2025 Distinguished Associate Professors
Announcing the 2025 Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professors!
Each year since 2016, deans, departments, and similar units nominate deserving colleagues as Provost Distinguished Associate Professors. A committee of distinguished senior faculty, chaired by Chandan Vaidya, Vice Provost for Faculty, reviews the applicants.
Georgetown uses the designation to honor Associate Professors who are performing at extraordinarily high levels. These designations are term-limited with a maximum duration of five years or until promotion to full professor. As indicated below, their work exemplifies what makes Georgetown strong – faculty thoroughly engaged in pushing the envelope of knowledge in their field and transmitting their passion for such work to their students and the general public.
The Provost Office is pleased to announce the 2025 Distinguished Associate Professors:
Dr. Qiwei (Britt) He is Associate Professor in the Program of Data Science and Director of the AI-Measurement and Data Science (AIMD) Lab at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is also affiliated with the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. He has a Ph.D in Psychometrics and Data Science from the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Dr. He’s research spans education, psychology, psychiatry, and public health, by leveraging new data sources in educational measurement with innovative data science methods. She aims to identify individuals’ latent traits and problem- solving strategies by sequence mining, text mining, psychometric modeling, and machine learning using multimodal data sources, such as log-file process data (human-machine interactions), eye-tracking, virtual reality, and textual data. Her work, funded by grants from the Department of Education, is published in top-tier journals in education and psychometrics as well as in books. Her co-edited book, Process Data in Educational and Psychological Measurement, was awarded the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) Annual Award of Exceptional Achievement in 2023, a prestigious honor granted to one recipient annually. Most recently, she is the recipient of the Exemplary Paper Award in Adult Literacy and Education from the American Educational Research Association in 2023. Dr. He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Behavioral Data Science and is currently selected to serve on the committee charged with revising the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, jointly appointed by the American Educational Research Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, and the American Psychological Association.
Dr. He teaches graduate-level courses in data mining and adaptive measurement with artificial intelligence.
Mike Amezcua is an Associate Professor in the Department of History in the College of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Amezcua has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.
Dr. Amezcua works in the area of American urban ethnic studies, focusing on the socio-economic, cultural, and political experience, influence, and trajectory of Latinx Americans. His work breaks new ground in understanding Latinx impact on electoral politics in the 20th century and broadly, the role of Latinx communities in the United States’ post-Cold war economic life. His 2022 book, Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification won the 2023 First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the 2023 Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City & Regional Planning History, and the 2024 C.L.R. James Award given by the Working-Class Studies Association for the best book of the year for academic or general audiences, in addition to an Honorable Mention for Outstanding
Book on the History of Chicago by the Union League of Chicago. Dr. Amezcua’s scholarship also includes articles in top-tier journals in political history as well as public media outlets such The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, and Zócalo. Dr. Amezcua is the recipient of the 2024-2025 Roger W. Gerguson Jr. and Annette L. Nazareth Fellowship in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Dr. Amezcua serves on Editorial Board of the Journal of American Ethnic History and is a member of the Scholars Council of the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute.
Dr. Amezcua’s teaching includes an undergraduate survey course on Latinx history, and upper class and graduate seminars on socio-economic and political-cultural history of the United States.
Janet (Ruoran) Gao is LaPeyre Family Associate Professor in Finance in the McDonough School of Business. She has a Ph.D. in Finance from Cornell University.
Dr. Gao’s interdisciplinary research tackles topics related to empirical corporate finance, such as the role of financial institutions in human capital mobility, greenwashing, and firms’ supply-chain relationships. Her work is relevant to academia as well as practitioners and policymakers. Dr. Gao was recognized by the McDonough School of Business with the 2024 Faculty Research Award, given to one faculty member annually for distinction in research productivity. Dr. Gao’s articles appear in Management Science, a top business journal, in addition to top-tier journals in finance and accounting. Her work has received Best paper awards, most recently in 2024 by the Fintech and Financial Institutions Research Conference. Her work is routinely cited by The Economist and Dow Jones. Dr. Gao serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Financial Intermediation, which are the leading journals in finance and banking.
Dr. Gao teaches courses in corporate finance, including the highly technical course on Valuation, that prepares students for jobs in banking and investment.
Shaun Brinsmade is Associate Professor in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences. He is affiliated with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Georgetown University Medical Center and the Global Infectious Disease Program. He has a Ph.D in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a post-doctoral fellowship from Tufts University.
Dr. Brinsmade works on the Staph bacteria, commonly found on the skin and in the nose, which is one of the top five infectious microbes that cause millions of deaths worldwide. Incidence of deadly antibiotic-resistant Staph are rising, particularly in hospital acquired infections. He uses cutting-edge and genome-wide approaches including Next Generation Sequencing and Mass-Spectrometry-based metabolomics to uncover ways in which Staph causes disease. His research has uncovered the role of nutrients such as fatty acids, in intracellular signaling to impact expression of toxins and other virulence genes. Dr. Brinsmade’s laboratory has been continuously funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health, where he mentors postdoctoral, doctoral, and undergraduate students in the interdisciplinary methods of genetics and biochemistry. Dr, Brinsmade’s research is highly cited and appears in top-tier journal in microbiology and biochemistry. Her serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Bacteriology, and Frontiers in Microbiology and Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology. He is Chair-elect of the 2025 Wind River Conference on Prokaryotic Biology.
Dr. Brinsmade teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in microbiology, biochemistry, and global health.