This semester, Arts & Sciences welcomed 54 tenure-track and teaching-track faculty to departments and programs across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities! Meet the newest members of our faculty community.
Natural Sciences and Mathematics
Department of Biology
Kevin Cox joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. He is also an assistant member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Cox’s research group uses spatial and single-cell genomics, imaging, and molecular biology to uncover the spatial organization of genes in plants, with a core objective of unraveling the communication mechanisms within plant cells. Cox earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and his doctorate at Texas A&M University. Before joining WashU, he was an HHMI Hanna H. Gray Postdoctoral Fellow at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.
Andreas Kautt joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. He is an evolutionary biologist interested in the mechanisms and conditions driving (or constraining) the evolution of biological diversity. His current research focuses on uncovering how coding or regulatory genetic changes act through the nervous system, resulting in behavioral differences in North American deer mice. He joined WashU after completing his postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Kautt earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate at the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Department of Chemistry
Kelly Powderly joins the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor. Her research seeks to develop and utilize new synthetic pathways to discover extended solids with magnetic, electronic, and non-trivial topological properties of interest in quantum information science, and to explore new fundamental bonding in materials. Before joining WashU, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Powderly earned her bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and her doctorate at Princeton University.
Environmental Studies
Christian George joins the Environmental Studies Program as a senior lecturer. George has more than 25 years of experience working with geographic information science (GIS) and has been a professor for 10 years. He has used GIS to address a variety of spatial questions and has mentored students to use the technology to solve problems in ecology, environmental science, public health, and social science. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Franklin & Marshall College, a master’s degree from the University of Florida, and a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin.
Physics
Shaffique Adam joins the Department of Physics as a professor. His current research explores the complex and surprising ways electrons behave when subjected to the interplay of quantum mechanics, material imperfections, confined geometries, and interactions with other electrons. He is a recipient of the Singaporean National Research Foundation Fellowship, the National University of Singapore Young Investigator Award, and the Singapore National Research Foundation Investigator Award. Before joining WashU, he was an associate professor at Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore. Adam earned his bachelor’s degree at Stanford University and his doctorate at Cornell University.
Karthik Ramanathan joins the Department of Physics as an assistant professor. He is an astroparticle experimentalist hunting for dark matter. Ramanathan is interested in using novel technologies, ideas, and tabletop-type experiments to answer fundamental questions. Prior to joining WashU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Ramanathan earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto, a master’s degree in finance from the London School of Economics, and a master’s and doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago.
Statistics and Data Science
Ran Chen joins the Department of Statistics and Data Science as an assistant professor. Previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she works on a wide range of statistical issues, including machine learning and data-driven decision-making with implications for business and health care. Her research interests also include optimization and revenue management. Chen earned her bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua University and her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joseph Guinness joins the Department of Statistics and Data Science as an associate professor. He studies modeling and computational issues that arise in the analysis of large datasets with a focus on applications in Earth sciences, including soil, weather, and climate. He previously served as an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies for the biometry and statistics, and statistical science majors at Cornell University. Guinness earned his bachelor’s degree at WashU and his doctorate at the University of Chicago.
Hong Hu joins the Department of Statistics and Data Science as an assistant professor with a primary appointment in the McKelvey School of Engineering’s Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering. Previously, Hu was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie in the fields of signal processing, statistics, and machine learning, with a particular focus on developing theoretical underpinnings for algorithms that process high-dimensional data. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University and a doctorate from Harvard University.
Vasileios (Bill) Katsianos joins the Department of Statistics and Data Science as a lecturer. His work has centered on statistical genetics with an emphasis on developing methods for the association analysis of infectious disease phenotypes jointly influenced by multiple interacting organisms. His other research interests include multiple testing with dependence, graphical models, Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, time series analysis, and model-based clustering. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Bo Li joins the Department of Statistics and Data Science as a professor. Previously the chair of statistics at the University of Illinois, Li is a leading statistician specializing in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics and environmental statistics concerning problems in climatology, atmospheric sciences, public health, forestry, and agriculture. She is also interested in Bayesian hierarchical modeling, functional data methods, and spatial extremes. Li earned a bachelor’s degree at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, master’s degrees at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Texas A&M University, and a doctorate at Texas A&M.
Carlos Misael Madrid Padilla joins the Department of Statistics and Data Science as an assistant professor. He studies high-dimensional statistics, a mathematical approach for extremely large and complicated data sets. His research interests include change-point detection, scalable Bayesian computation, graphical models, functional data analysis, network analysis, and nonparametric statistics. Padilla earned his bachelor’s degree at the Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas (CIMAT) in Mexico and his master’s and doctorate at the University of Notre Dame.
Lizda Nazdira Moncada Morales joins the Department of Statistics and Data Science as a lecturer. Her research interests include machine learning methods for time series problems, with a focus on recurrent neural networks, as well as Bayesian Statistics. She earned a bachelor's degree from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico and a master's and doctorate from the University of Notre Dame.
Humanities
African and African-American Studies
Thembelani Mbatha joins the Department of African and African-American Studies as an assistant professor after spending the 2023-2024 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow in the department. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of global Black thought, and the literary and cultural histories of Africa and the African diaspora. His work focuses on the histories of Blackness and the politics of memory in the postcolonial and Black Atlantic worlds. Mbatha earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, his master’s degree at the University of Cape Town, and his doctorate at Princeton University.
Classics
Christopher Erdman joins the John and Penelope Biggs Department of Classics as an assistant professor. A specialist in Roman history, Erdman’s research examines the state institutions and political culture of the ancient Roman Republic. Prior to joining WashU, he spent a year at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize recipient. Erdman received a bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and completed his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Regina Loehr joins the John and Penelope Biggs Department of Classics as a lecturer. Loehr is interested in ancient Greek and Roman historiography, ancient popular politics and social movement, and emotion and empathy in ancient historical literature. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Truman State University and a master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
English
Eduardo Corral joins the Department of English as an associate professor. His debut poetry collection, “Slow Lightning,” was chosen for the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His second collection, “Guillotine,” was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award. His poems have appeared in Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship, the National Holmes Poetry Prize, and the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. Before joining WashU, Corral taught in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. He has degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Julius Fleming joins the Department of English as an associate professor. Specializing in Afro-diasporic literatures and cultures, he has a particular interest in performance studies, Black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation,” which reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of Black theater. His work has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Fleming earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
Bernadette Myers joins the Department of English as an assistant professor. She is a scholar of early modern English literature and culture, specializing in theater, the environmental humanities, and the material culture of early modern London. Her research has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Association of America, which awarded her the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize in 2022. Before joining WashU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University. Myers earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Kansas and her master’s and doctorate at Columbia University.
Danielle Ridolfi joins the Department of English as a lecturer in children's studies. Ridolfi is a graphic designer, illustrator, and visual culture scholar. Her studio work includes children’s picture book illustration and her debut self-authored picture book “When the Dark Clouds Come” has been acquired by a major publisher. Her research centers on the pedagogical use of images, collage as an object-based practice, and the legacy of racism and colonialism in illustrated children's media. She currently serves as guest editor for The Journal of Illustration. She earned an MFA in illustration and visual culture from WashU’s Sam Fox School and a doctorate in clinical psychology from Kent State University.
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Michael Crandol joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer. His teaching and research center on Japanese film, animation, and popular media, as well as traditions of the monstrous and supernatural in East Asian culture. Crandol specializes in the history of Japanese horror films and is particularly interested in how popular notions of genre are recontextualized across cultural-linguistic borders. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary, and a master’s and doctorate from the University of Minnesota.
Yuan (Kevin) Gao joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer. He specializes in the cultural politics of technology in modern and contemporary China and his interdisciplinary research spans literature, film and media, environmental humanities, and queer studies from the early 20th century to the present. Before he joined the EALC faculty, he was a Center for the Humanities fellow. Gao earned his doctorate at WashU.
Jue Lu joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer, teaching courses in modern Chinese. Her teaching and research interests include modern Chinese literature with a focus on autobiographical writings and practices from the late Qing and early Republican periods, as well as language pedagogy, heritage cultural learning, and content-based curriculum development. Prior to joining WashU, she was a Chinese language lecturer at Princeton University. Lu earned her doctorate in Chinese and comparative literature at WashU.
Ayami Morita joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer, teaching courses in Japanese language. Prior to WashU, she taught at Franklin & Marshall College, Middlebury Summer Language School, and Bowdoin College. Morita has a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ayuka Suemasa joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer, teaching courses in Japanese language. Suemasa joins EALC after teaching Japanese for two years at Oberlin College and Middlebury Summer Language School. She has a master’s degree from the University of Utah.
History
Steven B. Miles returns to the Department of History as a professor and interim director of Global Studies. Common themes in his research include the physical movements of people across space and the seasonality and rhythms of urban life in 19th-century Chinese cities. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Late Imperial China and the creator and custodian of the database “Cantonese Migrant Networks: Stone Inscriptions from the West River Basin.” Miles earned his bachelor’s degree from Trinity University, his master’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin, and his doctorate from the University of Washington.
Marjan Wardaki joins the Department of History as an assistant professor. Previously at Yale University, Wardaki specializes in the history of science. She is a historian of the Global South with an interest in the history of knowledge, empire, and migration. Her research analyzes the formation of diasporic scientific communities, specifically the role of migrants in the circulation of scientific objects, ideas, and practices. She is working on a book titled “Decolonial Science: South Asian Migrants in Interwar Germany and the Making of Modern Afghanistan.” Wardaki earned her doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Music
Kimberly Jeong joins the Department of Music as a visiting lecturer. The Korean Canadian cellist is passionate about community engagement through performance mediums and promoting a more equitable music education for all. As a musician and an educator, her performances have been heard on CBC Radio, BBC, and Chandos Records, as well as in concert spaces and classrooms around the world. Jeong holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Yale School of Music. She is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University.
Performing Arts
Zachariah Ezer joins the Performing Arts Department as an assistant professor. He is a playwright whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include “The Freedom Industry,” “Address the Body!,” and “Legitime,” among others. His work has been published by Concord Theatricals/Samuel French, Smith & Kraus, American Blues Theater, and New World Theatre. He is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow, the winner of Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Hawai’i Prize, and a member of The Liberation Theatre Company’s Writing Residency. He is currently under commission from Theater J. Ezer earned his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow.
Philosophy
David Kinney joins the Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor. His areas of specialization include cognitive science, philosophy of science, and formal epistemology, with a focus on both intuitive and scientific modes of causal cognition. He has also published on decision theory, digital humanities, and philosophy of race. Previously, he was a lecturer at Yale University and a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and the Santa Fe Institute. Kinney earned his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College and his master’s and doctorate at the London School of Economics.
Luis Rosa joins the Department of Philosophy as a lecturer. His research probes things that muddle the mind and get in the way of its search for knowledge, including uncertainty, misleading evidence, ambiguity, doubts concerning our cognitive powers, disagreement, indeterminacy, incoherence, paradoxes, defective questions, and situations that call for suspension of judgment. He is also interested in logic, cognitive science, and literature. Prior to joining the Department of Philosophy at WashU, Rosa was an assistant professor of philosophy at CONCEPT, University of Cologne.
Romance Languages and Literatures
Allison Milner joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures as a lecturer. She is a Hispanic linguist specializing in sociolinguistics and phonetics with a focus on exploring and validating varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. She is passionate about mentoring and teaching, with prior experience as an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Central Florida. A St. Louis native, Milner received her bachelor’s degree at Wartburg College and completed her graduate studies at the University of Houston.
Paolo Scartoni joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures as a lecturer. His research focuses on the relationship between music and language in medieval Italian literature. He is the chief associate editor and encoder at Petrarchive, the first born-digital edition of Petrarch’s songbook. Before joining WashU, he designed and taught courses on Italian language and culture at Rutgers University and Vassar College. He earned his doctorate at Rut
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Allison S. Reed joins the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as an assistant professor. She studies how health and disability shape political participation, especially among minoritized populations. Her peer-reviewed work appears in Mobilization: An International Quarterly and Social Science & Medicine. Reed earned her bachelor’s degree from WashU, where she was a John B. Ervin Scholar. She earned her master’s and doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Social Sciences
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 returns to 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 Science
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.