor for German language and contemporary German literature. She is also certified as an examiner for the Goethe-Institut’s worldwide German language exams and has been a teacher trainer in the Goethe-Institut’s professional development DLL (Learn to Teach German) program. In that role, she has led seminars and workshops in the didactics and methodology of foreign language teaching. Additionally, she has taught young language learners at the German Saturday School Boston and has contributed to the German Language School Conference. She has also worked as a translator/interpreter for a private translation firm.

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

Salima Slimane joins the Arabic program in the Department of 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. She has taught at BU, the 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. Salima is also an educational advocate trained by the Parent Consultant Training Institute at the Federation for Children with Special Needs. She has represented many students and parents in school meetings to help them advocate for quality education and strong parent participation. She is also the president of the Malden Special Education Parent Advisory Council, which strives to work in partnership with the Malden Public Schools district to improve their program, policies, and practices for all students who receive special education services and who are either on Individual Education Programs (IEPs) or have accommodations for disabilities (504 plans). Salima is on the board of Massachusetts Advocates for Children, a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to removing barriers to educational and life opportunities for children and youth. She is passionate about special education and promoting inclusive practices as well as differentiating instruction for all students.

Assistant Professor of World Languages & Literatures
(Starts 2/1/21)
Areas of Expertise: Korean literature, literary translation

Dennis Wuerthner holds a PhD from Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). He studies and teaches Korean literature, history, and culture in a broader East Asian context. The focal points of his research include the diffusion and active cross-boundary circulation of books and knowledge, as well as their subsequent time- and context-related reception, translation, appropriation, and creative development in Korea. Concentrating on late premodern adaptations of the 17th-century novel Kuunmong in his monograph Nine Clouds in Motion, he analyzed the cross-border East Asian and inner-Korean diffusion, transformation, and creative production of prose work. He is enthusiastically involved in translation, and his extensively annotated translation of the 15th-century collection of strange tales Kŭmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle) by Kim Sisŭp was recently published in the UCLA Korean Classics Library Series by the Hawaii University Press. Dennis has also translated many contemporary Korean novelists and poets and has projects in the works on the translation of Korean classics in North Korea as well as on science fiction in Korea. In addition to courses in Korean history and literature, classical Korean, and classical Chinese, Dennis has taught courses in Korean film, sports, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the legacies of classical Korean literature and culture in the modern age.

Lecturer
Areas of Expertise: contemporary American fiction, genre theory, geocriticism, writing pedagogy

Jacob Burg holds degrees from Boston College (BA in English) and Brandeis University (PhD in English). Before joining the CAS Writing Program, he served as the codirector of Brandeis’ Writing Center and worked on the university’s curriculum committee to redesign the first-year writing program. As a lecturer at BU, he will be teaching seminars such as Environmental Horror and America’s Fascination with Crime Stories. His teaching and research interests include genre theory, spatial studies, digital writing, and public humanities. He has contributed a chapter to an edited volume on the weird western genre and has forthcoming publications examining fantasy’s contributions to environmental movements and exploring how to improve public humanities initiatives with community literacy projects.

Lecturer
Areas of Expertise: second-language writing, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, writing center studies

Yelin Zhao comes to BU from the Department of English at the University of Delaware, where she taught after earning a PhD in TESL/Linguistics from Oklahoma State University. She has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate writing-related courses (e.g., first-year writing, research writing, discourse analysis, English grammar) to both international and domestic students. She has created staff education curricula and other initiatives to empower multilingual students. Yelin’s scholarship focuses on second-language writing, discourse analysis, and writing center studies. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Writing Center Journal.