CAS Welcomes New Faculty

Heba Alnajada, Assistant Professor in History of Art & Architecture, focuses on migration history, particularly the intersection of refugees, the built environment, law, and the modern history of the Middle East. Before joining BU, she was the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History at UC Davis. She received her PhD in Architectural History from the University of California, Berkeley. Her academic research has been supported by numerous grants, including a Mellon/ACLS Fellowship. Her academic research builds on several years of professional experience in architectural NGOs, urban planning, and heritage documentation projects in Yemen, Libya, Jordan, and Palestine.

Pau Cañigueral Batllosera, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, teaches courses on medieval and early modern Iberian literatures, with a specialization in the cultural exchanges in the Western Mediterranean. His research interests include Mediterranean Studies, medieval theories of hermeneutics and authorship, brief-narratives collections and translation. His first book project, Boccaccio and the Cultural Hybridity of the Neapolitan Court of Alfonso the Magnanimous (c. 1442-58), examines the role of Boccaccio’s opere minori in the multi-lingual literary production during the Aragonese age of the Kingdom of Naples. He has published articles in the rhetoric of the genre “infiernos de amor” in Castilian poetry and in the reformulation of Boccaccio’s anti-feminine discourse in Catalan prose. 

Alex Denison, Visiting Assistant Professor in CIMS, is a scholar-practitioner whose work centers on the aesthetic and political ramifications of digital cinema. His research interests include classical film theory, critical theory, documentary, experimental cinema, film and the environment, political cinema, and post-filmic film theory. He has taught courses in both film studies and film and video production on topics such as digital cinema, film theory, film criticism, and political cinema. In addition to film scholarship, he also works in film programming and film production. Projects he has worked on have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Leeds International Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives.

Nicolás Fernández-Medina, Chair of Romance Studies & Professor of Spanish, holds PhDs in Spanish Literature and Humanities from Stanford University (2007). Before joining the faculty at Boston University, he taught at Pennsylvania State University where he was Professor of Spanish and Philosophy and founding co-director of the Iberian Modernist Studies Forum. His research and teaching interests focus on Spanish and Iberian literature and culture between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Enlightenment thought, Romanticism, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, the history of medicine, the fin de siglo, decadence, women’s literature, Modernist Studies, and the Avant-garde (la vanguardia).

Ines Garcia de la Puente, Senior Lecturer in World Languages & Literatures, expertise in the fields of Russian literature and culture, medieval and modern, Comparative literature, immigrant literature, translation studies (with training in Russian, Polish and German studies). In addition, she will contribute to the Core Curriculum, to the WGS program and to WLL’s MFA program in literary translation, and has taught for all three programs in the past as a highly popular instructor.

Micah Goodrich, Assistant Professor of English, explores the triangulation among nature, temporality, and (re)production to formulate a premodern trans theology of embodiment. He considers how the cultural power of nature is invoked by medieval institutions to control embodiment, specifically the body’s power to create and transform. Their book project, Chronic Bodies: Trans Natures and Premodern Temporalities, explores the emergence of a literary scientific discourse around body transformation in medieval and early modern England. His approach to teaching is informed by trans inclusive, anti-racist, queer, and feminist pedagogies which prioritize student-centered creation and transformation.

James Howard Hill Jr., Assistant Professor of Religion, holds a B.A. from Criswell College, an M.T.S. from Southern Methodist University, and a PhD from Northwestern University. Hill, Jr. teaches courses and conducts research in black study, religion and culture in the United States, cultural criticism and theory, black theologies of liberation, theopoetics, the destructive plundering of the environment, and critical theory. Hill, Jr.’s forthcoming book “The Michael Jackson Cacophony: Religion and the Politics of Black Popular Culture, 1963-1989″ examines how a critical study of the relationship between Michael Jackson, the entwined management of race and religion in the United States, and the politics of popular culture destabilizes modern notions of the proper location of religion, and religion itself. His cultural criticism on issues of race, popular music, sports, politics, and religion can be read in Black Agenda Report, The Syndicate, Black Perspectives, and The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, among other outlets. 

Laurie Hutcheson, Lecturer of Classical Studies, is an alumna of BU’s Core Curriculum and BU’s Classics Department (BA 2005, PhD 2018). Her current book project is about messenger speeches in the Iliad and she is especially interested in characterization and speech in Homer, and in the flexibility and range of poetic conventions. Hutcheson has a rich history teaching Greek and Latin, starting with 8 years at BU Academy, and is interested in developing language pedagogy that is effective, engaging, and accessible to all. She has also taught in BU’s Writing Program, including courses on Ovid, Homer, Greek tragedy, and receptions of Classical texts in art and poetry. Hutcheson has been speaking Latin since 2004, through Reginald Foster’s Latin experiences in Rome, the University of Kentucky’s conventicula, the Paideia Institute’s Living Latin in Rome High School program (which she directs), and elsewhere. She is also beginning to learn to speak Attic Greek.

Alberto Iozzia, Lecturer in Italian, entered American academia almost by chance in 2010, as a Teaching Assistant of Italian at Oberlin College, in Ohio. Since then, he has been teaching all levels of Italian language, from elementary courses to advanced content classes. He earned his PhD from Rutgers University in 2018, defending a dissertation on the apocalypse in Italian cinema and literature, and his research indeed focuses on speculative fiction and on post-apocalyptic literature and film. He has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of Italian cinema and on Italian film genres, and courses of Italian theater and of Italian language through theater. 

Najoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, is a specialist in the areas of computational linguistics, natural language processing, and linguistic semantics. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and maintains a part-time visiting position at Google Research as well. Prior to her arrival at BU, Prof. Kim was a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Data Science at New York University. She received her PhD in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2021. Kim’s research focuses on studying meaning in both human and machine learners, and especially ways in which they generalize to novel inputs and treat implicit meaning. Her current research profile focuses on compositional generalization and category learning in artificial neural networks, testing for and improving robust reasoning in neural language models, and latent representations of meaning.

Irina Kogel, Lecturer in World Languages & Literatures, comes from Davidson College where she was the Coordinator of the Russian program. Prior to that she taught Russian language at all levels at Columbia University, in the Three-College Russian Initiative of Mt. Holyoke College, Smith College and U Mass Amherst, and in the Critical Languages Institute of Arizona State University as a Startalk instructor. Kogel holds an MA and is currently ABD at University of California Berkeley where she received the Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award. The addition of Ms Kogel to the WLL faculty promises an infusion of energy and excitement into the Russian language program and the building of a strong and vibrant community of language-learners from the first year onward.

Rachel Mesch, Professor of French, is a scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, history, and culture. Her research interests include queer and trans histories, women writers and feminisms, photography and material culture, and media history. She focuses particularly on the years between 1870-1910, covering the fin de siècle and the Belle Epoque.

 

Shaun Miller, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, received his PhD from Marquette University. His focus is on ethics and applied ethics, and he has lately written about the ethics of sexuality and relationships. His dissertation was on the moral assumptions of sex education in the USA. He has written book chapters on sexual autonomy, sexual consent, and masculinity. Shaun’s other philosophical interests are in the ancient philosophical tradition of taking care of the self and how philosophy can help one achieve well-being. Outside of philosophy, Shaun also loves hiking and exploring the outdoors. He also has an intense interest in coffee culture and the different ways people have experienced coffee.

Koritha Mitchell, Visiting Professor of English, specializes in African American literature, violence throughout U.S. history and contemporary culture, and Black drama and performance. She examines how texts, both written and performed, have helped terrorized communities survive and thrive. Her study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011) won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. 

Rebecca Moorman, Assistant Professor of Classics, specializes in Republican and early Imperial Latin literature, especially the aesthetics of emotion and multisensory experience in Latin poetry. She is particularly interested in how ancient philosophers, poets, and literary critics used disgust to create new pathways for knowledge and pleasure in Roman culture. Her current book project, The Allure of Disgust in Ancient Rome: Knowledge, Poetics, and the Senses, explores the paradoxical appeal of disgust in Roman philosophy and Latin literature. Rebecca is also interested in other marginalized or less commonly valorized experiences in classical antiquity like anxiety and impoverishment. Additional projects explore topics such as taste and socioeconomic distinction in Horace’s Epistles, forgetfulness in Persius’ Satires, and economic aesthetics in Petronius’ Satyricon. Rebecca’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canaan Morse, Visiting Assistant Professor in World Languages & Literatures, is a specialist in Chinese literature in the Ming and Qing dynasties. He has completed and defended a groundbreaking dissertation at Harvard on the influence of oral storytelling on late imperial vernacular short stories. He offers historically grounded and conceptually original re-readings of important texts, paying attention to their rhetorical strategies to characterize them as portals through which members of a given culture relive their tradition. He holds an M.A. in classical Chinese literature from Peking University, and he is also an award-winning translator of modern Chinese literature.

Francisco Quinteiro Pires, Visiting Assistant Professor of Portuguese, is a journalist and Visiting Assistant Professor in Latin American and Brazilian Literature and Culture at Boston University. His areas of research are 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Luso-Brazilian studies and literatures, sensory studies, media and film studies. He teaches courses on Latin American, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Lusophone African literature and cultures. Francisco has also had a prolific career as a professional journalist for the past two decades. During this period, he has written over one-hundred stories for major publications in Brazil. As a filmmaker, Francisco recorded segments for TV Globo and co-directed a television documentary series about Brazilian immigrants in the United States. 

Bernard Reginster, Findlay Visting Professor of Philosophy, is Romeo Elton Professor of Natural Theology in the Philosophy Department at Brown University. He studied music in the Académies of Uccle and Bouillon (Belgium), and philosophy and psychology at the University of Louvain (Belgium). He also studied philosophy at the University of Münster (Germany), and received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on ethics and moral psychology in 19th and 20th century European philosophy, and on philosophical issues arising from psychoanalytic theory.

Catalina Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Spanish, specializes in Latin American Literature and Culture. Her research and teaching interests center on Latin American literature and culture from the nineteenth century onward, with a focus on gender and sexuality studies, women’s literature, theories of authorship, ecofeminism, and queer literature. Catalina is currently working on her first book, Writing like a Woman: Gendered Pseudonyms and the Impersonation of Female Voices, which analyzes the prominence of gendered pseudonyms in nineteenth-century Latin America and its implications for notions of “female literature” and “women’s writing.” The project traces different gendered pseudonyms used by canonical 19th century writers such as Jose Marti (1853-1895), Soledad Acosta (1833-1913), Rafael Pombo (1833-1912) and Dionisia Gonçalves Pinto (1810-1885) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888).

Kristian Sheeley, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, earned a PhD from the University of Kentucky in 2023. His dissertation focused on the discussions of virtue, vice, happiness, and erotic love in Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus. He has several publications on Plato and the Platonic tradition, and he continues to explore ancient Greek philosophy in his research. At the University of Kentucky, he taught a range of courses including Asian Philosophy, Existentialist Thought & Literature, Health Care Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Introduction to Philosophy. In the fall, he will teach Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Film.

George Vahamikos, Lecturer in Core Curriculum, is a scholar of late medieval and early modern literature, with a particular interest in England’s long and tumultuous love affair with Spain. He is passionate about bringing the distant past into dialogue with the present. He believes one of the great joys of studying medieval and early modern texts is that they allow us to rethink how many of our own assumptions have been formed, including issues of identity, power, sexuality, and faith. He also thinks that as we read, we catch sidelong glimpses at both the origins of many of our modern beliefs and alternate routes, roads not traveled in cultural history; and we can return from our reading with a fresh awareness that the prevailing beliefs of the present are not necessarily inevitable.

Juanita Duque-Rosero, Research Assistant Professor in Mathematics, focuses on computational number theory and arithmetic geometry. She received her PhD in June 2023 at Dartmouth College, where she was advised by John Voight. She completed her master’s in Mathematics at Colorado State University in 2019. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of the Andes.

Amir Emad Ghassami, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, focuses on causal inference and causal discovery. He develops statistical methodologies for evaluating the causal effect of actions or treatments on outcome variables of interest, designing policies for optimizing outcomes, and identifying the causal relationships among the variables of a system. He investigates such causal queries in the face of real-world data complexities such as ​presence of unobserved confounders, measurement error, and missing and censored values. Before joining Boston University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University under the joint supervision of Prof. Ilya Shpitser and Prof. Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen. ​He received hisPhD in the area of Data Science and Communications from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2020.

Tiago Januario, Lecturer of Computer Science, was a Tenured Assistant Professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. He earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Viçosa (UFV) in 2009 and both his MS (2011) and PhD (2015) from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). His research interests are in graph theory and combinatorial optimization. He has published in theoretical computer science, discrete mathematics, and operations research venues. Dr. Tiago Januario has extensive experience teaching CS courses such as Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Formal Languages and Automata Theory, Graph Theory, and Introduction to Computer Science and Programming.

Fotios Kokkotos, Professor of the Practice of Statistics, is an accredited professional statistician (PStat®) by the American Statistical Association with over 30 years of pharmaceutical consulting experience in data science and statistics.  Kokkotos specializes in the analysis of massive and complex databases using advanced data science and statistical techniques. He is an expert in many areas of statistics and data science, including but not limited to machine learning, data mining, predictive analytics, deep learning, sampling theory, stochastic processes, and time series. Kokkotos has extensive knowledge and research completed with secondary public health data in the pharmaceutical industry and he is an expert in Medicare data. He holds a doctorate degree in mathematical statistics from The American University in Washington DC.

Andrea Lincoln, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, joined the faculty at Boston University in 2023, focusing her research on theoretical computer science, specifically average-case fine-grained complexity. She completed her PhD at MIT in 2020 under the supervision of Virginia Vassilevska Williams and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship with Barna Saha at UC Berkeley in 2020-2021. In her work, Andrea employs theoretical models to explore and understand complex systems. She utilizes networks of reductions, providing shared explanations for the complexity of specific computational problems.

Benjamin Marx, Assistant Professor of Economics, has research interests in political economy and development. One strand of his research studies the determinants of political accountability, state capacity, and voting behavior in developing countries. He has worked in various countries including Kenya, Senegal, and Uganda as well as, more recently, Indonesia. Another strand explores the political economy of religion, with the goal of better understanding the interplay between religious institutions, politics, and culture. In addition, he is interested in the study of discrimination and the political economy of urban poverty. He completed his PhD in Economics from MIT in 2018.

Debarghya Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, is a member of the Probability and Statistics research group. He  obtained his PhD from the Department of Statistics at University of Michigan, where he was jointly advised by Prof. Moulinath Banerjee and Prof. Ya’acov Ritov. Before that, he earned his Bachelors and Masters in Statistics from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. His primary research interests include asymptotic theory of high dimensional statistics, theoretical analysis of non-standard asymptotics and application of statistical methods in machine learning (e.g. in Fairness and optimal transport).

Nathan Mull, Lecturer in Computer Science, is interested generally in the intersection of logic and computing. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley (2016) and his MS (2020) and PhD (2023) in Computer Science from the University of Chicago.

Preethi Narayanan, Lecturer in Computer Science, earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with a focus in Systems & Architecture as well as her master’s degree in Computer Science with a specialization in Social Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Preethi has extensive experience in teaching topics such as introductory computing, discrete math, and computer science ethics. Her goals and interests lie in making computer science easier to learn and accessible for all.

Sabrina M. Neuman, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, has research interests in computer architecture design informed by explicit application-level and domain-specific insights. She is particularly focused on robotics applications because of their heavy computational demands and potential to improve the well-being of individuals in society. She received her S.B., M.Eng., and PhD from MIT. She is a 2021 EECS Rising Star, and her work on robotics acceleration has received Honorable Mention in IEEE Micro Top Picks 2022 and IEEE Micro Top Picks 2023.

Padmavathi Srinivasan, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, is interested in algebraic geometry and number theory. Previously Srinivasan was a senior research scientist at ICERM, a limited-term assistant professor at the University of Georgia and a Hale Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received my PhD in 2016 at MIT and her undergraduate and master’s degrees are from Chennai Mathematical Institute.

Eran Tromer, Professor of Computer Science, works on cryptography and information security. He studies ways to build robust distributed computer systems that ensure privacy and integrity, using cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. He also studies the resilience of computing platforms to data theft and tampering, such as side-channel attacks at the physical and software levels. He is a founding scientist of the Zcash privacy-preserving blockchain; a founder of Sealance, which builds blockchain-based privacy-preserving financial regulation technology; and a founder of the ZKProof Standardization Effort. He received his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and previously pursued his research at Columbia University, Tel Aviv University, MIT and Microsoft Research.

Andrew Wood, Lecturer in Computer Science, was a PhD student at Boston University, advised by Peter Chin in the Learning, Intelligence, and Signal Processing Laboratory. He is interested in Machine Intelligence, particularly in graph learning, computational neuroscience, and reinforcement learning. He received his Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Notre Dame in March of 2019, where he was advised by Collin McMillan. He worked at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Software Engineering (SE) to develop virtual assistant technology for programmers.

Richard Becker, Lecturer in Earth & Environment, is a geoscientist and geospatial analyst focusing on geomorphology and climate-change adaptation.

 

 

Dillon Brout, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, joined the Astronomy Department on 1 July 2023. He received an undergraduate degree from the Johns Hopkins University and graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is a leader in the field of observational cosmology, where he is involved in the Dark Energy Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. He is a founder member of Boston University’s Cosmology Initiative, which spans the departments of Astronomy and Physics.

Sofía Casasa, Assistant Professor of Biology, runs the Casasa Lab, which studies the evolution of developmental mechanisms and their role shaping phenotypic diversity. They are particularly interested in how organismal development responds to environmental factors. The lab takes an integrative approach that includes genetics, genomics, developmental biology, ecology and behavior to understand the mechanisms and evolution of phenotypic plasticity. By using Onthophagus horned beetles and Pristionchus nematodes their goal is to understand phenotypic plasticity at multiple levels of biological organization.

Lynne Chantranupong, Assistant Professor of Biology, seeks to address three major questions: (1) What are the metabolic needs and vulnerabilities of neurons across the brain? (2) How are core signaling and metabolic pathways remodeled to support different neuronal classes? (3) Why do some neurons die in neurodegeneration while others live? Her lab will systematically address these questions with a multidisciplinary approach spanning molecular biology, biochemistry, neurobiology, and animal behavior. Knowledge from this research will have broad implications for our understanding of neuronal function in health and disease.

Keying Chen, Lecturer in Chemistry, received her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Southern California in 2021. There, she focused on developing metal organic framework electrocatalysts for green hydrogen production, while also serving as a teaching assistant for chemistry laboratory courses. Having discovered a passion for teaching, Keying joined the Chemistry Department at Boston University as a Postdoctoral Associate Lecturer, where she taught General Chemistry I and II (CH101/CH102) for two years. Outside of the classroom, Keying worked with Prof. Sean Elliott, researching the electrochemistry of redox active metalloenzymes. Keying enjoys sharing her enthusiasm for chemistry with her students, as she sees chemistry as a central science that can explain and provide solutions for many of the world’s most pressing scientific, technological, and environmental problems.

David Demeritt, Professor in Earth & Environment, is a long-time Red Sox fan excited to come to Boston to work in E&E. His research and teaching interests are wide-ranging and span the natural and social sciences. Alongside his continued focus on climate change and flood risk, he will also continue hisinvolvement in funded research on wildfires, through the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires Environment & Society, as well as another project focused on managing the risks of antimicrobial resistance from uncontrolled usage of veterinary medicines in Argentina.

Joseph Derosa, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, graduated magna cum laude from the City College of New York (CCNY) in 2015, where he carried out research with Prof. Mark R. Biscoe on stereospecific palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. Eager to fuel his passion for transition metal catalysis, he pursued his graduate studies at Scripps Research as one of Prof. Keary M. Engle’s first graduate students. His thesis work consisted of the exploration of nickel-catalyzed 1,2-difunctionalization reactions with alkene starting materials, which marked some of the earliest reports of directed, non-conjugated alkene difunctionalization with nickel catalysts. After the completion of his graduate work, he served a three-year appointment as an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Jonas C. Peters at Caltech, where he conducted research in the realm of electrocatalysis, specifically involving proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) mediators for inorganic and organic applications. His research interests exist at the interface of organic synthesis, organometallic chemistry, and electrochemical methods.

Chuanfei Dong, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, joined the Astronomy Department on 1 January 2023. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and graduate degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and a NASA Jack Eddy Postdoctoral Fellow and Staff Research Physicist at Princeton University. He is a leader in the field of solar wind interaction with planets, where he is involved in the BepiColombo, MAVEN, Parker Solar Probe, and Solar Orbiter spacecraft missions. He has already established a dynamic research group at Boston University.

Qimin Liu, Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, earned his PhD from Vanderbilt University in psychological sciences with specializations in clinical science and quantitative methods. Before that, he received a Master’s degree in applied and computational mathematics and statistics from the University of Notre Dame and Bachelor’s degrees in philosophy, psychology, and mathematics from the University of Washington. His research centers on understanding emotional disturbances that can lead to severe outcomes such as suicide, with a specific emphasis on marginalized adults. Additionally, he has developed novel statistical methods and software to help better measure and quantify psychopathology.

Minjung Son, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she investigated the photophysics of energy transport in organic and photonic nanomaterials using ultrafast spectroscopy and microscopy. She earned her PhD in 2020 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Robert T. Haslam Presidential Fellow. Her contributions were recognized with the 2021 Justin Jankunas Dissertation Award in Chemical Physics from the American Physical Society and the 2022 PHYS Young Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society. Minjung’s research at BU will encompass ultrafast optical spectroscopy and microscopy, materials science, photonics, and biophysics, where she will develop new classes of tailored nanomaterials and map the spatiotemporal photophysics that underlie their function.

Lynette Strickland, Assistant Professor of Biology, graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020 with a PhD concentration in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. Her work broadly sits at the intersection of ecological and evolutionary genomics, with a focus on tropical insect communities. After the completion of her graduate work, she served a three-year appointment as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Her graduate and postdoctoral work has primarily taken place in Panama with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, investigating the benefits and maintenance of naturally occurring adaptive color variation in Neotropical tortoise beetles, as well as the underlying genomic mechanisms that contribute to this adaptive variation. Lynette is also passionate about justice, equity, and inclusion in EEB fields and incorporates this lens into her work as a tropical ecologist and evolutionary biologist.

Nancy Sullivan, Professor of Biology, is the new director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) at Boston University. She will also serve as the inaugural holder of an Edward Avedisian Professorship and as a professor of Microbiology in the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

Paul A. Trunfio, Lecturer in Physics, is a Senior Research Scientist and member of the Complex Systems Collaborative in the Department of Physics, and fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University. Trunfio made his professional focus the integration of interdisciplinary science research with K-20+ STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) education, leading efforts to bridge the two by developing computer-based tools, curricula, training programs and mentoring partnerships. He co-led some of the early efforts to develop and study effectiveness of technology-enriched science education in the early 1990s, when computational tools were practically unheard of in schools.

Jacob Brown, Assistant Professor of Political Science, joined the Department and Boston University in 2023, after receiving his PhD in Political Science at Harvard University. His primary research focuses on where people live, and how where they live influences their politics. His current projects examine the causes and consequences of political segregation in the United States, the influence of where you grow up on future political behavior, and new methods for measuring political geography. Prof. Brown teaches courses in American Politics and Political Methodology.

Jilene A. C. Chua, Assistant Professor of History, is a cultural historian of Asian/American history. She was born in Manila (the capital city of the Philippines) and mostly grew up in Richland, Washington. Her research on twentieth-century Philippines intersects US empire, Chinese migration, Southeast Asia, and comparative racialization. Her current project uses legal sources, oral histories, and community archives to access stories of Chinese migrants living under US colonial rule in the Philippines. She teaches courses related to Asian/American history, US empire, the Philippines, and comparative racial regimes. 

Elizabeth F. Cohen, Maxwell Professor of United States Citizenship in Political Science, is associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science. She received a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Yale University. She has been a visiting scholar at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, Russell Sage Foundation and the Wagner School of Public Service, New York University. Cohen is the author of four books, and her scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in venues such as Ethics in International Affairs, Citizenship Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, Ethics, and the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy. In addition to her scholarly writing, Cohen has also published op-eds in newspapers such as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico and El Pais.

Andreana (Andree) Cunningham, Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Anthropology & African American Studies, is an interdisciplinary anthropologist whose research integrates bioarchaeological and archival evidence to examine the biosocial effects of the slave trade. She is specifically interested in the patterns of variation that existed for enslaved people in regions that are not traditionally placed in dialogue (currently the Caribbean, South Atlantic Ocean, and Indian Ocean). Her research also examines the ways that these sites of the slave trade can be used to reimagine theory and practice around heritage preservation and community engagement. Andree has conducted fieldwork centered around non-invasive osteology, archival analysis, and community-based efforts in the U.S., St. Helena, and South Africa.

Ben Finkel, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, is a biological anthropologist and primatologist with a focus on the evolution of senescence and life-history theory. His dissertation investigated the functional challenges of aging for wild chimpanzees at Ngogo in Uganda, where he has conducted field research since 2016. His research interests also include foraging behavior, dental wear, food mechanical properties, the social function of testosterone, and conservation psychology with a focus on media portrayal of primates. He is also keenly interested in the analysis and display of quantitative information and works extensively in R.

 Rob Grace, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, is interested in the evolution and application of international laws and norms during armed conflicts, international human rights fact-finding, and the politics of humanitarian action, with a particular focus on humanitarian negotiation and humanitarian-military relations. Dr. Grace has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on the politics of international law and international humanitarian response. Previously, Dr. Grace was a USIP-Minerva Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, as well as a Graduate Research Fellow and a Summer Fellow at the Harvard Program on Negotiation. He has also led or co-led policy-oriented research projects on humanitarian-military relations at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. He holds a PhD in political science from Brown University, an MA in politics from New York University and a BA from Vassar College.

Paul Gutierrez, Assistant Professor of Political Science, was previously a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Berkeley, School of Law. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Brown University, an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A. from the College of William & Mary. His research explores the intersections of political theory, political economy, and law, particularly within the historical context of the settler colonial U.S. He is working on two projects. The first uncovers and traces the settler colonial and revolutionary origins of the modern corporation in America. The second reevaluates the political-economic legacies of Jeffersonian thought relative to contemporary challenges with the climate, inequality, race, and settler colonialism.

Saleena Saleem, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, has interests at the intersection of the sociology and politics of race and ethnicity, religion, and gender, with a regional emphasis on Asia. Among other research projects, her current research examines the building of social trust between secular and religious women’s advocacy groups in the context of anti-pluralism stoked by polarizing culture wars. She is also presently co-editing a book volume on political sectarianism and social group divisions, with comparative case studies from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Saleena teaches Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Religion, and Masculinities.

Laura Anne Thompson, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, is a cultural anthropologist focusing on Islam in North Africa. Her research sits at the intersection of the study of emotion, language, and the law.  She is especially interested in how affective arguments can support claim-making and in how ethnography creatively attempts to capture the field.  She is also interested in comedy, curses, hate speech, and offense. She is currently preparing her dissertation for publication and has previously published on contemporary and historical blasphemy cases in Tunisia.

Samuel VanSant Stoddard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, has previously served on the faculty at institutions across Massachusetts including College of the Holy Cross, Clark University, Smith College, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  He spent his early career as a teacher and mock trial coach at the Secondary School for Law, a public high school in Brooklyn, and as a fellow with the Teachers’ Network Leadership Institute, where he conducted research and advocacy on education policy.  He earned his Master’s in Teaching from Pace University in 2005 and received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2018.  Stoddard’s research employs qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand how Americans form political identities, participate in politics, and relate to public officials and institutions. His forthcoming journal articles examine issue representation in congressional social media communications and the display of noncampaign yard signs as political participation.

Amber Vayo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, holds a PhD in political science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Vayo’s first academic love is constitutional law, but in subsequent years she has developed a keen interest in the relationship between law and political violence. Her M.S. in Justice, Law, and Society from American University forms the basis for her philosophical inquiries into law’s role in political violence and illiberal regimes. In the next few years she hopes to train graduate and undergraduate researchers from underrepresented communities to replicate her studies on childbirth experiences creating pathways for underrepresented scholars to take the lead on socio-legal work in their own communities while adding much needed diversity to our understanding of perinatal and maternal health experiences.

Alexander de la Paz, Assistant Professor of International Security, taught at the City University of New York and Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. His research interests span the political and moral psychology of war, international law, and international ethics. His current research agenda concerns the problem of human shields in war.

Aimee Genell, Assistant Professor of International History, focuses on the history of the late Ottoman Empire and its entanglements with Europe in the area of international law and international relations. Genell’s book, Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System in the Middle East (under contract, Columbia University Press), traces the Ottoman roots of the post-imperial political order through an analysis of the inter-imperial contest over autonomous Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a grant from the American Research Institute in Turkey, she started a new research project on the history of the Allied military occupation of Ottoman lands after the First World War (1918-1923). The project reexamines this critical period of state unmaking by focusing on how Ottoman subjects imagined and fought for different futures alongside the relentless fragmentation of space over the years of occupation. 

Tsitsi Musasike, Professor of Global Development Policy, teaches courses on ‘Financing Development in Africa’ and ‘Climate Change & Development.’ At the GDP Center, she works on South-South cooperation, the role of development finance institutions in scaling up renewable energy in the Southern African Development Community region and addressing project development challenges. Her research interests include development financing, infrastructure project development and financing, climate change and development, financial inclusion and the empowerment of youths and women. She has over 20 years of cross-functional financial management and infrastructure financing experience in the private sector, private equity, consultancy, investment banking and development finance environments.

Solomon Owusu, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy, is a Core Faculty Member of the Global China Initiative and the Global Economic Governance Initiative at the Global Development Policy Center. He has worked with the World Bank, UNIDO, and Ghana Statistical Service and worked on projects for the European Commission and Asian Development Bank. He holds a PhD in Economics from Maastricht University/UNU-MERIT in the Netherlands. His research interest focuses broadly on development economics in areas such as the economics and measurement of structural transformation, jobs and inclusive growth, global value chains, and trade. He also has a strong interest in research areas at the intersection of technology adoption, climate change, and productivity in developing countries with a particular focus on countries in Africa.

Sanne Veruschuren, Assistant Professor of International Security, is interested in the intersection of international relations, the domestic determinants of security policy, and the role of ideas, norms, and institutions in national security decision-making. She focuses on how states fight war, examining why they construct novel weapon technologies, how they envision fielding such technologies, and why they choose to abandon certain technologies and practices. Professor Verschuren is in the process of finalizing her first book manuscript, titled Imagining the Unimaginable: War, Weapons, and Procurement Politics. This book is based on her dissertation, which received APSA’s 2022 Kenneth N. Waltz Outstanding Dissertation Award. 

Amy Bennett-Zendzian, Lecturer in Writing Program, has been an instructor and writing consultant at colleges in the Boston area since 2004. In addition to writing pedagogy, her main areas of interest as writer, reader, and researcher are fairy tales, speculative fiction, and young adult literature. 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 as well as a voice actor, director, and playwright whose works have been produced around the Boston area.

Michele Calandra, Lecture in Writing Program, focuses on teaching English-language academic skills to international students from all over the world. In addition to teaching, she worked as an ELL specialist in the Writing Center and developed training materials for new tutors. She also regularly engages in peer review for TESOL Journal. She has a master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a bachelor’s degree in Communication Arts (with a concentration in science writing) from Gordon College. In addition to teaching writing, Michele is also passionate about cooking, reading, and gardening.

Max White, Lecturer in Writing Program, enjoys getting to know students and encouraging intellectual and personal growth. His doctoral research considered intersections of early American economic and literary history. In his spare time, Max enjoys long distance running, baseball, football, and the music of Bruce Springsteen.