This semester, Arts & Sciences welcomed 47 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
Elizabeth Mallott joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. Her research examines how the environment shapes host-associated microbial communities both within and across species. She is particularly interested in how the response of the gut microbiome to external factors might contribute to host health and fitness. Mallott earned her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and held postdoctoral research positions at Northwestern University, Dartmouth College, and Vanderbilt University before joining the Arts & Sciences faculty at WashU.
B. Duygu Özpolat has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology. She uses marine and aquatic segmented worms to understand the cellular origins and mechanisms of reproductive cell regeneration, with potential applications in stem cell and infertility therapies. She earned her doctorate from Tulane University and was previously a Hibbitt Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory.
Jennifer Wang joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. Her lab studies fundamental cell biological questions about how organelles are formed and regulated, focusing on mammalian centrosomes and cilia. The lab uses CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, high-resolution microscopy, and biochemical techniques to discover how nanometer-scale proteins form micron-scale cellular machines. Wang earned her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.
Xuehua Zhong has accepted a position as a professor in the Department of Biology. Her research focuses on epigenetic regulation of plant traits and environmental adaptation as well as how plants reprogram epigenetic landscapes in response to environmental changes to meet growth and survival needs. Prior to joining the WashU faculty, Zhong was an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dual appointment at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
Department of Chemistry
Kade Head-Marsden has accepted a position in the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on electronic structure properties and open quantum system dynamics relevant in emerging quantum materials and technologies, which she hopes to use to make predictions for correlated molecular systems undergoing complex environmental interactions with applications in chemistry, physics, and materials science. She earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.
Jennifer Heemstra joins the Department of Chemistry as the Charles Allen Thomas Professor of Chemistry and chair of the department. Her research focuses on harnessing the molecular recognition and self-assembly properties of nucleic acids to generate functional architectures for biosensing and bioimaging. She received the American Chemical Society’s Rising Star Award in 2021 and comes to WashU after five years as a professor at Emory University.
John Heemstra has accepted a position as a senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry. He has taught numerous chemistry courses and earned a reputation as an exceptional, innovative, and dedicated educator who creates enriching classroom experiences. In his previous position, Heemstra played a leading role in developing foundational coursework for Emory's undergraduate chemistry curriculum. He was also an award-winning instructor at the University of Utah and a research scientist in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries before coming to WashU.
Robert Wexler joins the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor. His research focuses on theoretical innovation for renewable energy and environmental applications, with an emphasis on the development of computational methods for the more realistic modeling of interfacial phenomena in heterogeneous electrocatalysis, solar energy conversion, and ferroelectric environmental energy harvesting. He earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Roger Michaelides joins the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences as an assistant professor. He uses a variety of remote sensing instruments, geospatial techniques, and time series methods to study dynamic surface processes from Arctic tundra wildfires to high-desert debris flows and is interested in developing novel approaches to studying the cryosphere, hydrosphere, land surface, and critical zone. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher with the Colorado Geological Survey and Colorado School of Mines.
Environmental Studies
Froggi VanRiper joins the Environmental Studies Program as a lecturer, where she will be teaching sustainability-themed courses and serving as co-director of WashU’s Sustainability Exchange program. She is driven by interest in how social, environmental, and technical systems interact to affect the sustainability of public infrastructure and the wellbeing of vulnerable populations. She is an active member of the movement to reshape the nature of academic collaboration between researchers from wealthy and exploited environments to achieve equitable distribution of benefits.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Wanlin Li joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on number theory and arithmetic geometry, including ranks of elliptic curves over function fields, curves over finite fields, Jacobian varieties, and Galois representations. She earned her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques.
Robert Lunde has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He is broadly interested in prediction and inference for data with complex dependence structures, such as networks and time series, with the major aim of understanding properties of resampling methods. He earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University and was a research fellow at the University of Michigan and postdoctoral scholar at the University of Texas at Austin prior to joining the WashU faculty.
Department of Physics
Alex Chen joins the Department of Physics as a research assistant professor. He uses GPU-based massive supercomputer simulations to study the complex plasma physics and radiative processes near astrophysical compact objects, namely neutron stars and black holes. He earned his doctorate from Columbia University and was previously a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University and at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Andrina Nicola has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics. Her research combines data from several cosmological probes to test and constrain the cosmological model and physics of galaxy formation. She is particularly interested in developing novel data analysis methods using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Nicola earned her doctorate from ETH Zurich and was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University prior to joining the Arts & Sciences faculty at WashU.
Yajie Yuan joins the Department of Physics as an assistant professor. She works on building first-principles models for the high energy processes powered by black holes and neutron stars. She is currently focused on multi-messenger emission from active galactic nuclei and mechanisms for fast radio bursts. Before joining the Arts & Sciences faculty, Yuan was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics. She earned her doctorate at Stanford University.
Humanities
Department of African and African-American Studies
Marlon Bailey joins Arts & Sciences as a professor of African and African-American studies and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Bailey is a Black queer theorist and critical/performance ethnographer who studies Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health, and HIV/AIDS prevention. His book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture (2013) was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association.
College Writing Program
Ezra Claverie joins the College Writing Program as a lecturer, teaching the Dreams & Nightmares theme of the College Writing (first-year) course. He earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The University Press of Mississippi just approved the publication of his monograph, Copyright Vigilantes: Intellectual Property and the Hollywood Superhero, 1998-2018. From 2014–22, he taught at New York University Shanghai.
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Alessandro Poletto joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer in East Asian religions. He earned his doctorate from Columbia University in which he examined the relationship between Buddhist healers and other technicians involved in the treatment of illness. His current research focuses on the material and textual dimensions of Buddhism as practiced by lay people in early medieval Japan.
Kaho Sakaue has accepted a position in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer in Japanese language. Sakaue earned a master's degree from Purdue University. She is interested in second language acquisition, fluency and pronunciation, and technology in Japanese instruction.
Department of English
Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of English. Adwetewa-Badu earned her doctorate at Cornell University. Her work is concerned with the interrelation of poetry and politics, Black diasporic culture and literature, post-colonial literary history, cultural theory, and the digital humanities. Her current book project takes a comparative approach to the poetry of the Black diaspora and is bolstered by her digital work through The Global Poetics Project.
Gabrielle Kirilloff joins the Department of English as an assistant professor. She uses digital methods to examine patterns and outliers in text-based corpora. Kirilloff’s book project, Keeping the Reader Close, employs computational analysis alongside close reading to examine reader address in a corpus of over 3,000 19th- and 20th-century Anglophone novels. She earned her doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Film and Media Studies
Deirdre Maitre joins the Film and Media Studies program as a lecturer and resident filmmaker. She received her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University with an emphasis of study in narrative and documentary. Her work has aired on local and national television and throughout the international festival circuit. She has taught filmmaking at the university level for over 10 years.
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Katherine Kerschen has accepted a position as a lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses on second language learners’ lexical knowledge and the process of vocabulary acquisition in a second language. As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship fellow, Kerschen taught English in a German secondary school before completing a master's in applied linguistics at the TU Dortmund University. She earned a doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University in German applied linguistics and language science.
Mikael Olsson Berggren joins the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures as a lecturer. Berggren earned his doctorate at Washington University, where he researched the way that public transportation systems influenced Berlin’s cultural identity and the lives of residents at the turn of the 20th century. He teaches German language courses and has previously taught Swedish at WashU.
Department of History
Steve Hindle joins the Department of History as the Derek Hirst Endowed Professor of Early Modern British History. He studies social, cultural, and economic change in Britain during the 16–18th centuries. Hindle comes to WashU after 11 years as the director of research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. His study of social, economic, and spatial relations in an especially well-documented 17th-century village will appear in 2023 with Oxford University Press as The Social Topography of a Rural Community in Seventeenth-Century England.
Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies
Noa Weinberg joins the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies as a lecturer of Hebrew. She earned a master's degree from Tel Aviv University and Hebrew teacher’s certificate from the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has been teaching Hebrew for over 10 years and comes to WashU from the College of Charleston. Weinberg is the co-author of two Hebrew workbooks.
Department of Music
Florent Ghys has accepted a position as a lecturer in theory and composition in the Department of Music. A double bassist and composer, Ghys has written music for some of today’s most influential ensembles and soloists, including the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. He has produced music videos for bands as well as for his own work, including an hour-long video album and real-time installations.
Amy Greenhalgh joins the Department of Music as a lecturer and the director of strings and chamber music. She has worked as a chamber and orchestral musician throughout Europe, with ensembles such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. At WashU, Greenhalgh teaches viola lessons and coordinates chamber music.
Rami Stucky joins the Department of Music as a lecturer in musicology. He earned his doctorate from the University of Virginia. Stucky is a music historian specializing in jazz and American music. His book project, When Bossa Was Black: Brazilian Music in 60s America, focuses on the arrival of bossa nova music to the United States during the 1960s.
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Kat Haklin has accepted a position as a lecturer in French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She specializes in 19th-century French literature and visual culture, and her current book project, Writing Claustrophobia: Enclosure in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, examines the unexplored proliferation of enclosed spaces in literature just prior to the first definition of “claustrophobia” in 1879. She earned her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
Zorimar Rivera Montes joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures as an assistant professor of Latinx studies. Her research focuses on contemporary Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latinx literatures and cultures in relation to race, gender, sexualities, colonialism, and neoliberalism. She earned her doctorate from Northwestern University.
Irene Zurita Moreno joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures as a lecturer in Spanish. She earned her doctorate from the University of Florida.
Social Sciences
Department of Anthropology
Rose Hores joins the Department of Anthropology as a lecturer in biological anthropology. Hores joined the department in 2020 as a faculty assistant and has since taught introductory courses in anthropology and global health. This semester, her courses included “Evolution of the Human Diet” and “Topics in Anthropology: COVID-19: What’s Next?” Hores earned her doctorate from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Kyle Olson joins the Department of Anthropology as a lecturer in archaeology. Olson is an archaeologist of politics, past and present, devoted to understanding both the political geography of Bronze Age Eurasia as well as the political economy of archaeological fieldwork in the modern world. His research interests include the prehistory Iran and Central Asia, the history of research and preservation practices in Iran, and the re-use of archaeological collections in synthetic and integrative research. Olson earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and has completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations.
Thomas Cody Prang joins the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor. Prang’s research interests include human evolution, functional morphology, and locomotion. In his research, he aims to understand how locomotor behavior has evolved in primates with special emphasis on early humans and apes. Prang has participated in fieldwork at Laetoli, Tanzania, which is a site best known for the preservation of 3.7-million-year-old fossilized footprints attributed to Australopithecus afarensis, and has studied human fossils at museums in Ethiopia and South Africa. He earned his doctorate from New York University and taught at the University at Albany and Texas A&M University.
Department of Economics
Gaurab Aryal joins the Department of Economics as an associate professor. His research interest is in empirical industrial organization. In particular, his research focuses on understanding real-world decisions by firms (e.g., pricing, collusion, wage-setting, bidding in auctions) and consumers (e.g., product choices, schooling) in strategic environments with informational frictions. Before his appointment at Washington University, he taught at the University of Virginia and the Australian National University. His work has been published in top economic journals such as the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Econometrics, and the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics.
Grace Junhui Yan Johnson joins the Department of Economics as a lecturer. Johnson began teaching in the department in 2016, and she enjoys teaching students in a diverse range of economics courses and working with students as an adviser and mentor. Her research areas are development economics, applied microeconomics, and health economics; projects include examinations of medical tourism in South Korea, brain drain from China, and CEO power of public companies. Johnson received her doctorate from Oklahoma State University and has taught at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa, Lindenwood University, and Saint Louis University. She also spent several years in the private sector working in international business.
Department of Political Science
Matthew Hayes joins the Department of Political Science as an associate professor. His current research investigates how citizens evaluate the importance of descriptive, symbolic, and substantive representation. Hayes has also published on redistricting and legislative responsiveness, the role of ethnic identity and skin tone in determining perceptions of ethnic discrimination in Latin America, and how personality shapes political trust. Before joining the faculty at Washington University, he earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois and taught at Rice University and Indiana University.
Lucia Motolinia joins the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. Motolinia earned her doctorate from New York University. Her research aims to understand how electoral institutions affect political behavior, with an emphasis on the mechanisms driving the behavior of individual politicians and parties. She combines observational data, natural experiments, and text-analysis to study the way electoral institutions affect important political outcomes such as political selection, party cohesion, and distributive politics. Motolinia’s research has appeared in or is forthcoming in The American Political Science Review, World Politics and Electoral Studies
Diana O’Brien joins the Department of Political Science as a professor. O’Brien’s research and teaching focuses on the causes and consequences of women's political representation in established democracies, including Western Europe and the United States, and across the globe. Specifically, she studies gender and political parties, legislative politics, and executive branch politics, as well as citizens' responses to women's presence in politics. She is also the founding editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Gender and Politics Series. She has served as an associate editor at Politics & Gender, president of the Midwest Women’s Caucus, and executive board member of the APSA Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section.
Anna M. Wilke joins the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. Her research uses experimental methods and formal theory to study the comparative politics of developing countries, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Wilke has conducted field work in South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia. Her current research focuses on policing, crime, and gender. Prior to her appointment at Washington University, she earned her doctorate from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) at the University of California.
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Alexander S. Hatoum joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as a research assistant professor. Hatoum studies the causes of psychiatric disorders for predicting and classifying individuals. This includes analysis of large-scale medical data sets and integration across many different fields using biostatistics and machine learning. His current focus is on substance use disorders and substance co-diagnosis of other psychiatric conditions. Hatoum earned his doctorate from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and since 2019 has been a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University.
Seanna Leath joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. Her research uses interdisciplinary approaches in education and psychology to understand and address issues related to the holistic development of Black women and girls in the context of families, schools, and communities. Specifically, her work focuses on how individual and contextual factors promote Black women and girls’ academic achievement and psychological wellbeing. She earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan and taught at the University of Virginia before coming to WashU.
Jessie Sun joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. Sun earned her doctorate from the University of California, Davis. Her research aims to understand how people can balance the pursuit of personal well-being with broader moral concerns. Sun’s main lines of research include examining which kinds of social interactions matter for well-being, studying the causes and consequences of moral improvement, and investigating the psychological connections and tradeoffs between well-being and morality. She uses a range of naturalistic methods to study people in the real-world contexts, including experience sampling, audio recordings of people’s everyday conversations, informant reports, and daily life interventions.
Emily Willroth joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. Willroth’s current research examines how different components of well-being, such as emotion, life satisfaction, and sense of purpose vary and change across time, both in the short-term from moment-to-moment and in the long-term across the adult lifespan. She applies insights from this research to examine links between well-being and important health outcomes in middle and older adulthood, such as chronic illness, mortality, and dementia risk. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.
Department of Sociology
Elizabeth Korver-Glenn joins the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor. Korver-Glenn’s research focuses on racial inequality within urban contexts. Specifically, she studies how contemporary cities and markets reproduce racial inequality as well as how public policy maintains or can mitigate such inequality. To date, her research has focused on urban housing and rental markets using qualitative research methods. She recently published a book, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America (2021, Oxford University Press). She previously held a faculty position at the University of New Mexico and was a Robert K. Merton Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University.
Kiara Wyndham-Douds joins the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor. Using methods ranging from causal inference to ethnography, their research examines mechanisms that create and sustain racial inequality in contemporary American society. Their current research focuses on the intertwined nature of race and space to investigate the spatial production of racial inequality in suburbs. This work includes projects on Black suburbs, municipal incorporation, and a book examining racial inequality in highly diverse suburbs. Wyndham-Douds' research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and more.
