The Krieger School welcomes a talented group of new faculty members, each of whom brings scholarly accomplishments to our academic community.
Angie Bautista-Chavez
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
As a scholar of American politics, Angie Bautista-Chavez examines the politics of migration, borders, bureaucracy, race, and citizenship. She is interested in the dynamic interplay between states and racialized migrants—at one level, how Latinx immigrants are regulated by and contend with the American state, and at another level, how the United States has expanded its regulatory reach beyond its borders. She is committed to creating more inclusive systems of knowledge production, as indicated by her research, teaching, and mentorship record.
Maria Betto
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics
Maria Betto’s research interests are in microeconomic theory, with a particular focus on topics related to information economics and decision theory.
Gira Bhabha
Associate Research Professor, Department of Biology
Gira Bhabha’s research focuses on the structural mechanisms and cell biology of microbes and their interactions with hosts. The lab uses integrative approaches including X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-electron tomography, optical microscopy, biochemistry, microbiology, and cell biology techniques, to uncover the unique biology of eukaryotic and prokaryotic pathogens.
Alessandra Corsi
Research Professor, William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy
Alessandra Corsi’s research focuses on multi-messenger time-domain astronomy, with emphasis on relativistic radio transients and gravitational wave physics. She has vast experience with observations of astrophysical transients and follow-up of gravitational wave (GW) events and works on detection algorithms for GW data.
Ross Doppelt
Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator, Applied Economics (Advanced Academic Programs)
Ross Doppelt teaches in the applied economics program, based out of the Washington, D.C., campus. As a macroeconomist, his primary research interests are labor markets and time series, and he has experience teaching classes in macro, micro, and econometrics. Doppelt has a PhD from New York University and a BA from the University of Chicago, both in economics.
Damian Ekiert
Associate Research Professor, Department of Biology
Damian Ekiert is a microbiologist and biochemist whose research focuses on bacterial and parasite cell biology. He studies fundamental cellular and molecular processes ranging from lipid transport and virulence factors in bacteria, to invasion mechanisms in microsporidian parasites and the evolution of a minimal eukaryotic cell.
Brahim El Guabli
Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Thought and Literature
Brahim El Guabli is an interdisciplinary scholar who teaches a variety of topics in Tamazghan and Middle Eastern literatures from the lens of environmentalism, indigeneity, and multilingualism. His work engages issues of race and racism, deserts and Saharanism, joint authorship practices, translation and transitional justice, Jews in Amazigh and Arabic cultural production, and revitalization of Indigenous cultures.
Harris Feinsod
Research Professor, Department of English
Harris Feinsod is a literary and cultural historian of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. He is the author of a literary history, The Poetry of the Americas: from Good Neighbors to Countercultures, and the co-translator of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poems. His recent academic essays and public writings focus especially on port cities, and on maritime labor, environment, and culture under conditions of globalization.
Kandyce Fernandez
Senior Lecturer, Non-Profit Management (Advanced Academic Programs)
Kandyce Fernandez’s expertise in the nonprofit sector includes philanthropy and foundations, advocacy and the policy process, civic health and engagement and program evaluation. Her research addresses the interactions that take place among communities and organizations across sectors, with a focus on civic health in the nonprofit sector.
Lauren Fusilier
Senior Lecturer, University Writing Program
Lauren Fusilier’s research interests include digital and multimodal pedagogy, the intersection of digital literacies and new media campus resources, and issues of institutional equity and accessibility, especially as they impact non-dominant student populations.
Andrew Gallup
Teaching Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Andrew Gallup’s research areas include the evolution and functional significance of yawning, sports and athletics in evolutionary perspective, and threat detection and group vigilance. He teaches courses in behavioral biology and provides advising and research mentoring to undergraduate students.
Maia Gil’Adí
Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Maia Gil’Adí’s work takes up speculative fiction as a site for theorizing Latinx identity across national and ethnic borders and shows the vital role of historical trauma in its formation. Arguing against reparative modes of reading, she analyzes how literary portrayals of violence, destruction, and pain paradoxically elicit pleasurable affective and aesthetic experiences. Examining novels by established Latinx authors such as Junot Díaz and Cristina García as well as multiethnic writers such as Colson Whitehead and Sesshu Foster, Gil’Adí challenges definitions of what constitutes Latinx literature and notions of the speculative by dismantling generic boundaries and entrenched definitions of race, ethnicity, and nationhood.
Nune Grigoryan
Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator, Communication (Advanced Academic Programs)
Nune Grigoryan’s research is focused on the intersection of media and democracy. Her scholarly work includes studies of media ethics and digital media use for political participation, as well as social media use for political dissent and political campaigns.
Christopher Grobe
Associate Research Professor, Department of English
Christopher Grobe specializes in the entanglement of literature, performance, media, and technology in U.S. culture. Understanding “performance” as both a mode of artistic practice and a source of social knowledge, he has studied such topics as the history of “confessional performance” in American culture, the theatricality of U.S. electoral politics, and the role artists play in constructing new technologies (from the telegraph to AI) and in determining their cultural significance.
David Guggenheim
Lecturer, Program Coordinator, Academic Advisor, Environmental Programs (Advanced Academic Programs)
David Guggenheim is a marine scientist, conservation policy specialist, educator, award-winning author, ocean explorer and manned submersible pilot. He has worked in Cuba for more than 20 years, leading collaborative education, research and conservation efforts focused on coral reef ecosystems.
John Hale
Research Professor, Department of Cognitive Science
John Hale’s expertise lies in computational linguistics. His research centers on language comprehension, asking questions such as how are we able to understand one another, just by hearing a sequence of words? He uses cognitive modeling, analyzing the human mind/brain via computer simulation.
Simon D. Halliday
- Associate Research Professor and Associate Director at the Center for Economy and Society, SNF Agora Institute
- Faculty affiliate of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (2023-2025)
Simon Halliday conducts research in behavioral and experimental economics, with a focus on social preferences (reciprocity and social norms) and institutions (ratings, punishment, communication). He also does economics education, and he has co-authored (with Samuel Bowles) an intermediate-level microeconomics textbook: Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination (OUP, 2022). Halliday is also the co-leader of the enCOREage Project. In a new textbook for introductory economics students, Understanding the Economy, the enCOREage team will introduce content that draws students in because it addresses societal problems that students care about while building employability skills, belonging, and inclusion into the curriculum.
Yuan He
Research Professor, Departments of Biophysics and Biology
Yuan He is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms by which large, multi-subunit complexes engage in DNA-centric processes. His research uses cryo-electron microscopy and other biophysical and biochemical approaches.
William Y. C. Huang
Assistant Professor, Department of Biophysics
William Huang is broadly interested in biochemical reactions at the cell membrane, especially those involved in signal transduction. The research combines optical methods and kinetic modeling to analyze biochemically reconstituted systems and living cells. The integrated approach has enabled the invention of extensive imaging-based membrane assays, oftentimes revealing unexpected dynamic characteristics unique to membrane signaling configurations.
Paul Johnson
Associate Research Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
A specialist in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish literature, Paul Johnson draws on the history of emotion, the senses, the body, and performance in his research. His writing on race, gender, translation, and popular culture also places pre-modern Iberia into conversation with urgent contemporary debates, while crossing borders to encompass the Global Hispanophone and larger early modern world.
Sujung Kim
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Sujung Kim’s research focuses on the transnational interactions of Buddhist practices in East Asia by engaging a variety of networks that connect people, places, and praxis in the Buddhist world. After her first monograph, Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), she is currently working on her second monograph, Korean Magical Medicine: Buddhist Healing Talismans in Choson Korea (under advance contract with the University of Hawai’i Press).
Chris Kromphardt
Lecturer, Assistant Program Director, Data Analytics and Policy (Advanced Academic Programs)
Chris Kromphardt’s research focuses on how citizens view the performance and legitimacy of judicial institutions, how judicial institutions make decisions, and the design and evaluation of experiential learning activities. He has taught courses on public policy, research methods and research design, constitutional law, and American politics.
Jason Ludden
Senior Lecturer, University Writing Program
Jason Ludden’s research interests include rhetoric of science, environmental communication, composition pedagogy, and creative writing. His work focuses on the role of experts in public policy discourse, and he has examined how forest management discourse shapes public perception of environmental issues.
Diego Luis
Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor, Department of History
Diego Luis is a historian of Latin America specializing in the connections between Mexico and the Philippines during the Manila galleon period (1565-1815). His work focuses on the global scope of the early modern Spanish empire by examining the movement of people across the Pacific Ocean and how that movement transformed societies at both the eastern and western termini of the galleon trade.
Julie K. Lundquist
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Wind Energy, Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Mechanical Engineering (Whiting School of Engineering)
Julie Lundquist uses observational and computational approaches to understand the atmospheric boundary layer, with an emphasis on atmosphere-wind energy interactions. Her research engages in both the atmospheric influences on wind energy production as well as the atmospheric consequences of wind energy deployment.
Vikash Morar
Lecturer, Biotechnology (Advanced Academic Programs)
Vikash Morar has a background in research in clinical diagnostics, cellular neuroscience, and machine learning. His interest in learning as an abstraction brought him toward pedagogy, where he has extensively trained and worked to improve student outcomes in the classroom.
Marcelo Nogueira
Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Marcelo Nogueira’s research focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American poetry, popular music, and visual culture, with a special emphasis on Brazil. Drawing on literary history, media theory, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, he investigates the Latin American avant-gardes, Brazilian modernism, concrete poetry, and the art of songwriting. He earned his PhD in Romance Studies from Duke University in 2022.
Danielle Norcini
Assistant Professor, William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy
Danielle Norcini’s research interests are in particle physics and cosmology. Her main focus is building detectors to discover dark matter and measure neutrinos. Currently, her group is developing single-electron sensors called skipper CCDs to make precision measurements of particle interactions at very low energy thresholds.
Grace Panetti
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry
Grace Panetti investigates challenges at the interface of photochemistry and inorganic chemistry. She uses inorganic synthesis coupled with photophysical techniques like transient absorption spectroscopy to investigate these new systems.
Mladen Petkov
Lecturer, Communication (Advanced Academic Programs)
Mladen Petkov is interested in journalistic roles and practices, media freedom, disinformation, and Artificial Intelligence. He has several years of newsroom experience in the United States and Bulgaria.
Allison Pugh
Research Professor, Department of Sociology
Allison Pugh’s research speaks to central concerns in the sociology of gender, investigating how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. Her work uses qualitative methods to investigate how gender, race, and class inequalities affect the way people negotiate dignity and connection amidst socioeconomic trends such as rationalization, insecurity, and commodification.
Lakshmi Rajkumar
Senior Lecturer, Program Coordinator, Lab Manager, Biotechnology (Advanced Academic Programs)
Lakshmi Rajkumar is an alumni of Johns Hopkins University’s M.S. in Biotechnology program specializing in microbiology. She has contributed to cancer research at the University of Maryland’s Translational Core Lab and has worked in the industry as a food microbiologist.
Margaret Renwick
Associate Research Professor, Department of Cognitive Science
Margaret Renwick’s research incorporates variation into models of spoken language to answer questions about the nature of phonological contrast, the origins and realization of phonological patterns, regional accents of U.S. English, and linguistic change across generations.
Mona Khadem Sameni
Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator, Applied Economics (Advanced Academic Programs)
Mona Khadem Sameni’s research focuses on health economics, health policy, healthcare systems, and labor economics. She has done studies on global disparities in the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare systems, the application of AI in healthcare worldwide, and the regulation of AI.
Hale Sirin
- Assistant Research Professor, Alexander Grass Humanities Institute – Center for Digital Humanities
- Affiliated faculty, Center for Languages and Speech Processing
Hale Sirin’s research and teaching bring together computational and critical methods to explore questions about narrative, language, and translation across historic and modern languages. She teaches courses on computational methods in the humanities and narrative theory. Sirin’s work has appeared in numerous venues including the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and has been published in technical conferences including the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Sarah Sowden
Lecturer, Computational Biology (Advanced Academic Programs)
Sarah Sowden has expertise in data science, research administration, and the ethical and legal implications of data practices. She lectures in bioinformatics and individualized genomics and health.
Frederick Tan
Assistant Research Professor, Biology
Frederick Tan researches mechanisms to effectively train and support diverse populations in genomic data science. He focuses on strategies that increase persistence among undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Through collaborative educational programs, he aims to build inclusive communities that advance research using the latest genomic technologies.
Heiko ter Haseborg
Associate Teaching Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Heiko ter Haseborg’s research interests include curriculum design, curriculum evaluation, assessment, world language pedagogy, teacher, and learner role in language education, second language acquisition, and metacognition.
Karina A. Vado
Senior Lecturer, Medicine, Science, and the Humanities Program
Karina Vado’s research lies at the intersections of Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural studies, science and technology studies, and science fiction studies. She is currently working on her first book project, Latinx DNA: Race, Latinidad, and Gene(ome). In it, she interrogates scientized representations of Latinx identity across multiple cultural forms—popular science writing, music, speculative memoirs, documentary film, and visual art—and considers the vexed de- and re-codings of Latinidad that these “texts” forward or foreclose.
Jasmina Wiemann
Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Jasmina Wiemann’s research develops new chemical methods and instrument components that comparatively probe biologically and geologically informative patterns in the macromolecular composition of modern and fossil organismal tissues to characterize past, present, and predictable future interactions between life and its changing environments and translates these insights into bio-inspired climate solutions.
Frances Wu
Senior Lecturer, Organizational Leadership (Advanced Academic Programs)
Frances Wu’s research focuses on cross-cultural leadership for global challenges and community-engaged pedagogies for leadership education. She has been awarded research grants on leadership for sustainability in business education in Singapore, higher education innovations in the U.S., and change processes for joint-venture universities between the U.S. and other countries.