Weinberg College welcomes new faculty members for 2025-2026 academic year

Shreeya Behera
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: The Ohio State University
Previous title and institution: Data Scientist at Pandora Bio, Inc.
Home department: Statistics and Data Science

Shreeya Behera is a mathematician and data scientist with a proven track record in both academic and industry settings. Her research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, and machine learning. She is dedicated to advancing mathematics education and promoting student mental well-being. Her doctoral research focused on variants of the chromatic number of the plane over finite fields, and she established new lower bounds on the chromatic number of multi-distance graphs using probabilistic methods. At PandoraBio Inc., she contributed to the development of machine learning models for early detection and personalized support in young adults’ mental and behavioral health. In addition, she is an accomplished educator, recognized for her inclusive teaching practices and strong mentorship.

 

Ankit Bhardwaj
College Fellow/Assistant Professor
PhD institution: New York University
Home department: Sociology

Ankit Bhardwaj is an environmental sociologist who uses qualitative methods to research how democracies respond to climate change. Studying how cultural norms of deliberation shape climate action, his current book project details the case of New York’s ambitious emission reduction mandate, building on his research on India’s climate governance. Alongside developing a sociology of climate change, his work contributes to debates on the relationship between democracy and expertise, infrastructure governance, and environmental politics.

 

Keva Bui
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: University of California, San Diego
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Home department: Asian American Studies

Keva X. Bui (they/them) is a scholar of war and US empire, science and technology, and anti-war social movements with specific focus on the US Cold War in Asia and the Pacific. Their current book project examines how the research and development of weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War proliferated new forms of racial knowledge production that structure the US military-industrial complex. Additionally, the book traces how anti-war social movements have contested the alignment of scientific knowledge production and US imperialism in pursuit of decolonial and anti-militarist futures. Their writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies, Frontiers, Amerasia, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and the SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies.

 

Lexie Cook
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Columbia University
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at University of Durham (UK)
Home department: Spanish and Portuguese

Lexie Cook is a specialist in the written, material, and performative cultures that connected Iberian and West African historical worlds in the early modern period.
Drawing on a corpus of texts and objects that European imperialism and commerce in West Africa put into circulation, her book-in-progress – Before the Fetish – tells the story of how a medieval Portuguese concept of instrumental magic came to define as “fetishes” a corpus of African forms that smuggled sacred power into the marketplace and defied the demand for a clear separation between commercial and religious spheres. Against a backdrop of intensifying commerce and slaving along the Rivers of Guinea and the Gold Coast, the book traces how the regulatory idea of the feitiço offered a language for thinking about the morality of exchange in material terms and was only later refashioned into an object-oriented theory of Africa’s unique condition of unreason.

 

Alexander Coppock
Associate Professor
PhD institution: Columbia University
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor (on Term) at Yale University
Home department: Political Science
Joint department: Institute for Policy Research

Alexander Coppock is associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at the Institution for Policy Research. He is the author of Persuasion in Parallel, which synthesizes evidence from 23 randomized experiments to show that even groups that differ tremendously in their baseline attitudes change their minds in response to new information quite similarly. Coppock is also the coauthor of Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign, a research design textbook that introduces a language for describing research designs and an algorithm for evaluating their properties. His current work assesses the generalizability of empirical research findings through meta-reanalysis.

 

Jesse Gordon
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Johns Hopkins University
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University
Home department: Chemistry

Jesse Gordon’s research applies the principles of physical inorganic chemistry to advance efficient, selective, and sustainable approaches in energy catalysis and chemical synthesis. His work focuses on overcoming fundamental challenges in bond activation and electron transfer, which are central to energy conversion and modern synthetic chemistry, by integrating transition-metal and organometallic chemistry with photochemical and electrochemical strategies. Key areas of his research include developing sustainable nitrogen-based fuels, unlocking new modes of synthesis that rely on abundant chemical feedstocks, and designing novel light-harvesting materials. These efforts are rooted in the pursuit of understanding the mechanisms that underpin these complex chemical transformations.

 

Jiayi Lu
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Stanford University
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania
Home department: Linguistics

Jiayi Lu specializes in syntax and psycholinguistics. The central question of Jiayi’s research is how linguistic input can shape speakers’ syntactic knowledge and language use. In his dissertation, Jiayi examined the underlying mechanism of the syntactic satiation effect: the effect whereby repeated exposure to ungrammatical sentences increases speakers’ acceptability ratings for such sentences. His more recent work examines how speakers of different languages come to acquire different syntactic knowledge from input, and how the systematic variation across languages can be explained by a combination of syntactic principles, the variability in the input data children are exposed to, and a learning mechanism that allows generalization from observed structures to unobserved ones.

 

Marcus Michelen
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: University of Pennsylvania
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at University of Illinois, Chicago
Home department: Mathematics

Marcus Michelen is a mathematician whose research explores the intersection of probability and combinatorics. Much of his work focuses on understanding the behavior of large or high-dimensional random structures, such as random sphere packings and random polynomials. He also enjoys using probabilistic thinking in order to study problems in combinatorics, analysis and other subfields of mathematics.

 

Zavier Nunn
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: The University of Oxford
Previous title and institution: Mellon Fellow, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University
Home department: History
Joint Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies

Zavier Nunn is a historian of trans subjectivity and the governing of sex/change. He specializes in the formation and administration of medical and legal transition in Weimar and Nazi Germany.
Contestations at the centre of debates on trans identity in the United States and Europe are run through with claims to history. Sensationalist and fear-inducing media portrayals of trans people as novel and a form of social contagion are often contrasted by a liberal positioning of transgender inclusion as the fulfilment of a progressive march towards sexual and gender equality, assertions that sometimes depend on a universal category of trans identity. But people on both sides of the aisle push trans existence outside of historical reality. Nunn’s work historicizes transness in its modern arrangement.

 

Alexandra Montero Peters
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: University of Chicago
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Texas State University
Home department: History

Alexandra Montero Peters is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean world, specifically the intellectual exchange between Iberia, North Africa, and the Near East. She researches the porousness of medieval boundaries, particularly how textual and intellectual traditions traversed religious, cultural, and racial boundaries in a period that has long been mischaracterized as insular and stagnant. Working primarily with Arabic and Castilian manuscripts from the multi-confessional, multilingual, and multicultural world of medieval Iberia, Alexandra explores how such costly objects, which were often diplomatic gifts or part of royal patrimony, reveal a wider web of intellectual exchange between Christian and Islamic milieus. Manuscripts that synthesize and combine information from both of these communities record the crossroads—both literal and literary—of these overlapping worlds. She is currently working on these themes in her first book, entitled Representations of Power: Alfonso X, the “Book of Games,” and the Islamic Tradition, and she has article-length publications that investigate the rich historical universes captured on medieval parchment.

 

Amanda Roca
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: Northwestern University
Previous title and institution: Laboratory Manager-Teaching Program at Arizona State University
Home department: Molecular Biosciences

Amanda Roca is a cell biologist whose research examines the molecular mechanisms that ensure accurate chromosome segregation. She has investigated how female eggs detect meiotic errors and how the post-translational modification SUMOylation regulates protein complex assembly during cell division. In addition to her research, Amanda brings expertise in managing undergraduate chemistry and biology teaching laboratories and increasing engagement in molecular and cellular biology courses. At Northwestern, she looks forward to applying this experience to support undergraduate education.

 

 

Tsering Samdrup
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: SOAS, University of London
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Leeds, UK Lector of Tibetan at University of Bonn, Germany
Home department: Asian Languages and Cultures

Tsering Samdrup holds a PhD in Tibetan Studies. His research focuses on the pragmatics of Tibetan language in both historical and contemporary contexts. His current work examines Tibetan proverbs through textual, pragmatic, and folkloric approaches, exploring how their performance shapes Tibetan culture and how they continue to adapt and endure in the digital era.

 

 

 

Kunal Sangani
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Harvard
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford GSB
Home department: Economics

Kunal Sangani is a macroeconomist. His research focuses on topics such as inflation, aggregate productivity, and firm behavior. He uses empirical analysis of large datasets on consumer and firm decisions to inform macroeconomic models.

 

Alexander Smith
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Harvard
Previous title and institution: Clay Fellow at UCLA
Home department: Mathematics

Alexander Smith is a number theorist who is best known for his results in arithmetic statistics, including work on the distribution of Mordell-Weil ranks in families of elliptic curves. He is also interested in analytic number theory and class field theory more broadly. His work exhibits a particular focus on elementary problems with deep solutions.

 

Chiara Sotis
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Previous title and institution: LSE Fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science
Home department: Economics

Chiara Sotis is passionate about both the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of people’s decisions and their implications for welfare and well-being. She designs theory-informed experiments and surveys to study how individuals process information and form policy preferences. She is interested in behavioral and cognitive economics and how people can better understand and use complex information to make better decisions. She collaborates with the OECD’s SWACHE working group and her economic valuation studies have directly informed international organizations and policy changes in the EU.

 

 

Elizabeth Thom
College Fellow/ Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Harvard University
Home department: Political Science
Joint Department: Program in Environmental Policy and Culture

Elizabeth Thom is a political scientist who studies social and climate policy, political economy, and place-based inequality in the United States. Her research agenda focuses on the ways that major economic and social transformations reshape local community contexts, policy dynamics, and political behavior. She examines these issues using a range of methods and data sources, including in-depth field work, interviews, archives, and administrative records. Her current book project explores the policy responses to extractive industry decline in Appalachia and their consequences for both individuals and communities. She is also engaged in policy-oriented research on community-driven, regional strategies for the U.S. energy transition.

 

Jakub Witaszek
Assistant Professor
PhD institution: Imperial College London
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Princeton University
Home department: Mathematics

Jakub Witaszek’s work lies at the intersection of algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, and arithmetic geometry. His primary interests include algebraic geometry in positive and mixed characteristics, the Minimal Model Program, as well as singularities arising in birational geometry, commutative algebra, and Hodge theory.

 

 

Shengbin Ye
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: Rice University
Home department: Statistics and Data Science

Shengbin Ye’s current research focuses on developing interpretable machine learning methods to uncover structure in complex systems. Ye is particularly interested in symbolic regression for discovering concise, human-interpretable equations that explain patterns in data. Owing to its NP-hard nature, Ye is leveraging statistical techniques, such as nonparametric variable selection, to improve the efficiency and scalability of symbolic regression.

 

Bo Zhang
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: University of Connecticut
Previous title and institution: Lecturer at Loyola University Chicago
Home department: Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences

Bo Zhang’s research uses geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing to analyze how Earth’s surface is changing and how those changes interact with human society. He is interested in integrating satellite data and field measurements to study land use and land cover change, urban expansion, and vegetation dynamics from local to global scales.

 

Jieyu Zhou
Assistant Professor of Instruction
PhD institution: University of Washington, Seattle
Home department: Asian Languages and Cultures

Jieyu Zhou specializes in Chinese Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Her research investigates how learners acquire challenging features of Chinese, particularly for native English speakers, to inform effective pedagogical approaches that enhance learning outcomes. Her published work includes studies on the written syntactic complexity of adult Chinese learners and the narrative skills of Chinese-English bilingual children. Her current project examines the acquisition of formal collocations in Chinese by intermediate and advanced learners, with direct applications to classroom instruction.