This fall, 19 new researchers and instructors join six social science departments in Arts & Sciences. Read about our new faculty members in the natural sciences. New faculty in the humanities will be profiled next week.
Welcome to our incoming faculty!
Anthropology
Audrey “AJ” Jones joins the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor. Informed by medical and psychological anthropology, feminist and queer theory, disability studies, and performance ethnography, her research broadly investigates the intersubjective ways individuals embody meaning in light of the often contradictory American cultural expectations of bodies. Her work seeks to challenge the cultural narratives that reduce identity to narrow categorizations and, in its place, facilitate more radical forms of human connection. Jones earned her bachelor’s degree at Princeton University and her doctorate at Emory University.
Ilaria Patania joins the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor. She is an environmental and geo-archaeologist specializing in hunter-gatherer societies and human migrations, conducting land and underwater work using a multi-scalar geoarchaeological approach. Her research aims to understand human-environment feedback and contextualize biological and sociocultural adaptive strategies of Homo. She is particularly interested in human adaptation to marginal environments and issues of human sustainability in extreme and fragile ecosystems. Patania earned her doctorate from Boston University.
Economics
Md Nazmul Ahsan joins the Department of Economics as a senior lecturer. Prior to joining WashU, Ahsan was an assistant professor of economics at Saint Louis University. His research interests include development economics, global health, population economics, applied microeconomics, and impact evaluation. Ahsan earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Dhaka, and a doctorate from the University of Southern California.
Martin Garcia-Vazquez joins the Department of Economics as an assistant professor. His research interests are in the areas of labor economics, public economics, macroeconomics, and econometrics, with a focus on policies related to early childhood development and health economics. Garcia-Vazquez earned his bachelor’s degree from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, his master’s degree in economics and finance from CEMFI, and his doctorate from the University of Minnesota.
Philipp Grübener joins the Department of Economics as an assistant professor. He is a quantitative macroeconomist with current research areas such as understanding earnings dynamics, insurance against income risk, and the design of the tax-and-transfer system. Before joining WashU, he was a postdoctoral researcher in economics at Goethe University Frankfurt and a member of the Frankfurt Quantitative Macro Group. Grübener earned his doctorate in economics from the European University Institute.
Molly Moore joins the Department of Economics as a lecturer. Her research and teaching relate to reputation and how observer expectations of behavior align with — and influence — individual decision-making. She is especially interested in how this applies to the contexts of political polarization and gender. She earned a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard University.
Political Science
Christina L. Boyd joins the Department of Political Science as a professor with a joint appointment in the WashU School of Law. She joins WashU from the University of Georgia Department of Political Science and the School of Public and International Affairs where she was the Thomas P. and M. Jean Lauth Public Affairs Professor. Boyd’s research focuses on judicial politics, public law, women and politics, judicial diversity, American politics, and the intersection of courts and the bureaucracy in American politics. She earned her doctorate at WashU.
Lee Epstein joins the Department of Political Science as the Ethan A. H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor. Her research and teaching interests center on law and legal institutions, especially the behavior of judges. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science, as well as the principal investigator of the U.S. Supreme Court Database. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 articles and essays, and 18 books. Epstein earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate from Emory University.
Jaclyn Kaslovsky joins the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on Congress, representation, and women in politics. She analyzes how legislators choose to allocate their resources and the effects of these choices on the quality of representation. Her work has appeared in outlets such as The American Political Science Review and The Journal of Politics. Prior to joining WashU, she was an assistant professor at Rice University and a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. She earned her bachelor’s degree from New York University and her doctorate at Harvard University.
Michael Strawbridge joins the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. His research interests include American politics and quantitative methodology with an emphasis on developing novel empirical ways to assess and understand the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities. He is an expert in Black politics, and his research examines how social and environmental factors shape the political attitudes and behaviors of Black citizens and Black political elites. Strawbridge earned his bachelor’s degree in political science and media studies from Beloit College and his doctorate from Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Psychological & Brain Sciences
Rebecca Cox joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. She studies the role of sleep and circadian rhythm disruption in the etiology and treatment of anxiety-related disorders. Her research uses a multimethod approach, largely focused on young adults, to identify novel modifiable behavioral targets to improve treatment outcomes for anxiety-related disorders. Cox earned a bachelor’s degree at Hendrix College and a master’s and doctorate at Vanderbilt University.
Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an associate professor. Her research focuses on harnessing technology for the prevention and treatment of mental health problems, mental health screening, and training in evidence-based treatments with a focus on eating disorders. Through her work, she aims to reduce mental health disparities and promote equity in care. Fitzsimmons-Craft earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Notre Dame and her master’s and doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Derek Isaacowitz joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as a professor. His lab investigates the links between attention and emotion across the adult lifespan. Using a multimethod approach, his research probes how individuals of different ages manage their own emotions and perceive emotions in others to understand the role of visual attention in producing age differences in the regulation and perception of emotions. Isaacowitz earned his bachelor’s degree at Stanford University and his master’s and doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.
Josh Oltmanns joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. His research integrates AI and multimethod approaches to enhance psychological assessments and health predictions. By bridging psychology and data science, and prioritizing the representation of diverse groups to reduce and explain biases, his lab aims to improve the understanding of personality and psychopathology, enhancing psychological assessments and behavioral monitoring in clinical and research settings. Oltmanns earned a bachelor’s degree at Indiana University, a master’s at Villanova University, and a doctorate at the University of Kentucky.
Sociology
Darwin Baluran joins the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor. He conducts research at the intersection of race, health, and criminology/criminal justice. Baluran examines how racialization processes harm marginalized communities and the various ways race is conceptualized and studied. Before joining WashU, he served as a postdoctoral scholar at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. Baluran earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University Chicago and a doctorate from Vanderbilt University.
Yannick Coenders joins the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor. As a historical sociologist, he interrogates how race persists and continues to shape the social life of populations on both sides of the Atlantic despite the decline of the European colonial project that brought it into being. His current book project, “Dispersal,” poses a question crucial to contemporary urban race governance: Why did Western cities shift from their colonial tradition of concentrating nonwhite populations to an embrace of residential dispersal in the latter half of the 20th century?
Samuel Kye joins the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor. His research examines racial inequality in the metro U.S. with a focus on the mechanisms that facilitate or prevent the formation of racially diverse and integrated neighborhoods. His primary work involves the analysis of data to understand the persistence of residential segregation. He also researches trends in Asian American assimilation. He previously served as an assistant professor at Baylor University and an external faculty affiliate of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Kye earned his bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College and his master’s and doctorate from Indiana University.
Public Health & Society
Eleanor Peters Bergquist joins the Program in Public Health & Society as a senior lecturer. Her research interests lie in the realms of infectious disease, the climate crisis, global health, complex emergencies, parasitology, medical anthropology, and health behavior. She has a master’s degree in arts from SOAS University of London, a master’s degree in science and public health from Tulane University, and a doctorate from Saint Louis University.
Kristin Brig-Ortiz joins the Program in Public Health & Society as a lecturer. Her scholarly interests include the racial and class dynamics of public health and environment in southern Africa. Her current work explores the relationship between water management and public health in colonial urban South Africa. She joins WashU from the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Brig-Ortiz has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the College of Charleston.
