Past Faculty Bio (2020)

Ziad Abu-Rish

School of Foreign Service

Ziad Abu-Rish is a Fellow in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) in the School of Foreign Service. He is an historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa. He is Co-Director of the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts, and Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights, at Bard College. He was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Program at Ohio University. Abu-Rish’s research interests center on the intersections between state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in mid-twentieth-century Levant. He holds a PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in History from Whitman College. Abu-Rish currently serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, as well as Co-Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) and the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the Beirut-based Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS).

Rodrigo Adem

Arabic & Islamic Studies

Rodrigo Adem is an assistant professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies (AIS). As an intellectual historian of the premodern Middle East, his research encompasses early Islamic thought and is dedicated to an intimate engagement with the textual sources of “classical Islam.” He is working on book that will analyze the intellectual and social history processes underlying the broader development of Islamic thought from the 8th to the 13th century. As a social historian, Rodrigo also is interested in the urban development of medieval Syrian cities (Damascus in particular) to understand their distinctive features as archives of literary and material culture, sites for the formation of regional, ethnic, and religious identities, and centers for standardization of knowledge production and dissemination of norms and tastes. He received his MA and Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at The University of Chicago.

Mike Amezcua

History

Mike Amezcua is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. He teaches, researches, and writes about the Latinx past in the United States and the Americas. Mike is currently at work on a book about Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and the politics and struggle over white flight neighborhoods in postwar Chicago (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2021, as part of the series, Historical Studies of Urban America). His writing has appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Social History, The Sixties, as well other scholarly and public venues. Through his spatial humanities lab initiative, Raza Landscapes (www.razalandscapes.com), Mike is working on several archival recovery projects with under-archived communities to document and preserve Latinx metropolitan histories through community-based archiving, oral history, and platform-building for the production and dissemination of historical knowledge. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.

Andrea Headley

McCourt School of Public Policy

Andrea M. Headley is an Assistant Professor interested in public management, racial equity, and criminal justice policy. Her research focuses on policing to understand how organizational, managerial, and individual level factors affect service delivery and outcomes, with a keen focus on inequities and disparities. Specific examples of her past work include improving police-community relations in communities of color, assessing the effect of race during use of force encounters, understanding national police reform commissions, and exploring the gendered norms and cultures in policing.  She previously was an Assistant Professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Public Affairs and MS in Criminal Justice from Florida International University. 

John Bansemer

School of Foreign Service

John Bansemer is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in the School of Foreign Service.In addition to his work at CSET, he is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Prior to joining CSET, John served in a variety of cyber, space and intelligence positions within the U.S. Air Force before retiring as a Lieutenant General. His last role was serving as the Assistant Director for National Intelligence, Partner Engagement, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Prior to that assignment, he served as the Deputy Chief, Central Security Service at the National Security Agency. He also held a variety of staff positions including on the Air Staff and the National Security Council staff. His joint experience includes serving as the director of intelligence at European Command. John holds a master’s degree in computer science from James Madison University and was a national defense fellow at Harvard University. He received his B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics from Roanoke College.

Vera Barton-Maxwell

School of Nursing and Health Studies

Vera Barton-Maxwellis an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences Advanced Nursing Practice Academic Department on the NHE Educator track.

Mario Ramirez Basora

McDonough School of Business

Mario Ramirez is a Professor of the Practice at the McDonough School of Business and the Walsh School of Foreign Service, as well as the Managing Director of the BS in Business and Global Affairs program (jointly offered by these two schools). Prior to joining Georgetown, he worked as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Mario was a Director and a transfer pricing economist focused on the economic analysis of global value chains, particularly the pricing of intercompany transactions and the valuation of intangible property, and assisted clients with tax controversy matters. He also completed a two-year secondment in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). Mario worked as a supply chain engineer in the Dominican Republic for multinational corporations prior to joining PwC. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Cornell University. 

Nicholas Bell

Mortara Center for International Studies, School of Foreign Service

Nicholas J. Bell is a Pre-doctoral Fellow with the Global Political Economy Project at the Mortara Center for International Studies in the School of Foreign Service. His research interests are in public opinion and international trade. Nicky’s dissertation explores the barriers to worker participation in the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program and the consequences for trade liberalization in the United States. He has field qualifications in international relations and methodology (qualitative and quantitative), and has published on the sociology of the international relations. Previously, Nicky was a Project Manager with the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project at William & Mary. He received his M.A. in European Studies from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Nicky received a Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students.

Nejm Benessaiah

Anthropology

Nejm Benessaiah is an environmental anthropologist, whose research interests include water governance, climate change, infrastructures, agroecology, environmental justice, oases, the Sahara, the Middle East and North Africa, and Algeria. He is currently investigating the potential for upscaling ways to commonly govern important goods for humankind, such as water, and digital data security. His most recent work investigates the role of voluntary associations in contemporary water management in North Africa, conceptualizing them as “micro-movements” in order to contrast how they may be key to managing (new) change, as opposed to customary governance regimes which are configured to maintain the status quo. He has published in Ethnobiology Letters and Quaternary International, and has book chapters in Law and Property in Algeria: Anthropological Perspectives, and African Anthropologies in the Post-colony (HSRC Press). He has also written for Truthout and the Daily Maverick. 

Shauna Bennett

Biology

Shauna Bennett is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Biology. Her research career has focused on the molecular entry mechanisms of DNA virus infections. She is interested in the ways that people of all stages of life think about and learn science. Shauna previously worked as a community college professor and science writer. Her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology is from the University of Michigan.  

Chantal Berman

Government

Chantal Berman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. Her research interests include social movements and mobilization; the political economy of development; democratization; repression and political violence; Middle East politics; survey methods; and qualitative and field methods. Chantel is working on a book entitled Protest, Social Policy, and Political Regimes in the Middle East. Her work has been published in Mediterranean Politics, Middle East Law and Governance, and Refuge. She received her Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.

Esther Braselmann

Chemistry

Esther Braselmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. The overarching theme of her research involves the adaptation of cross-disciplinary approaches for insights into biochemical processes in live cells. Her doctoral work focused on understanding how proteins fold in the complex cellular environment, using a bacterial virulence protein as a model. In her postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado, Boulder she spearheaded the development of a new platform called Riboglow. This platform uses fluorescence microscopy to illuminate cellular processes on the single cell and single molecule level for insights into the underlying biology. This is particularly useful for understanding intracellular bacterial infections, such as infections with the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes. Esther is from Germany originally. Her Ph.D. in Biochemistry is from the University of Notre Dame. 

Annalisa Butticci

Theology & Religious Studies

Annalisa Butticci is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies. Her research interests include the anthropology and sociology of religion, historical anthropology, World Christianities, African religions, and African diasporas. Her book African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2016) received honorable mention by the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize committee for its contribution to the anthropological study of religion. Annalisa has published in academic journals and edited volumes, edited a photographic catalogue “Na God. Aesthetics of African Charismatic Power,” curated several photographic and multimedia exhibitions, and co-directed the film/documentary “Enlarging the Kingdom. African Pentecostals in Italy.”  She previously was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Annalisa received her Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Milan, Italy.

Taylor Campbell

Research Fellow at Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation

Taylor Campbell is a Fellow-in-Residence and the Deputy Director of the Digital Service Collective at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation

She has served as Deputy Director of Tech and Innovation for both the Office of Presidential Correspondence in the Obama White House and the City of Los Angeles. Taylor is an advocate for historically underrepresented people in their areas of expertise and has worked with grassroots organizations, entrepreneurs, government leaders, and philanthropies nationwide. Fellow-in-Residence and the Deputy Director of the Digital Service Collective at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation

Dail Chapman

Biology

Dail Chapman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Biology. She studies the biophysics of molecular motor, the proteins within our cells that move cargo from one part of a cell to another. Dail studied neurons in an animal model, C. elegans. This research is very clinically relevant since many human neurodegenerative diseases result from defects in neuronal structure, and could lead to the development of successful therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Dail also is passionate about teaching and engaged learning. She has received two teaching excellence awards at the University of California, Irvine, where she completed her Ph.D.

Matthew Daniels

School of Foreign Service

Matthew Daniels is a Senior Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). In addition to his work at the Center, he is a senior expert in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and an affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His work focuses on U.S. space programs and artificial intelligence. Previously, Dr. Daniels was the Technical Director for Artificial Intelligence in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering. In this role he managed investments for future U.S. capabilities, advised the DoD CTO on technology strategy and convened bilateral science and defense discussions with U.S. allies. He has also served as Advisor to the Director of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, focusing on space and AI across the U.S., and a member of the strategy and plans team for the NASA Administrator, focusing on development of Cislunar space. Previously, he was a research engineer at NASA, with work in stochastic control, spacecraft design and new science missions.

Sudipta Dashomapatra

McDonough School of Business

Sudipta Dasmohapatra is a Professor of Practice and the Academic Director of the new Master of Science in Business Analytics program. Her interests span all areas of statistics and data science, particularly unsupervised modeling techniques and predictive modeling. She previously was the Director of the Masters in Statistical Science Program in the Department of Statistical Science and an adjunct faculty member in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Sudipta also worked as an associate professor of Marketing Analytics at the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University. Currently she serves as an Associate Director for the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, an NSF funded Math Institute based in Research Triangle Park, NC. Her prior experience also includes marketing research consulting as a data scientist. Sudipta received her Ph.D. in marketing from The Pennsylvania State University. 

Manoli Dayanand

McCourt School of Public Policy

Manoli Dayanand is a Visiting Associate Professor. His research interests include labor market issues such as the long term impact of job search and training, the factors affecting retirement decisions, and policy effects on labor market decisions. Day’s work has been published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and NYU Tax Law Review. He previously taught at the University of Texas-Austin and was a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  His Ph.D. in Economics is from the University of California-Berkeley.   

Irina Denischenko

Slavic Languages, Women and Gender StudiesIrina Denischenko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Her work focuses on 20th-century literature, art, critical theory, and women’s history in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia, Czechia, and Hungary.  Irina has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of cognition and Czech avant-garde photopoetry, as well as a number of book reviews and translations. She is currently completing her book manuscript on Vladimir Mayakovsky and the politics of aesthetic form, which examines the lyric’s capacity for democratic representation alongside theories of the novel and feminist-posthumanist thought. Irina also is currently co-editing a collection of critical articles on Dada in Central and Eastern Europe and a volume of new Bakhtin translations. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Xiang Ding

School of Foreign Service

Xiang is an incoming assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service. His research interests lie at the intersection of international trade, technology, and policy. He received a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University in 2020 and a BA from Princeton University in 2013. His interests in all things international is inspired by his experiences growing up in Finland, Germany, Singapore, and Hong Kong. 

Linda Dunn

School of Continuing Studies

Linda Dunn is faculty director and assistant professor of the practice for the Master’s in Supply Chain Management at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies. Dunn’s focus area is on developing agile Supply Chains that are highly interconnected with partners and integrated within an organization. 

Before joining Georgetown University SCS, Dunn served as VP Supply Chain & Quality Assurance for HMSHost, a global leader in creating dining for travel venues.  In her role at HMSHost, she oversaw North American supply chain and quality assurance functions including Procurement, Distribution, Category Management, Supplier and Operations Food Safety, and Supplier Relationship Management.  Other prior experiences at HMSHost spanned the areas of Financial Planning & Analysis, Business Process Analysis and Revenue Optimization.  Dunn has played a strong role in sustainability efforts and previously served on the inaugural National Restaurant Association’s Conserve Sustainability Advisory Council.  Prior tenures before HMSHost included roles in the telecommunications and banking sectors.  

Dunn earned her MBA from the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland and obtained her BBA from James Madison University graduating summa cum laude with a double major in Finance and English.

La Quita Frederick

School of Continuing Studies

In January 2020, Dr. LaQuita Frederick joined Georgetown University as faculty director and associate professor of the practice for the Sport Industry Management (SIM), Master of Professional Studies (MPS) program. Prior to joining Georgetown, she served as director of sport management and assistant professor in the Frank J. Guarini School of Business at Saint Peter’s University and as a member of the adjunct faculty at St. John’s University Lesley H. and William L. Collins College of Professional Studies for the Sport Management MPS program. In addition, she previously worked as a capstone advisor with Georgetown’s SIM program.

For well over a decade, she worked in the sports industry with roles at The Ohio State University Department of Athletics, NBA Orlando Magic, MLB Atlanta Braves, and North Carolina State University Department of Athletics, among others. Many notable career highlights included, but are not limited to: first ever WNBA Pre-Draft Camp, various NBA Draft and Playoff events, several NCAA playoff tournaments including men’s and women’s soccer as well as men’s and women’s college basketball as well as the inaugural Division 1A Athletic Director’s Association (now LEAD1) Sportsmanship Award for the Get “WITH” the Pack initiative. Along those lines, Dr. Frederick is most proud to have been part of the collaborative effort that launched the inaugural “Hoops for Hope” women’s basketball game in honor of Naismith Hall of Fame Coach Kay Yow, raising significant awareness and funding for breast cancer research.

Dr. Frederick earned an Ed.D. in sport management from the United States Sports Academy, a M.A. in sport management from The Ohio State University, and a B.A. in communication and English from North Carolina State University.

Diana Gehlhaus Carew

School of Foreign Service

Diana Gehlhaus (Carew) is a Research Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in the School of Foreign Service. Diana’s research focuses on the intersection of tech and talent, including domestic talent pipelines in Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technologies; workforce development and education policy; youth career and educational decision making; trends in employer hiring, recruiting, and retention; military and federal civilian talent management; and technology and telecommunications policy. Prior to her doctoral fellowship at the RAND Corporation she was an economist and director of the Young American Prosperity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute; a policy analyst at the U.S. Export-Import Bank; and an Economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She has an M.A. in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Alexander Golovnev

Computer Science

Aleksandr Golovnev is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests lie broadly in computational complexity, algorithms, learning theory, cryptography, and pseudorandomness, with a focus on proving lower bounds for various computational models. Aleksandr received his Ph.D. from New York University. He then was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and a Research Scientist at Yahoo Research, and a Rabin postdoc at Harvard University. Aleksandr also was one of the creators of Coursera’s five course specialization on discrete math.  

Dayo Gore

African American Studies

Dayo Gore is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies. Her research interests include Black Women’s Intellectual History; U.S. Political and Cultural Activism; African Diasporic Politics; and Women, Gender and Sexuality studies. She wrote Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (2011), and co-edited Want to Start A Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (2009). Dayo’s current focus is African American women’s transnational travels and activism in the long Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, forthcoming book). She previously served as the Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department and Founding Director of the Black Studies Project, a research center, and was a core faculty member in the Critical Gender Studies Program, at the University of California-San Diego. Dayo received her Ph.D. in History from New York University.

Bradley Gorski

Slavic Languages

Bradley A. Gorski is assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages. His research focuses on post-Soviet Russia, specifically, the effects of capitalist markets and international circulation on contemporary Russian literature and culture. He is currently finishing a manuscript tentatively titled Cultural Capitalism: Literature and Success after Socialism. Bradley’s previous publications, including invited articles for Russian Literature and two volumes of edited or co-edited work, have touched on topics such as late-Soviet subcultures, Russian neo-medievalism, and Vladimir Sharov’s poetics of truth. His Ph.D. in Russian Literature is from Columbia University.

Rahul Gupta

McDonough School of Business

Rahul Gupta is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy. His research seeks to understand the impact of technological change and industry dynamics on the personnel and spatial organization of firms. He focuses on how firms innovate and grow, and why we see disparities in the compensation of workers and types of firms across cities in the United States. Rahul is a Special Sworn Status researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau and uses in his research large restricted-use administrative data sets on all firms and workers in the United States. Prior to his doctoral studies he was a Research Associate at Harvard Business School. He received his Ph.D. from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and a M.A. in Economics from Boston University.

Jay Hammond

Performing Arts

Jay Hammond is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Recording Arts in the Department of Performing Arts. He is a musician, audio producer and cultural anthropologist. His publications have appeared on Bloomsbury Academic, and his recording credits include New Amsterdam Records, Galtta Media, and Sleepy Cat Records. Jay holds a Ph.D. from Duke University where he conducted ethnographic research on the gentrification of New Orleans and New York in relation to the work of jazz musicians. He also holds an M.A. from Columbia University in Anthropology, and a B.M. from Berklee College of Music, where he studied audio engineering, guitar, and jazz composition.

Sharda Harsh

McCourt School of Public Policy

Harsh is a Fellow in the McCourt School of Public Policy. He serves as the Media Editor for the Georgetown Public Policy Review. Prior to McCourt, he worked for 5 years as an assistant manager for an analytics consulting firm with Fortune 500 companies. After an internship for a digital agriculture firm in Kenya for the summer, he realized how data science can be applied and used to make better informed decisions and bring about a positive social impact. Using this skill, he wishes to help fight the cause of climate change in making policies which propel us in the direction of sustainability. He has a M.S .in Data Science for Public Policy from Georgetown University.

Joseph Hartman

Government

Joseph Hartman teaches constitutional law, American government and political theory in the Department of Government, where he also serves as the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies. Prior to his time in the academy, he spent more than a decade as a litigation attorney in private practice with a large law firm in Washington, D.C. He earned his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University and also holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Justin Haynes

Classics

Justin Haynes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics. His research interests include Latin literature of all periods, ancient & medieval literary criticism, and Latin textual criticism & paleography. His primary interest is the history of medieval Latin poetry and its relationship to the classical Latin poetry from which it drew inspiration. Justin’s Ph.D. dissertation analyzed the differences (and similarities) between ancient, medieval, and modern interpretations of the Aeneid by showing how twelfth-century Latin epicists read Virgil through the lens of ancient and medieval commentary. He recently completed a monograph entitled The Medieval Classic: Twelfth-Century Epic and the Virgilian Commentary Tradition (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). His current book projects include a monograph on the influence of twelfth-century Latin epic on Petrarch’s Africa and several collaborative translation and editing projects.  Justin received his Ph.D. from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

Wyatt Hoffman

School of Foreign Service

Wyatt Hoffman is a Research Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in the School of Foreign Service where he works on the CyberAI Project. Previously, he was a senior research analyst with the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where his work focused on cyber strategy, the role of the private sector in cybersecurity, and the intersection of nuclear weapons and cybersecurity. Wyatt holds an M.A. in War Studies from King’s College London, where he was a Rotary Global Grant Scholar in Peace and Conflict Prevention and Resolution.

Megan Houston

Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) in the Health Policy Institute, McCourt School of Public Policy

Megan Houston is a Research Fellow at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) in the Health Policy Institute in the McCourt School of Public Policy. Before joining CHIR, she worked as a research analyst in the Massachusetts state legislature’s Joint Committee on Health Care Financing where she conducted policy research, drafted and analyzed legislation, and worked on bills related to community hospital financing and the cost of prescription drugs. Before graduate school Megan served as a health insurance navigator in Philadelphia where she helped members of the community enroll in plans on the marketplace and Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program. She earned her Master of Public Health degree from Boston University’s School of Public Health, with a certificate in Health Policy and Law.  

Karen Huang

McCourt School of Public Policy

Karen Huang is an Assistant Professor of Ethics and Public Policy. Drawing from philosophy, psychology, and science & technology studies (STS), she uses empirical methods to investigate ethics and politics, guided by normative implications for public policy. Her work examines the individual and interpersonal processes underlying moral decision-making, alongside the institutional structures that enable and constrain those decisions. Her research has been published in academic journals such as the Artificial Intelligence Journaland Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and has been covered in media outlets such as The New York Times. Karen received her Ph.D. and M.A. at Harvard University. She has held fellowships at the Program for Science, Technology & Society (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard), and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School).

Tim Hwang

School of Foreign Service

Tim Hwang is a Research Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in the School of Foreign Service. His current research focuses on the geopolitical aspects of computational power and machine learning hardware, and the future of media manipulation and online information warfare.  He is the former Director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative, a philanthropic project working to ensure that machine learning and autonomous technologies are researched, developed, and deployed in the public interest. Previously, he was at Google, where he was the company’s global public policy lead on artificial intelligence, leading outreach to government and civil society on issues surrounding the social impact of the technology. He holds a J.D. from Berkeley Law School.

Philip Ivanhoe

East Asian Languages and Cultures

Philip J. Ivanhoe is a Professor, the Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC), and an Affiliate Faculty member in the Department of Theology. He specializes in the history of East Asian philosophy and religion and its potential for contemporary ethics, with particular attention to Confuciansism and Neo-Confucianism. The most recent of his seven books is Three Streams: Confucian Reflections on Learning and the Moral Heart-Mind in China, Korea, and Japan (Oxford, 2016). Philip has contributed to and co-edited a collection of essays exploring the on-going dialogue between Confucianism and Catholicism. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture. Prior to joining the Georgetown Faculty Philip was a Visiting Distinguished Chair Professor of Philosophy in the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea.  He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Religious Studies.

Waldo Jacquith

Research Fellow at Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation

Waldo Jaquith is a technologist with extensive experience in the government, non-profit, and for-profit sectors.

Until recently, he worked for 18F, developing and promoting best practices for government procurement of custom software, particularly for state governments. Previously, Jaquith ran U.S. Open Data, and worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama. He’s had fellowships from both the Knight News Challenge and the Shuttleworth Foundation. He lives near Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and children.

Dawson Kaaua

McDonough School of Business

Dawson Kaaua is an Assistant Professor in the Operations and Information Management. His research focuses on service operations in the public and private sectors. He uses both experimental and quasi-experimental methods. Dawson also has industry experience in retail, management consulting, institutional investment, and education. He received a MBA, MA in Statistics, and Ph.D. in Operations and information Management from The Wharton School. Dawson was born and raised in Hawaii and enjoys cooking and traveling with his wife Christine, who is also from Hawaii. He also likes to take his dog Bella, a Japanese Chin, on walks.

Matthew Kavanaugh

School of Nursing & Health Studies

Matthew M. Kavanagh, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Global Health, Visiting Professor of Law, and Director of the Global Health Policy & Politics Initiative at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law(Georgetown Law School). He focuses on the political economy of health policy in low- and middle-income countries and the political impact of human and constitutional rights on population health. Matthew is as a member of the UNAIDS Scientific & Technical Advisory Committee.  He has published in leading journals such The Lancet, Foreign Policy, and Health & Human Rights, and  been interviewed on the politics of global health by the news media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Science. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, a certificate in health law from Penn’s law school, and Masters in communities and public policy from Harvard University.

Suh Yeon Kim

McDonough School of Business

Suh Yeon Kim is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at McDonough School of Business. She is an empirical marketing researcher who is interested in customer management (e.g., product customization and customer journey analytics) and branding (e.g., human brands, star power, private labels, and brand equity dynamics). Suh Yeon uses multiple empirical strategies such as conducting field experiments, applying quasi-experimental approaches, and combining machine learning techniques to causal identification strategies. She obtained a Ph.D. degree in Marketing from Emory University and a Master’s degree in Statistics from Columbia University. She also has worked as a practitioner at LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton in New York.

Louise Laage

Economics

Louise Laage is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. Her research interest is Econometrics (i.e., statistics for economics). She completed a one-year postdoctoral research position at the Toulouse School of Economics in France before coming to Georgetown. Her Ph.D. in Economics was earned at Yale University.

Christopher Lawrence

School of Foreign Service

Christopher Lawrence studies the history of U.S. engagement with North Korea and Iran. He obtained his PhD in nuclear science and Engineering at University of Michigan, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Siyao Li

School of Foreign Service

Siyao Li is a pre-doctoral at the Global Political Economy Project (GPEP) at Georgetown’s Mortara Center for International Studies She is a fellow Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on international political economy and business-government relations. Her dissertation investigates why and how foreign direct investment into weak institutional environments use host government institutions for property protection.

Claire Yi-Chun Liang

McDonough School of Business

Claire Liang will be joining the Finance Area in the McDonough School of Business as Teaching Associate Professor. Previously she taught at University of Maine and Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and worked in investment banking in New York and Asia with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Claire holds a BS in physics from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering and an MBA from Cornell University, and most recently a PhD in Finance from University of Alberta in Canada. She loves cats and kids, and enjoys meeting new people, getting together with family and friends, and learning about how people form opinions and make decisions.

Andrew Lohn

Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), School of Foreign Service

Andrew (Drew) Lohn is a Senior Fellow in the CyberAI Project in the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in the School of Foreign Service. His research focuses on the vulnerabilities in artificial intelligence or machine learning, and spans the technical aspects of the technology to strategic issues these vulnerabilities raise. He has published and taught in public policy, materials science, optics, and computer science. Drew’s work has been published in technology and policy outlets, including TechCrunch, MIT Technology Review, Foreign Policy, BBC, and Politico. His prior experience includes developing nanotechnologies for energy generation and emerging computer memory devices, and researching technology policy issues such as cyberwarfare on military systems or commercial drone delivery systems, at the RAND Corporation. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of California- Santa Cruz.

Mireya Loza

History

Mireya Loza is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History. Her areas of research include Latinx History, Public History, Labor History, and Food Studies. Her book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (UNC Press), examines the Bracero Program and how guest workers negotiated the intricacies of indigeneity, intimacy, and transnational organizing. This book won the 2017 Theodore Saloutos Book Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. She is currently researching her second book tentatively titled The Strangeness and Bitterness of Plenty: Making Food and Seeing Race in the Agricultural West, 1942-1965. Mireya previously taught Food Studies at New York University and was a curator at the National Museum of American History. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies and a M.A. in Public Humanities at Brown University.

Lucy Hadley

McCourt School of Public Policy

Lucy Hadley is a Research Fellow at the Edunomics Lab, a research center exclusively dedicated to exploring and modeling complex education finance decisions to inform education policy and practice. The end goal is the betterment of education, writ large. Previously, Lucy served as an Academic Assistant at a middle school in Fort Collins, Colorado, and a Campaigns and Communications Assistant at Sojourners in Washington, D.C. She has a Masters of Public Policy from Georgetown University.

Alva Maria

McCourt School of Public Policy

Maria Alva is an Assistant Research Professor in Massive Data Institute in the McCourt School of Public Policy. Her interests include health economics, program evaluation, and public health, particularly impact evaluations of healthcare interventions, and the cost-effectiveness of preventive decisions. Maria works primarily in the area of behavioral health and noncommunicable diseases. She also serves as Senior Social Scientist with The Lab @ DC (new window), where she works on housing, transportation, and mental health programs. Previously Maria worked as a Senior Research Associate at Impaq International and as a Health Economist in the Division of Public Health and Policy Research at RTI International. Her early research focused on economic analyses of the U.K. Prospective Diabetes Study to improve the management of people with type 2 diabetes. Maria earned a DPhil in Public Health and a MPhil in Economics at the University of Oxford.

Amani Morrison

English

Amani Morrison is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature & Culture in the Department of English. Her areas of expertise include 20th-century African American literature, race and space studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and the urban and digital humanities. Amani’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridians, African American Review, and The Common Reader.  She is writing the first cultural history of black Chicago’s mid-twentieth-century kitchenette apartments.  Amani was a 2019-20 CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Data Curation at the University of Delaware with the award-winning Colored Conventions Project, and a 2018-19 Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis in African and African American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Robert Nagel

Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS), School of Foreign Service

Robert Ulrich Nagel is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) in the School of Foreign Service where he will study UN peacekeeping effectiveness and the role of uniformed women in UN Peace Keeping Operations. His research explores the conflict dynamics that contribute to, and result from, sexual violence, and their consequences for international security, conflict resolution, and post-conflict stability. Robert’s research has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the Journal of Peace Research. He won the 2019 Cedric Smith Prize for the best peace and conflict studies paper by a UK or ROI-based Ph.D. student. Robert also is a member of the editorial team for International Peacekeeping and a member of the Consultative Group for the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict dataset. He earned his Ph.D. in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent, UK.

Kerry O’Grady

School of Continuing Studies

Kerry O’Grady is the faculty director for the Master’s in Public Relations and Corporate Communications program at Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies. She’s also an Associate Professor of the Practice. Prior to coming to Georgetown, she spent eight years at NYU’s School of Professional Studies, teaching in its M.S. in Public Relations and Corporate Communication program. With professional experience in public relations, integrated marketing and advertising, past  positions include Associate Director, Integrated Marketing for Women’s Health magazine, Senior Manager, Integrated Marketing at Parents, FamilyFun, and American Baby magazines (Meredith Corp.), Business Development Manager, La Voz and TV y Mas, and Advertising Executive, The Arizona Republic (Gannett, Inc.). She’s also held consulting roles at Saatchi & Saatchi, Viacom, and TalkSpace. She is a regularly sought-after media expert, as seen in The Washington Post, The New York Post, The Telegraph, and on ABC News’ digital podcast “Uncomfortable,” to name a few.  An award-winning practitioner,  she’s been honored with President’s Club winner (Gannett, Inc.), Marketing Campaign of the Year Finalist (Meredith Corp.), the Public Relations Society of America – NY top “35 Under 35” winner, and NYU’s “Outstanding Service” award. A passionate fitness enthusiast, she is also the creator of #realtalk fitness blog KerryLeeintheCity (Instagram @kerryleeinthecity). She is currently a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University, studying Leadership and Learning in Organizations.   

Sara Omar

Arabic & Islamic Studies

Sara Omar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arabic & Islamic Studies. Her research and teaching interests include Islamic intellectual history, the Qur’ān and its exegesis, Islamic Law, gender and sexuality, religious authority, and religion and violence. Sara’s work traces the legal and social genealogies governing words, concepts, and the practices that they encode. She explores the logic, contexts, and hierarchies that have shaped discourses of normativity over the first eight centuries of Islamic history, particularly as they relate to gendered patterns of power. Sara is working on a book on the genealogy of same-sex sexual practices in the formation of Muslim discourses as a means of understanding the legal, ethical, and social genealogies that have authorized various practices and beliefs as authentically Islamic, while also disqualifying and silencing others. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Near East Studies

Meital Orr

School of Foreign Service

Meital Orr is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Jewish Civilization and Hebrew Program Coordinator in the Center for Jewish Civilization (CJC)in the School of Foreign Service. Her expertise includes Hebrew Language, Comparative Literature, Israeli Literature and Film, and Palestinian Literature and Film. She provides outreach for CJC, nationally and internationally, through workshops, symposiums, and conferences and publications, and teaches courses on comparative Jewish literature and culture, and Hebrew language. Previously, Meital taught at Harvard University and Columbia University. Her recent publications focus on thematic intersections between Israeli and Palestinian literature and film. Meital’s current project explores the convergent experiences of Israeli and Palestinian women in 21st century literature and film. She received a Ph.D. in Modern Jewish Literature from Harvard University and a M.Phil. in Hebrew Literature from Columbia University.

Berquist Parrish

McCourt School of Public Policy

Parrish Berquist is an Assistant Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy focused on state politics and environmental policy in the U.S. Her research examines political representation, policy responsiveness to partisan politics, and the development and implications of elite and public attitudes for political conflict and policy outcomes. She completed a post doctoral fellowship at Yale University working on climate change communications. Parrish earned her Ph.D. in political science and urban and regional planning from MIT, and her MS/MUP in environmental policy and urban and regional planning from the University of Michigan.

Anna Puglisi

Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), School of Foreign Service

Anna Puglisi is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in the School of Foreign Service. She previously served as the National Counterintelligence Officer for East Asia, advising senior U.S. and foreign government officials at the highest levels, academia, and the private sector on counterintelligence (CI) issues. Anna helped draft the “U.S. National Counterintelligence Strategy 2020-2022” and design mitigation strategies for both the public and private sectors to protect technology. As a member of the Senior Analytic Service, she developed multidisciplinary efforts to understand global technology developments and their impact on U.S. competitiveness and national security, as well as efforts to target U.S. technology. She is a co-author of Chinese Industrial Espionage (2013) and related proprietary studies. Anna holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a MS in environmental science from Indiana University. 

William Pullen

School of Continuing Studies

Bill Pullen is President of BPA Coaching and Consulting and Academic Director for the Institute for Transformational Leadership and Program Director of the Leadership Coaching Program at Georgetown University. Bill joined the Institute for Transformational Leadership – Leadership Coaching Program in 2015 as adjunct faculty and became Program Director in 2017. Prior to Georgetown Bill served as Director of Training for the Leadership Coaching for Organizational Performance Program at George Mason University. Bill’s work as a coach, consultant, and facilitator focuses on supporting senior leaders, leadership teams, and organization in building leadership capacity and aligning leader behavior with organizational strategy and mission needs. He has worked with front line leaders to C-level executives in the US and around the world including countries such as South Africa, China, Japan, Chile, Israel, Lebanon, India, Slovakia, U.A.E, Columbia, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Bill has a master’s in organizational development from Johns Hopkins University. He is a Master Certified Coach through the International Coach Federation. He has a B.S Degree from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pa.

Margit Reischer

Economics

Margit Reischer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. Her research focuses on macroeconomics, production networks and applied macroeconometrics. She was a postdoctoral research scholar in the Economics Division at Columbia Business School, Columbia University. Margit received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge in 2019. She also holds a Masters’ Degree in Economics from the Vienna University of Economics.

Joel Reynolds

Philosophy

Joel Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in the Department Philosophy with a specialty in Disability Studies, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. His work explores the relationship between bodies, values, and society. He is especially concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of people with disabilities and the justness of institutions ranging from medicine to politics. Joel is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability. Currently he is the co-director of a 2-year NEH Public Humanities grant project, The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and authored The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and the History of Morality (The University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). Joel received his Ph.D. from Emory University in 2017. From 2017-2020, he was the inaugural Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center. He currently is working on two book manuscripts, The Meaning of Disability and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction.

Theresa Sabonis-Helf

School of Foreign Service

Theresa Sabonis-Helf is the Inaugural Chair of the Science, Technology and International Affairs concentration in the Master’s Degree program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College in Washington DC. She has lived and worked in seven countries of the Former USSR, has assisted two nations with the development of their first National Security Strategies, and has co-edited two volumes on Central Asia’s political and economic transition. She has also published and lectured extensively on energy security, climate change policies, post-Soviet energy and environmental issues, regional water politics, regional trade and transit, and the politics of electricity. She is a frequent advisor to the US Department of State and USAID and is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Aditi Sahasrabuddhe

Mortara Center for International Studies, School of Foreign Service

Aditi Sahasrabuddhe is a Pre-doctoral Fellow in the Global Political Economy Project (GPEP) at the Mortara Center for International Studies in the School of Foreign Service. Her research specializes in the politics of international finance, central banking, international cooperation, and economic history, with a focus on systemic financial crisis management. Aditi’s dissertation research shows that individual and personal relationships between central bankers matter for central bank cooperation in times of crisis and conditions of uncertainty. Her work has been published in the Review of International Political Economy and in The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage. Prior to her doctoral study, Aditi worked as a researcher at The Bretton Woods Project in London. She received a MSc in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is a Ph.D. Candidate in Government at Cornell University.

Sebastian Jilke

McCourt School of Public Policy

Sebastian Jilke is an Associate Professor whose research applies insights from the behavioral sciences to study how government reforms affect public employees and the people they serve, particularly with regard to social equity in access to public services and programs. He works with public agencies to design and apply behavioral interventions to improve government effectiveness. Sebastian also is a Fellow with the Office of Evaluation Sciences at the U.S. General Services Administration, co-editor of Experiments In Public Management Research: Challenges and Contributions (Cambridge University Press), and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, a not-for-profit, open-access journal.

Born in Germany, Sebastian received his master’s in public administration from Zeppelin University (Germany), and Ph.D. from Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands). He received the Beryl Radin Award for the best article published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART).

Katerina Sedova

School of Foreign Service

Katerina Sedova is a Research Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where she works on the CyberAI Project. Most recently, she advised Sen. Maggie Hassan on cybersecurity and technology policy issues and drafted key legislation as a TechCongress fellow with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Previously, she published research and advised projects on disinformation, state-sponsored information operations and OSINT for the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, the Department of State and the Department of Defense. She started her career at Microsoft, where she led engineering teams in the security, networking and performance components of the internet browsing platform. She was named as an inventor on multiple patents awarded to Microsoft. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from California State University and an M.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, where she focused on strategic competition and engagement in the cyber domain, Russia, Ukraine and NATO. She speaks Ukrainian and Russian.

Arjun Shankar

School of Foreign Service

I am an anthropologist, critical pedagogue, and mediamaker whose work falls into three broad areas. First, I am concerned with the politics of help and its role in upholding systems of racial capitalism. In my current book project, Brown Saviors and their Others, I take India’s burgeoning help econoy, specifically the education NGO sector, as a site from which to interrogate these ideas. I show how colonial, racial, and caste formations undergird how transnational and digitized NGO work is done in India today. Second, I am a visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker who has been interested in developing decolonial, participatory visual methodologies. I have primarily focused on the neocolonial politics of representation, global circulation, and reception of the “impoverished” and “suffering” child figure and offer new multimodal methods as alternatives to these paradigms. I am also interested in multimodal evaluation and publishing, asking questions regarding the possibilities that might accompany non-textual knowledge production. Finally, I am an advocate for Curiosity Studies (with Perry Zurn), an emerging interdisciplinary field which challenges us to think anew about scholarly production, pedagogic praxis, and the political role of the academician. 

Luken Sidney

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Center

Sydney Luken is an Assistant Research Professor and Designer in the interdisciplinary Ethics Lab in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE). She contributes to the development of creative ethics pedagogy. Her current research interests include Design Justice and non-use as morally motivated resistance to technological determinism. Sydney combines her eye for visual representation with her skill in distilling complex philosophical ideas into engaging exercises for courses across the university. She previously worked at the Edit Lab, where she helped design neighborhood restaurants in DC, and taught at the Corcoran College of Arts and Design. Sydney earned an MA in Interior Design from the Corcoran College of Arts and Design.  

Chad Smith

Research Fellow at Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation

Chad Smith is a Fellow-in-Residence at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation focused on Human Centered Design, Public Benefits systems, and emerging technologies helping residents with enrollment. 

Chad researches the operational, technological, and ethical practices of integrating continuous client data into programs offered by Social Services Departments and Providers. He is currently the founder of YourSeat, a data platform for collecting, measuring and reporting behavior change in Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) programs. Prior to YourSeat, Chad led Human Centered Design engagements for Accenture’s Public, Healthcare, Telecommunication, and Financial Services clients undergoing internal system modernization efforts.

Sara Soka

Research Fellow at Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation

Sara Soka is a Fellow-in-Residence in the Social Safety Net Research Project at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation. She studies how technology, data, and design are used to simplify social safety net benefit enrollment and delivery. Sara has a background in applied qualitative research and network leadership spanning public health issues, plus substantial experience in community engagement and strategic communication, which she applies to her interest in human-centered policy and service design/co-design. In 2014 Sara managed Berkeley, California’s successful soda tax campaign, the first to pass in the U.S., with resident-led policymaking, locally resonant messaging, and participatory budgeting as guiding principles. She subsequently monitored iterations of this policy and its implementation, the related impacts, and implications for equity. Sara earned a MS in population health sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Stephanie Straus

McCourt School of Public Policy

Stephanie Straus is a Policy Fellow in the Massive Data Institute. She helps governmental and administrative agencies increase their use of data for research and evaluation purposes. Using the most appropriate and current privacy-enhancing technologies, Stephanie facilitates the linking of previously unlinked datasets which inform pressing policy issues across education, public health, and the civil justice system. She addresses the legal and regulatory risks involved with data sharing by collaborating across the social, computer, and data sciences to advocate for the most secure and responsible data governance models. Prior to joining Georgetown, Stephanie was a research analyst at the American Institutes for Research, where she analyzed and reported on national student assessment data and conducted research on achievement gaps across socioeconomic status. Stephanie holds a M.Ed. in Education Policy and Management from Harvard University.

Varsha Thebo

Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS), School of Foreign Service

Varsha Thebo is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) in the School of Foreign Service. Over the years she has organized small study circles for young girls in her rural village in Pakistan, and actively advocated against the practices of honor killing and child marriages. Varsha has worked with several international organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The Global Village Project, Katsikas Refugee Camps, and the Ugandan Ministry of Education and Sports. She has designed and led several projects for the promotion of interfaith harmony and peacebuilding in Pakistan through the UNHATE Foundation, United Nations Academic Impact, and the Davis Projects for Peace. She received her Master’s in Global Human Development with a concentration in Gender Development and Project Planning and Evaluation.

Benjamin Ujcich

Computer Science

Benjamin Ujcich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He conducts research on topics in systems and networking security, network accountability, and legal and regulatory influence on systems and networking design. His most recent research focus has been in the area of securing software-defined networks and network operating systems using data provenance and program analysis techniques. Benjamin received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  

Angela Van Doorn

Biology

Angela van Doorn is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Biology and the Georgetown Environmental Initiative. She specializes in wildlife conservation, specifically human/primate conflict. Angela lived and worked in East, South, and West Africa for a period of 12 years and regularly incorporates this experience into her teaching. She joins Georgetown from American University where she has spent the past 5 years teaching environmental science and conservation. Angela has a Ph.D. in Zoology and a MS in Environmental Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Gen Yin

Physics

Gen Yin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. His research interests are theoretical solid-state physics, focusing on both the fundamental understanding and the device applications of topological quantum materials. He served as a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Los Angeles, and in 2019 became an Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCLA. Gen received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California, Riverside. His B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics are from Fudan University, Shanghai, PRC.