Please welcome the 29 new faculty of Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences for the academic year of 2024-2025!
Marta Agüero Guerra
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: University of New York University of Iowa and Universidad de Salamanca
Previous title and institution: Lecturer at Binghamton University–State
Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
Marta Agüero Guerra’s research areas include multimodality, humor studies, pragmatics, and second/foreign language pedagogy. In her works, she explores multimodal narratives that comment on contemporary political and social realities in Spain, Argentina, and among the Hispanic populatio ns in the US, both from a cultural and a linguistic perspective. Her book, Representaciones de la infancia en el comic: de la nostalgia al compromiso social (University of Leon Press, 2023), analyzes how comics and graphic novels portray diverse childhoods, and give visibility to topics such as identity, migration, human rights, and social justice. Additional research and teaching interests include second language acquisition, service-learning, and Spanish for the professions.
Sokhieng Au
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
Previous title and institution: Interim Director and Lecturer, Global Health Studies at University of Iowa
Home department: Global Health Studies Program
Sokhieng Au is a medical historian and public health practitioner focused on health and illness in the Global South. Her research examines medicine and disease broadly in both contemporary and historical perspectives, with particular focus on (cultural, scientific, technical) exchanges/interventions and global inequities in health. She is an area specialist in Southeast Asia and Central Africa. Her first monograph was a study of French colonial medicine in Cambodia. Her two most recent publications examined Belgian colonial medicine in the Congo and present-day antibiotic overuse in Afghanistan.
Noah Chaskin
Assistant Professor of Instruction/Academic Advisor
PhD institution: Northwestern University
Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University
Home department: English
Noah Chaskin researches the representation and construction of femininity in eighteenth-century literature through the lens of queer theory and disability studies. Focusing on narrative structure, their work explores how form affects content, particularly in cases where narrative form may subvert a text’s apparent, or even stated, intent; for example, where form may queer a heterosexual plot or undermine the protagonism of an ill heroine. Chaskin’s work has been published in Women’s Writing, Modern Philology, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Their latest chapter, “Ill Femininities and the Problem of Protagonism in Jane Austen’s Novels” is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies in Literature.
Kalisha Cornett
Assistant Professor of Instruction/Academic Advisor
PhD institution: University of Chicago
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor of Instruction in the School of Communication, Northwestern University
Home department: English
Kalisha Cornett’s research is primarily concerned with the political and aesthetic representation of space in post-classical Hollywood Cinema. She is also interested in the influence of art, advertising, and mass culture on American cinema of the counterculture/Vietnam era. Her research focuses on the ways in which various aesthetic practices influenced emerging modes of American independent cinema of the 1970s. Her teaching interests include the history of Hollywood and genre theory.
Jeremy Davis
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: Indiana University
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Loyola University Chicago
Home department: Department of Molecular Biosciences
Jeremy Davis is an evolutionary biologist and ecologist who seeks to understand the mechanisms driving biodiversity, with a particular focus on plant-insect systems. Plant-feeding insects represent an immense amount of Earth’s biodiversity, and understanding their ecology and evolution is pivotal for improved environmental stewardship. Jeremy’s published work has combined field studies, chemical ecology, and population genomics to answer fundamental questions about speciation and adaptation in such systems. Jeremy brings this expertise to Northwestern, where he will be teaching genetics and evolution and hopes to inspire the next generation to better appreciate the diversity of life around them.
Gustavo Diaz
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University
Home department: Political Science
Profile: https://www.gustavodiaz.org/
Gustavo Diaz is a political scientist who specializes in quantitative methods in the social sciences. His research develops standards to navigate research design tradeoffs in the social sciences, with emphasis on tools from causal inference and computational social science. His substantive work applies these ideas to the challenges to accountability, governance, and representation in the Global South and beyond.
Sarah Dimick
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Harvard University
Home department: English
Joint program: Program in Environmental Policy and Culture
Sarah Dimick (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on portrayals of climate change and environmental justice in contemporary Anglophone literatures. Her first book, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures will be published by Columbia University Press in October 2024. Sarah’s writing has appeared in journals including ISLE, Contemporary Literature, Post45: Contemporaries, Mosaic, and other venues. She currently serves as a co-editor for Under the Sign of Nature, a book series in the environmental humanities published by University of Virginia Press.
Juan Du
Professor
PhD institution: University of Freiburg
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at Van Andel Institute
Home department: Molecular Biosciences
Joint program: Pharmacology
Profile: https://www.dululabs.com
Juan Du’s research explores the molecular mechanisms that enable the human body to sense and respond to external stimuli, particularly how we detect and respond to different temperatures. Temperature sensation is crucial for survival, guiding our responses to environmental changes and protecting us from harm. Her lab focuses on understanding how neuronal ion channel receptors detect temperature changes and convey these signals to the brain. Using techniques such as cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) and patch-clamp electrophysiology, the lab seeks to illuminate the processes underlying temperature regulation and its broader implications, including pain perception. This research not only deepens our understanding of these essential biological functions but also informs the development of new therapies for pain.
Sarah Eisen
College Fellow
PhD institution: Harvard University
Home department: Classics
Sarah A. Eisen (PhD, Harvard University, 2024) is an archaeologist and cultural historian specializing in the artistic and religious practices of Archaic and Classical Greece. Her first book project examines how and why the senses were engaged during the ritual of animal sacrifice and explores how a deeper examination of this ritual’s phenomenological experience can illuminate ancient Greek theological ideas about the gods and how they were conceptualized to interact with humans. The book offers a critical reconstruction of the embodied experience of religion to get closer to the answer of why sacrifice was so integral to Greek life and religion. Sarah’s other research interests include the construction of gender and sexuality in the ancient world, the lived experiences of non-citizen populations, and how ancient material culture is displayed in museum contexts for educational programming.
Bihter Esener
College Fellow
PhD institution: Koç University
Previous title and institution: Lecturer I of Medieval Mediterranean and Islamic Art at the University of Michigan
Home department: Art History
Profile: https://www.besener.com/
Bihter Esener (she/her/hers) is an art historian of the visual and material cultures of the medieval Islamic world, with a special interest in Armenian, Byzantine, and Persian-Islamic artistic exchange and cultural encounters in medieval Anatolia, the South Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her dissertation, which she is currently transforming into a book, contextualized bronze mirrors within the lives of the inhabitants of medieval Anatolia by considering their various functions in personal adornment and their use in devotional, divinatory, and talismanic practices during the Seljuk period, i.e., between the late eleventh and early fourteenth centuries.
Before joining Northwestern, Prof. Esener was a lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, where she taught courses on the Art and Architecture of the Mediterranean, Istanbul Through the Ages, Sports and Art, and Medievalism in Video Games. Moreover, she is one of the founding members of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, for which she serves as Digital Technologies Manager, as well as an assistant editor at the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA).
Andrew Fink
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Columbia University
Previous title and institution: Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University
Home department: Neurobiology
Joint department: NUIN PhD program
Profile: https://sites.northwestern.edu/finklab
Andrew Fink is an experimental neurobiologist interested in uncovering fundamental principles that govern learning and memory. To do this, he takes advantage of the impressive and delightful capacity of rodents to explore and learn about the smells of their worlds. He has developed experimental approaches that permit longterm observation and precise quantification of this behavior, while simultaneously measuring neuronal activity and synaptic connectivity. His goal is to capture how experience alters the synaptic connectivity and function of a cortical network in order to gain insight into how those changes produce learning and long-lasting memory.
He is inspired by the elegant discoveries of early twentieth-century experimental psychologists, who showed that animals can readily learn the structure of a world simply because it exists before them (e.g. Edward Tolman’s latent learning or Wilfred Brogden’s sensory preconditioning). He seeks to apply the rigor and beauty of synaptic physiology and neuronal biophysics to the question of how the brain’s hardware can produce this impressive cognitive faculty.
Stephanie Fryberg
Professor
PhD institution: Stanford University
Previous title and institution: Professor of Psychology at University of Michigan
Home department: Psychology
As an Indigenous person who grew up in her tribal community (Tulalip Tribes), Dr. Fryberg aspires to use research to improve the life opportunities of children in her community and in other similar communities across the country. Following Kurt Lewin—a social psychological founder—her research is motived by the belief that the best way to understand a social phenomenon is to try to change it. Specifically, her research focus is three-fold. The first two questions have been central throughout her academic career: 1) How do social representations—that are either limiting and negative (i.e., commissions) or that erase or omit (i.e., omissions) the existence and contributions of groups in society—differentially influence self-understanding for minority and majority group members; and 2) How do culture-relevant (vs. culturally mismatched) social representations influence motivation and performance in consequential domains such as education and health. After years of building theory, conducting research studies, and spending time in the field where it was clear to Dr. Fryberg that many of psychology’s most significant findings have yet to be translated and tested for their relevance in the field, her research focus shifted toward putting research into action. Specifically, she asks: 3) How can we translate research to develop interventions that interrupt and reconfigure socio-cultural spaces—such as education, media, and law—to improve outcomes and make real world change for racial minority and low-income individuals?
Alba Girons
Associate Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: Autonomous University of Barcelona
Previous title and institution: Associate Senior Instructional Professor at University of Chicago
Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
Alba Girons holds a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies. Her teaching and research is driven by inclusivity and the idea of making language learning accessible to the widest possible audience. Her co-authored monograph, Teaching Languages in Blended Synchronous Learning Environments: A Practical Guide (Georgetown University Press, 2020), is an example of how she offers her passion for accessibility and inclusivity in language teaching to her professional community. Her interest in utilizing technology to increase language learning accessibility has led to her participation in numerous workshops, lectures, and conferences.
Rachel Greenfeld
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Bar Ilan University
Previous title and institution: Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Home department: Mathematics
Profile: https://rgreenfeld.math.northwestern.edu/
Rachel Greenfeld works in harmonic analysis, additive combinatorics, discrete geometry, and related areas. She is particularly interested in structure theory for tilings and other special configurations, spectral problems, and the relationships between them.
Usman Hamid
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: University of Toronto
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Hamilton College
Home department: Religious Studies
A historian of Islam, Usman Hamid specializes in the study of early modern South Asia and its connections with Iran, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. His current research project examines how the circulation of people, objects, and texts between Hindustan and the Hejaz shaped Muslim devotion to the Prophet Muhammad in North India. Previous to this work, he has published on the history of royal concubinage in late fifteenth century Iran and Central Asia and edited a collection of essays focusing on the circulation of Iranians in early modern South Asia. Hamid’s research has been supported by the J.W. McConnell Foundation and Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada.
Katie Insel
Assistant Professor of Psychology
PhD institution: Harvard University
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute
Home department: Psychology
Katie Insel studies child and adolescent brain development to better understand how youth learn, make decisions, and pursue their goals. Her research investigates how kids and teens build cognitive skills to handle the challenges of daily life. She also examines the links between brain development and wellbeing to explain why adolescence coincides with a sudden rise in mental health disorders. She directs the CATS Lab, and her lab uses multimodal approaches, including novel behavioral tasks, functional neuroimaging (fMRI), and computational modeling. Insel is committed to translating science to inform policy, and she works with policy-makers, lawyers, educators, and clinicians to help translate basic science to inform real world applications.
Insel’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health. Before joining Northwestern, Insel was a postdoctoral fellow working at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute.
Sylvester Johnson
Professor
PhD institution: Union Theological Seminary
Previous title and institution: Associate Vice Provost for Public Interest Technology & Director, Center for Humanities Virginia Tech
Home department: Department of Black Studies
Sylvester Johnson’s research has examined religion, race, and empire in the Atlantic world; religion and sexuality; national security practices in the United States; and the impact of intelligent machines and human enhancement on human identity and race.
Sylvester is the author of The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (Palgrave 2004), a study of race and religious hatred that won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book award; and African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge 2015), an award-winning interpretation of five centuries of democracy, colonialism, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson has also co-edited The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11 (University of California 2017) and Religion and US Empire (NYU Press 2022). He is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. Sylvester is currently writing a book on human identity in an age of intelligent machines and human-machine symbiosis.
Jennifer Jones
Associate Professor
PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at University of Illinois Chicago
Home department: Sociology
Profile: http://www.jenniferajones.me/
Jennifer Jones is a sociologist whose research lies at the intersection of the sociology of race, immigration, and politics. Throughout her scholarship, she examines how race “works”, exploring the relationship between categorical ascription (e.g., checking a box or how one is perceived) and meaning-making (e.g., identity or feeling a sense of group belonging). She is the author of The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press 2019), which examined immigrant integration, racial change, and shifting intergroup relations in the newly triracial community of Winston-Salem, NC. Her second book manuscript (in progress), co-authored with Hana Brown, investigates how distinctive racial ideologies structure the work of immigrant-serving organizations across four Southern states and with what consequences.
Michael W. Kraus
Professor, Morton O. Schapiro IPR Faculty Fellow
PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology (by courtesy) at Yale University
Home department: Psychology
Laboratory: www.csinequality.org
Michael Kraus is a social psychologist who studies how motivations, emotional states, and behaviors maintain and perpetuate societal inequality. He studies these topics through a variety of methods that include qualitative interviews, archival data, survey panels, and experiments conducted in both laboratory and field settings. Dr. Kraus conducts this research with a team of students and trainees at the contending with societal inequality lab. Dr. Kraus received his undergraduate degree in psychology and sociology and his graduate degree in social psychology from UC Berkeley.
Wei Lu
Professor
PhD institution: University of Freiburg
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at Van Andel Institute
Home department: Molecular Biosciences
Joint program: Pharmacology
Profile: https://dululabs.com
Recognizing the six basic tastes—sweet, bitter, sour, salty, umami, and fat—not only allows us to enjoy the variety of flavors in our food but also plays a vital role in guiding us toward nutritious choices while helping us avoid potentially harmful substances. Taste receptors, which detect these flavors, are not limited to our tongues but are also found in various parts of the body, where they influence critical processes like metabolism and immune response. Wei Lu’s research focuses on understanding how taste signaling occurs and how it impacts broader aspects of health. By employing techniques like structural biology and electrophysiology, the lab aims to uncover the intricate mechanisms of taste perception and its implications for metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune-related diseases, paving the way for novel therapeutic approaches.
Wílmar López-Barrios
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Previous title and institution: Spanish Teaching Associate at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
Profile: https://wilmarlopez-barrios.netlify.app
Wílmar López-Barrios specializes in prosody—the music of language. His research lies at the intersection of Second Language Acquisition and Language Contact, as the latter complements and nurtures the former. In the same vein, Wílmar has studied the prosody of Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals disentangling the melodies of African origin from those induced by contact with the majority language. In the classroom, he recreates communicative contexts that emulate diverse language contact situations, aiming to raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities involved in learning and maintaining minority languages, such as Spanish in United States or Palenquero in Colombia. His publications include “Language-specific Prosody in Statements of Palenquero/Spanish Bilinguals” (Languages, 2024); “Decline and Substitution of Spanish Future Subjunctive in Northwest and Southwest Colombia from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries” (Journal of Linguistic Geography, 2022); and he is currently writing the paper “Language Differentiation and Generational Effects on Yes/No Question Intonation in Palenquero/Spanish Bilinguals”.
Martin Naunov
College Fellow
PhD institution: UNC – Chapel Hill
Home department: Political Science
Joint program: Institute for Policy Research
Martin Naunov is a scholar of political behavior and psychology, with a focus on stereotyping, discrimination, and intergroup relations. His research explores how individuals respond to political actors—such as politicians and protesters—based on characteristics related to gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Naunov’s work also examines whether and how prevailing experimental approaches to studying identities might lead social scientists to misinterpret the extent and nature of prejudice against minority communities. Methodologically, Naunov is especially interested in the use of audio-based experiments.
Garima Sharma
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University
Home department: Economics
Profile: https://garimasharma.com/
Garima Sharma’s research focuses on development and labor economics, with a particular interest in studying market power and gender in the labor markets in developing countries, and the role of social protection in improving the lives of the poor.
Gordon Smith
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: University of Arizona
Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College
Home department: Plant Biology and Conservation
Profile: https://gosmith2.github.io/
Gordon Smith is an ecologist interested in the role of within-species variation in species interactions, especially plant-pollinator mutualisms. His research explores questions such as how small differences scale up to affect whole plant-pollinator networks and how pollinator behavior has changed over historical time. In addition to teaching, at Northwestern his work will focus on the consequences of variation in plant-pollinator interactions using field work (including in museum collections), computational analyses, and behavioral experiments with hawkmoths.
Morgan Thompson
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: University of Pittsburgh
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University
Home department: Philosophy
Profile: http://www.morgankthompson.com/
Morgan Thompson specializes in philosophy of science, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. Her current work addresses issues in measurement and data collection, such as when and how racial/ethnic data should be collected in official statistics and the validity of self-report methods in social science. Her second research project concerns public participation in scientific research and calls for “democratizing science”.
Wei-Chun Wang
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: Northwestern University
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Bucknell University
Home department: Neurobiology
Wei-Chun Wang got her Master’s degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from National Taiwan University and completed her Ph.D. study at Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program. Her Ph.D. and postdoctoral research focused on how the nervous system controls locomotion using larval zebrafish as the model animal. She used a combination of electrophysiology, microscopy imaging, and behavioral studies to examine how different types of neurons function and connect so that the animal can perform diverse and appropriate behaviors. As an Assistant Professor of Biology at Bucknell University, she aimed to uncover conserved and specialized neural mechanisms of locomotor control by studying additional fish species.
She has developed and taught seminar courses on the gut-brain axis and developmental neurobiology and a CURE (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience) course on fish behavior and neuroscience. She is passionate about using active learning in her classes to promote critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork.
Kate Weisshaar
Associate Professor
PhD institution: Stanford University
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Home department: Sociology
Profile: http://www.kateweisshaar.com
Kate Weisshaar is a sociologist whose research focuses on the causes and consequences of gender, racial, and economic inequality in the United States. Her research falls under three specific areas: (1) the consequences of gendered work-family arrangements; (2) gendered evaluations in work organizations; and (3) gendered and racialized labor market outcomes. In the first area, she studies how the gendered organization of work and family in the United States can have short- and long-term consequences on individuals’ careers and work opportunities. In the second area, she studies how gendered beliefs can subtly shape work evaluations differently for men and women in organizations—leading to inequality in promotion, pay, and work assignments. In the third area, she examines how gender and race simultaneously shape labor market opportunities and how labor market context affects gender and racial inequality. Across her work, Weisshaar uses a range of research methods, primarily using quantitative and experimental methods, while also using qualitative methods for some projects.
Nicole Wilson
College Fellow
PhD institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Home department: Political Science
Profile: https://www.nicoleewilson.com
Nicole Wilson is a political scientist specializing in comparative politics. Her research explores how neighborhood-level characteristics, particularly social and leadership structures, shape the relationship between citizens and the state, with a focus on cities in the Global South. Her current book project considers how and why those who opt for private alternatives to public service delivery continue to engage with the state, drawing on the case of gated communities in Lagos, Nigeria. She is interested in developing field methods to access difficult-to-reach populations, primarily using surveys and administrative data. She also values working across subfields and disciplines and has done several projects related to housing and public opinion in the U.S. context.
Allen Yuan
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: MIT
Previous title and institution: Member at Institute for Advanced Study
Home department: Mathematics
Profile: https://www.allenyuan.me
Allen Yuan is interested in various aspects of algebraic topology, homotopy theory, and algebraic K-theory. In his thesis, he studied how one can capture the data of a space, or homotopy type, via algebraic means. His recent work has focused on the algebraic K-theory of ring spectra, and especially aspects of the chromatic redshift problem. Currently, he is exploring extensions of the Bhatt–Lurie–Drinfeld theory of prismatization to the setting of commutative ring spectra.