2022 Faculty Bios

Sarah Adel Bargal

Sarah Adel Bargal is an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow. Previously, she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science of Boston University, Co-director of AI4ALL at Boston University, and a member of the Image and Video Computing (IVC) Group. In 2019, she received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University. Her degrees in Computer Science include a Bachelor’s degree from Kuwait University, a Master’s degree from American University, Cairo, and a Ph.D. from Boston University.

Dr. Bargal’s research interests include machine learning, computer vision, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a focus on making artificial intelligence systems explainable and accountable to humans and society. She is a recipient of the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, Hariri Graduate Fellowship, Outstanding Teaching Fellow Award, among other recognitions. 

Sarah is currently serving as a guest editor for a special issue of the Frontiers in Computer Science Journal. Sarah’s research interests are in machine learning, computer vision, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a current focus on making artificial intelligence systems explainable and accountable to humans and society.

Nicolás Campisi

Nicolás Campisi is an incoming Assistant Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He works at the intersection of contemporary Latin American literature, visual arts, and the environmental humanities, and is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times. He received a BA in Art History and Hispanic Studies from Washington College, and an MA and Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University. Before coming to Georgetown, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University. Nicolás is originally from Argentina. In his free time, he likes to play tennis, watch soccer, visit art museums, and learn about the life of birds. His awards include the 2021 Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Award given by Brown University to the best dissertation in the Humanities, the 2021 best Dissertation Prize from the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University, and the 2019 Lyle Olsen Graduate Essay Prize awarded by the Sport Literature Association.

Melinda Gonzalez

Melinda Gonzalez, a socio-cultural anthropologist, is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. Following a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Rutgers’s University, she received a Ph.D. in Geography and Anthropology from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

Dr. Gonzalez works on racial, class, and gender disparities in the impact of environmental disasters. She uses decolonial and indigenous research methods to study new media technologies in environmental justice studies. Dr. Gonzalez is the 2021 Mary Fran Myers Gender and Disaster Award winner, which honors research on gender issues in disaster and emergency management. She is also a performance/spoken word poet who as performed internationally.

Dr. Gonzalez will be an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service.

Peggy Kyoungwon Lee

Peggy Kyoungwon Lee is a scholar in contemporary American literature, performance, and media. She is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research has been previously supported by pre- and post-doctoral fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

Dr. Lee’s current book project examines the politics, performance, and protest of composure for women of color during the rise of multicultural institutionalization in the US. Following her B.A. in Women’s Studies from UC Santa Barbara and M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, Dr. Lee earned her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 Dr. Lee will join as Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies in the Department of English at Georgetown University.

Johann LeGuelte

Johann Le Guelte, a cultural studies scholar, is assistant professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Francophone studies. He received his Master’s degree and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in French and Francophone Studies following a Master’s degree in French Language and Literature from Ohio University. From 2019 to 2022, he was assistant professor of French and Francophone studies and directed the French and Francophone studies program at Xavier University (Cincinnati). 

Dr. Le Guelte’s research focuses on visual culture, colonial history and propaganda, and critical race studies. His academic interests range from diaspora and migration studies, French and Francophone literatures, art history, media studies, and postcolonial history. His book in progress, Uncovering the Colonial Lens: Creation and Subversion of the French Visual Empire, examines the production and reception of colonial photographic propaganda to determine how state-sponsored photographs became official colonial information in the minds of many French citizens. His work explores the nuanced ways in which photography has been used both as a device for colonial propaganda in interwar France and a powerful mode of resistance for colonized peoples who used the camera to reclaim their subjugated identities. He is the recipient of the 2019 Alumni Association Dissertation Award from the Penn State Alumni Association and two awards for teaching excellence from Penn State.

In his free time, he enjoys reading, craft beer, horror films, spending time with family and cats, and unsuccessfully trying to start a collection of good wine bottles.

Kristia Wantchekon

Dr. Kristia Wantchekon is an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology and a Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Georgetown University. Broadly, her research seeks to integrate the literatures on context-embedded adolescent development, identity processes, and academic adjustment to understand the factors that inform ethno-racially minoritized adolescents’ positive development in and out of schools. She was awarded the 2017 Frances Degen Horowitz Millennium Scholar award from the Society for Research in Child Development. Kristia earned her B.A. from Yale University and received her Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University in Spring 2017. She received her Ph.D. in Human Development, Learning, and Teaching in Spring 2021 from Harvard University as well.

Melanie White

Melanie Y. White is a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Department of African American Studies and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her research and teaching interests include hemispheric Black feminist politics, Black diasporic women’s art, and the histories, politics, and visual cultures of Black Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book project traces a history of sexual and gender-based colonial violence against Black and Afro-Indigenous women and girls from what is today the Nicaraguan and Honduran Mosquitia. Linking this genealogy of racialized, gendered, and territorial dispossession with the centuries-long struggle for autonomy on the Mosquito Coast, White juxtaposes the history of intimate colonial violence in the region with the “counter-colonial intimacies” of Afro-Mosquitian women past and present. 

Specifically, she explores the historical record and contemporary artistic production to highlight Afro-Mosquitian women’s embodied and creative practices of colonial refusal and intimate autonomy. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Her work is published or forthcoming in Caribbean Quarterly, Latin American Music Review, The E3W Review of Books, and the edited volumes Critical Social Science Research on Black Women in the Americas and Black Feminisms Beyond Borders: Cultivating Knowledge, Solidarity, and Liberation. White has served as an instructor in the Departments of English and Africana Studies at Smith College, where she taught courses on Black diasporic women writers. 

Dr. White will be an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Program in Georgetown College.

Will Fleisher

Will Fleisher is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. He is also affiliated with the Center for Digital Ethics and the Initiative in Technology, Ethics, and Society. His areas of specialization are in the ethics of AI and in epistemology. Will’s research concerns the ethical, political, and epistemic implications of contemporary and near-term AI systems, particularly those developed using machine learning techniques. He has written about algorithmic fairness and explainable AI. He also maintains a research program in the epistemology of inquiry. His work has been published in AAAI/ACM conference proceedings and in leading philosophy journals, including Noûs, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy of Science. Before coming to Georgetown, Will was a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University and at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University.

Emily Hainze

Emily Hainze is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Prisons and Justice Initiative and directs the Writing Program for PJI’s Bachelor of Liberal Arts Program for incarcerated students. Her teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th-century U.S. literature, the history of race, gender, and incarceration in the U.S., and archival methods. She received her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. 

Brian Berkey

Brian Berkey is an Associate Professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from the Philosophy Department at UC-Berkeley in 2012, and has held positions at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Melbourne in addition to Penn and Georgetown. His research is in moral and political philosophy, and he has published articles on topics such as moral demandingness, individual and corporate obligations of justice, climate change ethics/justice, ethical consumerism, exploitation, effective altruism, and animal ethics/justice. For the 2022-23 academic year, he is Visiting Associate Professor at the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics.

William Sullivan

Dr. William F. Sullivan is the incoming Joseph P. Kennedy Senior Chair in Bioethics, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. He brings to this position qualifications and experience in family medicine and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Bioethics). Prior to this appointment,

he was a member of the St. Michael’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team, Toronto, Canada. His clinical and academic focus is on integrating ethics and primary care of people who are vulnerable in healthcare systems, especially adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). With colleagues, he has offered an interdisciplinary service consulting to other family physicians regarding their patients with IDD and complex needs.

For instance, as founding director of the Developmental Disabilities Primary Care Program of Surrey Place (DDPCP), Dr. Sullivan led work on the Primary Care of Adults with Intellectual Disabilities: Canadian Consensus Guidelines (Canadian Family Physician 2006, 2011, 2018) and various point-of-care tools and other resources to implement those guidelines. Dr. Sullivan has served as Chair of the College of Family Physicians of Canada’s Committee on Ethics. He has contributed to developing resources for teaching ethics in Family Medicine. He has also helped to develop and teach a part of the new undergraduate medical curriculum at the University of Toronto, e.g., a week in the second-year curriculum on ‘Complexity and Chronicity’.

Anita Rao

Anita Rao is an empirical marketing researcher. Her work focuses on causally measuring consumer reactions to deceptive practices: such as false claims, fake news ads, and misinformation. An underlying theme of her research is how research in marketing can be a valuable input to questions at the forefront of policymaking and how technology can enhance or reduce information asymmetry.

She is an associate editor for Quantitative Marketing and Economics and serves on the editorial board for Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research. She won the 2016 Bass award and was named a 2019 MSI Young Scholar. Anita holds a Ph.D. in marketing from Stanford University and an MS in transportation engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned a Bachelor of Technology in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Madras, India. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked in the Customer and Brand Science practice at Mercer Management Consulting.

Aishwarrya Deore

Aishwarrya (Ash) Deore joins Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business after graduating with a Ph.D. in Accounting from Michigan State University. She also has a Master’s in Finance from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. Her research focuses on management accounting, specifically on internal and external control systems as well as governance and regulatory mechanisms that affect organizational behaviors. She is interested in studying non-financial outcomes in organizations. She will be teaching the ACCT 102 (Intro to managerial accounting) class in the Fall. 

In her spare time, Ash likes to travel, read, cook, and watch movies.

Thomas Williams

Thomas Williams is the Isabelle A. and Henry D. Martin Professor of Medieval Philosophy. He comes to Georgetown from South Florida, where he taught for sixteen years and served for several years as the Canon Theologian of the Cathedral Church of St Peter in St Petersburg, Florida. He began his career with the Jesuits at Creighton University and is happy to be returning to the world of Jesuit education.

Thomas has written widely on medieval philosophy and theology, with particular interests in ethics, philosophy of religion, and the theology of atonement. His translations include Augustine’s Confessions (Hackett, 2019), John Duns Scotus: Selected Writings on Ethics (OUP, 2017), and Anselm: The Complete Treatises with Selected Letters and Prayers and the Meditation on Human Redemption (Hackett, 2022). His book on Anselm for OUP’s Very Short Introductions series is in press.

His husband, Marty Gould, is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida, specializing in Victorian literature. Thomas and Marty have an American Pit Bull Terrier named Tess.

Paul Treacy

Paul Treacy (he/him) earned a BA from Rice University, a Master of Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In between those academic pursuits, he worked in private sector human resources, was a creative writer at Hallmark Cards, and worked at the U.S. Department of Labor, helping write and implement rules to protect vulnerable workers. His research interests include labor and employment policy, particularly related to low-wage workers. 

Diana Dumitru

Dr. Diana Dumitru is Ion Ratiu Visiting Professor and Chair in Romanian Studies at Georgetown University. Her research interests include the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, nationality policies and antisemitism in the USSR, and late Stalinism and postwar trials in the Soviet Union. Dr. Dumitru has held multiple fellowships that include a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship for research at Georgetown University, a research fellowship at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a fellowship at Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, and a research fellowship at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg at Jena University in Germany. 

Currently, Dr. Dumitru is working on two projects: together with Chad Bryant and Kateřina Čapková, she is working on a book titled “The Trial that Shook the World: The Slánský Process and the Dynamics of Czechoslovak Stalinism,” a project supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and under contract with Oxford University Press. Simultaneously, Diana is working on her own book manuscript “Indispensable Yet Suspect: Soviet Jews under Late Stalinism.” Dr. Dumitru is an editorial board member of the scholarly journals Holocaust and Genocide Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and Journal of Genocide Research.

Qiuping Yu

Qiuping Yu conducts research on data-driven service operations with a focus on virtual queue management, labor scheduling, and fairness issues, and management of service networks. Besides applying various state-of-art empirical and analytical methods, Qiuping also develops frameworks that combine techniques from both casual inference and machine learning. Her research has been published in Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (MSOM), and Harvard Business Review and was given extensive coverage in media outlets, including the WSJ, Bloomberg Businessweek, and American Enterprise Institute. Her research was recognized with multiple awards and grants. Prior to joining Georgetown University, she was a faculty at Georgia Tech and Indiana University.

Kyle Shernuk

Kyle Shernuk is an Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. He is a scholar of modern and contemporary Sinophone literature and film, with a focus on disempowered and marginalized populations. His published works focus on issues of ethnicity, indigeneity, queerness, and language in global Chinese communities, and his current book project investigates the role of ethnicity in shaping contemporary ideas about Chinese identities.

Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Professor Khoja-Moolji is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in the fields of Muslim studies, feminist theory, South Asia, and migration studies. She is the author of two award-winning books. Professor Khoja-Moolji’s book Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia and Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan. 

Shenila is currently working on a book (under contract with the Oxford University Press) that traces the transnational lives of Ismaili Muslim women. The book follows their journeys, past, and present, from colonial India to East Africa and then onto North America. It outlines the everyday forms through which women create spaces of joy, forge community, and practice ethical subjectivities.

Professor Khoja-Moolji has published articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Theory, Feminist Media Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Gender and Education, Comparative Education Review, Girlhood Studies, Third World Quarterly, and Feminist Teacher, among others. She also maintains an active public scholarship agenda and has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, and The Express Tribune.

Benjamin Harrop-Griffiths

Benjamin Harrop-Griffiths is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His research focuses on the analysis of partial differential equations. In particular, he is interested in problems arising from the study of nonlinear waves and fluid dynamics. Before joining Georgetown, Benjamin was a Simons Junior Fellow at the Courant Institute, NYU, and a Hedrick Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCLA. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. When not doing mathematics, there is nothing Benjamin enjoys more than exploring the great outdoors with his wife, daughter, and greyhound.

Sophie Heller

Sophie Heller is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Georgetown’s Capitol Applied Learning Labs (CALL). Dr. Heller’s research examines 20th and 21st-century film representations of national trauma in Spain and Latin America. Her transatlantic study of contemporary debates surrounding historical memory in public and political discourse focuses primarily on identity formation in contemporary Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. Dr. Heller’s current book manuscript, The Child’s Gaze and the Politics of Memory and Mourning: Spatiality, Spectrality and Sound in Contemporary Spanish and Latin American Cinema, explores the cinematic child protagonist as it reveals the oppression of State-sponsored modes of erasing history. 

As part of the CALL, Dr. Heller guides Georgetown undergraduates in pre-professional coursework and advising which allows them to explore the use of Spanish in fields such as government, public policy, cultural studies, and consulting in the Washington DC area. Dr. Heller earned her Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 2021. She has taught Spanish at Georgetown for over 6 years and is a recipient of the Georgetown Faculty and Staff Champion for Student Success Award.

Ziwei Cong

Ziwei is an empirical marketing scientist working on large-scale causal behavior analytics, with a particular interest in the production and consumption of digital content. Ziwei’s current research focuses on questions related to monetizing user-generated content and the impact of platform policies (e.g., recommendation algorithms) on user behavior. In a broad sense, the goal of my research is to inform the decision-making of digital content creators and platforms by combining state-of-the-art machine learning methods with causal inference. Before joining Georgetown, I received a Bachelor and Mphil of Economics from Renmin University of China (2013, 2016), and a Ph.D. of Marketing from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2022).

Sicheng Wang

Sicheng Wang is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research interests include second language acquisition of Chinese, language pedagogy, and Chinese linguistics. Before joining Georgetown University, she taught Chinese language courses at various levels at the University of Iowa, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Duke University’s intensive summer program. Sicheng Wang received her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Iowa, an M.A. in Chinese linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as an M.A. in Chinese Philology and Linguistics from Nanjing University. She completed her B.A. in Chinese

Language and Literature at Jilin University. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, practicing meditation, and spending time with friends and family.

Kristen Rock

Dr. Kristin Rock is an applied linguist studying the ways in which explicit instruction and clearly communicated rubrics can help learners to succeed in acquiring additional languages and language varieties. Through the untangling of traditional and emerging digital genres, she expands students’ access to their chosen professional communities. An Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Rock values academic mentorship, and she brings more than 15 years of professional teaching experience to Georgetown University. In addition to a Ph.D. in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Rock holds a master’s degree in TESOL from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and a master’s degree in Spanish from Middlebury College. She also maintains a professional teaching license with the State of Colorado in elementary education, K-12 Spanish, and linguistically diverse education, and she is a first-generation college student. Rock served as an English Language Fellow with the U.S. Department of State in Amman, Jordan, and she received a Fulbright student award to support her doctoral research at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her research expertise spans second language (L2) assessment, L2 writing, task-based language teaching, and statistics for linguistics research. Her most recent publication is Rock, K. (2022) Constructing a data-based analytic rubric for an academic blog post.

Jonathan Ostry

Professor Ostry joins the faculty of Georgetown’s Economics Department as Professor of the Practice, following a 34-year career at the International Monetary Fund, where he served in a number of senior positions, including Deputy Director of Research and Acting Director for the Asia Pacific region. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research in London and also serves on the advisory board of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report in Geneva. Ostry received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He graduated from Queen’s University in Canada and went on to do a second undergraduate degree at Oxford University (Balliol College) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

Professor Ostry’s recent academic and policy work has focused on the management of international capital flows; this work has been influential in bringing about a shift in the institutional position of the IMF on capital controls. Ostry has also published influential studies on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, where his work suggests that high-income inequality and a failure to sustain economic growth may be two sides of the same coin. He has been involved in efforts to raise awareness of inequality issues at the global level over many years, including through his membership in the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils on new growth models and inclusive growth. Professor Ostry’s work has also focused on the issue of fiscal sustainability, and in particular on the role of a country’s track record of fiscal management in determining access to international capital markets. This work is used by the main credit rating agencies for their sovereign credit rating analysis.

Professor Ostry is a highly cited economist in scholarly journals (ranked in the top 1 percent of economists worldwide over the past ten years, according to RePEc), and his writings have featured prominently in the financial press (the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Time, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, NPR, and the BBC). Earlier in his career, Professor Ostry led the team at the IMF that produces its flagship publication, the World Economic Outlook, and was mission chief for a number of Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia and Japan. His recent books include Taming the Tide of Capital Flows (MIT Press, 2017) and Confronting Inequality (Columbia University Press, 2018).

Rev. Joseph E. Simmons, SJ

Joseph Simmons, SJ, is a Catholic priest from the Midwest province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). He studied Classics and Spanish at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After volunteer teaching for two years, Joe entered the Jesuits in 2006. 

Joe completed an MA in Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, focusing his thesis on Charles Taylor’s ‘buffered self’ and the verifiability of religious experience. Joe then taught undergraduate philosophy at Creighton University as part of his 11-year Jesuit formation.  

Joe completed his Theology studies at Boston College and was ordained in June 2017. His Licentiate in Sacred Theology thesis, “Via Litteraria: Marilynne Robinson’s Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations. Joe is finishing his doctoral dissertation through Campion Hall at the University of Oxford. His topic is Anglo-American writers bothered by the question of religious belief, including Virginia Woolf. His research interests include faith and literature, religious epistemology, and the ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology.

During the pandemic, Joe co-convened a series of online presentations/discussions for Georgetown’s Future of the Humanities Project with Kathryn Temple and Mike Collins from Georgetown, and Michael Scott (Blackfriars, Oxford) entitled, “The Christian Literary Imagination.” This will culminate with an in-person conference in Oxford in December.

Daniel Cuzzocreo

Dan Cuzzocreo was raised in Connecticut and earned a B.A. from Tufts University in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Boston University in 2014. He has held faculty positions in the mathematics departments of Smith College and, most recently, Northwestern University, where he taught for the past seven years. Dr. Cuzzocreo’s research interests are in dynamical systems, with an emphasis on holomorphic dynamics in one variable. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, skiing, watching the Boston Celtics, and spending time with his wife and young daughter.

Pauliina Patana

Pauliina Patana is an Assistant Professor at the SFS BMW Center for German and European Studies. Her research focuses on political behavior, political economy, and party politics, primarily in Western democracies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University in 2020. Prior to joining Georgetown, Pauliina was a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Her book project, tentatively titled “Residential Constraints and the Political Geography of the Populist Radical Right,” examines geographic divides in the rise and popularity of populist radical right parties. Her other work explores transformations in European party landscapes, including political representation and party support in diversifying societies; the effects of globalization and economic re-structuring on party competition; and the politics of climate change and redistribution. At Georgetown, Pauliina will teach courses on the politics and policy of the EU and Europe, populism and democracy, and political economy.

Macon Stewart

Macon Stewart is a Senior Fellow in the McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Juvenile Justice Reform. Macon is recognized as one of the country’s foremost experts on systemic reform to address the needs of youth involved with multiple human services or justice systems. Her portfolio includes serving as one of the authors of the Crossover Youth Practice Model and managing its implementation in 100+ communities across the country. She has written and co-authored scholarly publications on the intersection of child welfare and juvenile justice. Her current research interest center around understanding and addressing the needs of Black Girls involved with multi-systems. Additionally, she serves on the Justice Consortium for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

Working to improve how systems address and respond to children and youth on a micro and macro-level has been and will continue to be the passion exemplified in her work. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Rowan Co. Literacy Council and is actively involved with the Salisbury-Rowan Branch of the NAACP.

Macon holds a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Beverly Goines

A native of the Washington Metropolitan area, Reverend Beverly Goines, Ph.D., is committed to the ecumenical and interfaith movement as a means to repair the political, social, and economic fractures that have been caused by religious intolerance. Her research examines the mosaic of the American pluralist religious scene by focusing on the different ethical approaches that exist within the ecumenical movement. It brings to light the connection between ecumenism and social and race consciousness in black denominations; it provides insight into what prompts black churches to participate in ecumenical activity with the very denominations from which they broke away, and it engages different academic and theological worlds by building bridges that expose avenues for communication and understanding to groups of people who have histories of misunderstanding. 

Dr. Goines earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Technical Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master of Divinity from Howard University School of Divinity. She also earned a Master of Philosophy and a Doctor of Philosophy in Religion and Culture from The Catholic University of America. She taught Jewish-Christian Relations at The Catholic University of America and worked in the Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust department of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and Georgetown University, and she has worked as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Dr. Goines was called to National City Christian Church in Washington, District of Columbia as a Lilly Endowment Fellow and currently works as the Associate Pastor. She serves on the boards of the Washington Theological Consortium and the Disciples Center for Public Witness. She enjoys engaging in social justice advocacy that crosses denominational and religious boundaries to find a common cause.

Alexandra Miller

Alexandra Miller is an Assistant Research Professor of the Practice at the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR) within the McCourt School of Public Policy. Alex began working at CJJR in 2019 and oversees the development, evaluation, and implementation of the Crossover Youth Practice Model, in addition to managing various other multi-system projects and collaborations.

As a former special education teacher, Alex went on to earn a Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of Virginia Curry School of Education and Human Development. Her research focused on education and reentry services for adjudicated youth with disabilities in the juvenile justice system, on which she has published various articles. Alex is passionate about combatting injustices facing marginalized populations across social systems and structures. In her personal time, she enjoys reading, live music, and hiking with her dog.

John Quattrochi

John Quattrochi is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include global health and sustainable development, with a focus on interventions to improve the well-being of vulnerable populations affected by fragility, conflict, and violence, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has studied cash-like vouchers; water, sanitation, and hygiene; social support; empowerment training; health infrastructure; and public work programs.

He partners with key international development actors including the World Bank, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and Panzi Hospital (whose founder won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2018). His study of a humanitarian assistance program was named one of the top three UNICEF-affiliated research projects in the world in 2019. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, & Development Office (FCDO), and published in PNAS Nexus, BMJ Global Health, and World Development, among other journals.

Previously, he was a tenured Associate Professor of Public Health at Simmons University. He has a doctorate in Global Health & Population from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Fulbright scholar in Entebbe, Uganda, and a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar in Naples, Italy.

Brienne Adams

Brienne A. Adams is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in American Studies. She holds certificates from the University of Maryland, College Park in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She received her MA in African American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA in Literature Studies from Beloit College. Her research utilizes Black feminisms, queer, and affect theories as centering frameworks to study intimate world building and meaning making fans create from Black popular culture productions on social media platforms. Through studying the quotidian act of social media usage, her work intervenes in examining interiority in Black cultural productions and fandom expression as an example of Black digital knowledge production and public intimacy.

She was a 2019-2020 AADHum (African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities) Scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park, an invited participant to the Understanding Digital Culture: Humanist Lens for Internet Research institute at the University of Florida, the Future of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College, and Digital IDEAS: A Summer Institute for Anti-Racist Critical Digital Studies from the DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Critique, and Optimism) Network at the University of Michigan. She has presented at ASA, SCMS, Fan Studies Network North America Conference, DC Queer Studies Conference, and moderated a panel at NWSA. Brienne has an article titled “Whole Self to the World: Creating Affective Worlds and Black Digital Intimacy in the Fandom of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and Insecure” published in a special edition of Digital Humanities Quarterly on “Black Digital Humanities in the Rising Generation.”

Rebecca Johnson

Rebecca Johnson is an Assistant Professor in Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where she teaches data science. Her research focuses on how K-12 school districts use a mix of data and discretion to decide which students need help most urgently, combining computational methods (field experiments; quasi-experimental designs; natural language processing) with normative analysis. Her early career work, funded by the American Bar Foundation (ABF)/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Scholars program, focused on how school districts with tight budgets struggle with clashes between school budgets and parents’ exercise of their rights. Previously, she received her BA/MA from Stanford University, her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University, and served as an Assistant Professor in Dartmouth College’s Program in Quantitative Social Science. Her website is: https://www.rebeccajohnson.io

Laura DeNardis

Laura DeNardis joins Georgetown University as the inaugural endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society in Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences. DeNardis holds several appointments at Georgetown, including Professor in the Communication, Culture and Technology Program housed within the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and Research Professor in the Center for Digital Ethics. DeNardis has published numerous books on Internet governance including The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (Yale University Press), recognized as a Financial Times Top Technology Book of 2020, and The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale University Press) widely considered a definitive source for understanding power struggles in the digital world. She joins Georgetown from American University, where she served as Professor and Faculty Director of the Internet Governance Lab. She previously served as the Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. DeNardis holds engineering degrees from Dartmouth College and Cornell University, a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School. She enjoys cooking and is a lifelong classical guitarist.

Megan Lickley

Megan Lickley is an incoming Assistant Professor of climate science, with a joint appointment in the Earth Commons and the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program. She received her Ph.D. in Climate Science from MIT, her MS in Technology and Policy from MIT, and her BSc in Mathematics from Acadia University. She studies the drivers and impacts of climate change to inform adaptation and mitigation policy. Her recent work has focused on evaluating halocarbon emissions to evaluate global compliance with the Montreal Protocol. She has worked with the World Bank to design climate adaptation plans for Uganda. Hobbies include trail running, playing music, and being on the water.

Jason Farr

Jason is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Ethics Lab, which is housed in the Kennedy Institute for Ethics at Georgetown. Jason received a BA in Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Georgetown in 2021. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Ethics Lab. Jason primarily teaches environmental and technology ethics, while also strategizing on how best to weave creative ethics pedagogy into courses across the university. His research is similarly interdisciplinary, attempting to bridge more foundational issues in ethics with the granular ethical issues that we find in complex and evolving environmental and socio-technical contexts. Outside of philosophy and pedagogy, Jason enjoys hiking, playing music, and reading fantasy and sci-fi novels.

Yeonju Lee

Yeonju Lee is the Korea Foundation-Song Family Assistant Professor in Korean Business and Economics in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. She specializes in comparative political economy with a focus on the political and social origins and consequences of economic inequality and development in Korea and East Asia. In particular, she is interested in explaining how people define and judge economic inequality through the lens of injustice and the mechanisms through which inequality judgment shapes the political arena. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in Japan. Lee holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Korea University, an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She likes swimming, rowing, wall-climbing, painting, and playing the piano and flute. 

Rachel Pacheco

Rachel Pacheco, Ph.D., is thrilled to be joining the faculty of the Management Department at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown. A 2004 alum of the College, Rachel will be teaching undergraduate and MBA classes focused on organizational behavior, human capital, and communication. Her academic research focuses on power, conflict, and team diversity in complex global organizational settings. Rachel’s research brings together political science, development economics, and micro and meso- theories of management.  

Rachel is also deeply passionate about ensuring that leaders, executives, and managers have the practical tools required to build thriving teams and develop inclusive and resilient cultures. A former Chief People Officer, Rachel serves on the board of directors, and board of advisors for numerous start-ups and high-growth organizations. Her first book, Bringing Up the Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers, focuses on translating academic research and data into immediately useable tools for practitioners in fast-growing startup environments. 

Prior to Georgetown, Rachel was on the faculty of the Management Department at the Wharton School and was a founding faculty member of the Entrepreneurship Education Program at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated from Georgetown University, where she studied Mathematics and spent four years on the Potomac as a member of the Women’s Varsity Rowing Team. She received her MBA, MPhil, and Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Georgetown with her husband, Michael, and enjoys good romance novels, rock-climbing, and Down Dog Yoga. Website: https://rachelpacheco.com/ 

Rebecca Sinderbrand

Rebecca Sinderbrand is a Professor of the Practice and Director of the Journalism Program. She joined the university following more than two decades in political and presidential journalism spanning coverage of six presidential campaigns and five administrations, first as a reporter and then as an editor at news organizations including The Washington Post, Politico, and CNN, most recently as Senior Washington Editor for NBC News. She has also explored the evolving relationship between the press and the presidency as a Block Visiting Lecturer on Journalism and Politics at Yale University, the elements of political reporting as an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s graduate journalism program, the shifting dynamics of campaign journalism as a Fellow at Georgetown’s Institute of Politics and Public Service, and Syria and Lebanon as a Johns Hopkins University-SAIS International Reporting Project Fellow.

A Brooklyn transplant to Washington, Sinderbrand graduated from Georgetown University with a B.A. in Government and received an M.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Heidi Uben

Heidi A. Urben is Professor of the Practice and Director of External Education and Outreach in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. She also serves as a Senior Associate (Non-Resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Adjunct Scholar at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy. Her research interests focus on civil-military relations, military and defense policy, and national security strategy, and her book entitled, Party, Politics, and the Post-9/11 Army was published with Cambria Press in 2021. A retired U.S. Army colonel, she commanded the Army’s largest military intelligence brigade, served two tours in the Pentagon, and deployed to Afghanistan twice and to Bosnia-Herzegovina during her 23-year career. 

Alyssa Newman

Alyssa M. Newman is a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Georgetown. Previously, she was a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics (2020-2022), and the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in Science and Technology Studies at Harvey Mudd College (2018-2020). Her research currently focuses on assisted reproductive technologies, centering the experiences of racial and sexual minorities, and on institutional solutions to racial health disparities. She has also published extensively on multiraciality, exploring the topic through a variety of research projects relating to collective identity formation; biology and genetics; the intersection of mixedness and masculinity; immigration; as well as family relationships and reproduction. Alyssa received her Ph.D. in Sociology with a doctoral emphasis in Black Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara. Her undergraduate degree is also in Sociology from the University of California Berkeley, where she minored in African American Studies and Demography. 

Gina Green

Dr. Gina Green is a specialist in biodiversity (terrestrial and marine), climate change, forestry, and agriculture. She has over 35 years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating initiatives to protect and manage marine and terrestrial resources in Latin and North America, Caribbean, Asia, and the Pacific. Dr. Green served as a Senior Technical Scientific Associate for the Environment and Natural Resource Sector for Tetra Tech and was responsible for the execution of highly lauded marine biodiversity, fisheries, and debris prevention programs. Dr. Green has lived and worked throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and South East Asia, implementing Forestry, Marine Debris Recovery, and Sustainable Fisheries programs. She is fluent in Spanish.

Dr. Green has extensive experience working with the private sector. Recently Dr. Green designed and implemented the Clean Cities Blue Oceans (CCBO), USAID’s $48 million-dollar project to reduce marine debris in 7 focal countries. She leads the CCBO project, working closely with sanitation and environmental engineers to support solid waste management initiatives in these focal countries. Dr. Green has enjoyed recent success incorporating private sector involvement into public sector initiatives, working with partners such as Walton Family Foundation, Thai Union, Microsoft, Philip’s Seafood among others. The partnership between Microsoft and the USAID funded Ecofish project was awarded the Concordia Public Private Partnership award. In addition, the USAID funded Oceans project implemented regionally throughout SE Asia was awarded the Tt technology award for development and use of the electronic catch and documentation traceability (eCDT) systems.

Dr. Green served as Vice President for The Nature Conservancy, where she worked with a team to build the TNC Caribbean program. While at TNC she developed and implemented the first Initiative for Joint Implementation-certified carbon sequestration project located in Belize, assisted with the first Caribbean Debt for Nature swap, initiated the sister-forest program between USFS and the Caribbean (which was for the John Crow, Blue Mountain National Park in Jamaica), gained the needed private and public support for the sustainable management of a million-hectare ridge-to-reef corridor in Belize and assisted in the development of the Tropical Forest Conservation and Coral Reef Conservation Acts. Dr. Green has testified to Congress on the need of funding for tropical marine biodiversity. She began her professional career working for the USFS in Oregon as a wilderness ranger, firefighter, and recreational planner.

Dr. Green serves as a board member of the National Whistleblower Center, where she has helped the organization expand its activities to include representation of environmental and wildlife trafficking whistleblowing. She also owns and co-manages Kew Park and Copse Mountain Farms, in western Jamaica.

Dr. Green holds a D. Phil in Natural Resource Management from Oxford University, an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and BS in Natural Resource Management from the University of Oregon. During 2001 she took a sabbatical from TNC, and established and taught as a visiting lecturer the Masters in Biodiversity Management course at Oxford University. Dr. Green has written and spoken widely about her work and projects.

Nadja Tadic

Nadja Tadic is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University. She received her doctorate in Applied Linguistics from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research examines issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity in interaction, with a primary focus on classroom interaction. Her work has been published in edited volumes and in journals such as Language and Education and Linguistics and Education.

Tatevik Gevorgyan

Professor Gevorgyan is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. Her professional experience and scholarly interests revolve around the Spanish Language, Hispanic and General Linguistics, Comparative Linguistics, Language and Identity, Intercultural Communication, Second Language Acquisition, and Multilingualism/Bilingualism.

Jing Deng

Jing Deng is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the McDonough School of Business. Her research examines the location and relocation decisions of firms, including incumbents and startups, and how these decisions affect or are affected by firm strategy and performance. In her research, Jing uses the micro-U.S. census data, among other datasets. She is a Special Sworn Status researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. Prior to getting her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder, Jing studied at UCLA and Peking University and worked in the private and public sectors in the United States and China. Jing has taught strategy courses multiple times and received the Best Teaching Award for her outstanding teaching performance.

Yifang Xie

Yifang is an Assistant Professor in Accounting. Prior to joining MSB, she taught at UBC from 2020 to 2022. She received her Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis. Her main research interests are corporate information disclosure and business and financial regulations. She’s particularly interested in understanding the economic forces shaping a firm’s information disclosure decision and its implications on capital markets.

Dylan Audette

Dylan Audette completed his Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics at the University of Delaware in 2015. Dylan’s doctoral research described a signaling pathway controlling cell fate decisions in the mammalian lens. Audette completed a teaching post-doc at the University of Delaware’s Interdisciplinary Sciences Learning Laboratory. Subsequently, he has been an Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut Department of Molecular and Cell Biology since 2018. Audette has taught introductory biology, cell biology, and genetics, in addition to developing a course-based undergraduate research experience in biochemistry. Dylan is beginning an appointment as an Assistant Teaching Professor in Georgetown University’s department of Biology.

Timothy DeStefano

Timothy DeStefano is an Associate Professor of Research at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. He is an applied economist with expertise in the areas of digital technology, artificial intelligence (AI), industrial robotics, firm productivity, and trade. His research at Georgetown examines the effects of digital technology on firm reorganization and performance using a mixture of field experiments and observational data techniques. Over the last year, Tim has partnered with various businesses to construct and execute field experiments which measure the causal effects of AI on firm performance. Tim has also carried out a number of research projects that examine how fiber broadband and cloud computing impact firm productivity, organization, and employment. He has extensive experience assessing policy interventions for multiple European and Asia Pacific governments on a range of economic outcomes at the region, firm, and individual levels.

Before joining Georgetown University, Tim worked for 3 years at Harvard University in the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) where he led a team to establish a new research area at the lab on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Before moving to Harvard, Tim worked as an Economist/Policy Analyst for 5 years at the OECD and for 1 year for the G20. Tim’s work has been presented at a number of high-level academic events including the NBER meetings (on the Economics of Digitization and Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship), the Royal Economics Society, and the Toulouse School of Economics and to policy makers at the G20, the OECD, the World Bank, the Italian Parliament, the Ministry of Finance France, the Ministry of Economics Trade and Industry Japan and the Vatican. Tim holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Nottingham (UK).

In his free time, Tim enjoys hiking when it’s warm and snowboarding when it’s cold. 

Personal website: https://www.timdestefano.com/

Sara Moller

Dr. Moller is an Associate Teaching Professor and Director of International and Alumni Affairs in the Security Studies Program (SSP) at Georgetown University. Prior to joining the core faculty in SSP, Dr. Moller was an Assistant Professor at the School of Diplomacy and IR at Seton Hall University, where she also directed the International Security specialization. Dr. Moller’s research examines organizational adaptation in alliances in peacetime and wartime. Her research has been published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Asian Security, International Politics, The Washington Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her policy commentary has appeared in Politico, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and other outlets. She has held fellowships from MIT’s Security Studies Program, George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Georgetown University’s Mortara Center for International Studies, the Modern War Institute at West Point, and the NATO Defence College. Before entering academia, she worked at the Council on Foreign Relations. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and has a MA from the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Gözde Güran

I join Georgetown with a joint appointment in Sociology and the School of Foreign Service. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2020. Before joining Georgetown, I was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. My research spans the fields of economic sociology, migration studies, and conflict studies. I am particularly interested in the emergence of trust networks and informal markets in times of crisis. I am currently writing a book on the informal networks that enable money transfers in the context of Syria’s protracted civil war and refugee crisis. I also study rating and ranking systems, and how they reshape global inequalities. I am from Turkey, and therefore a great admirer of cats. 

Babak Zafari

Dr. Zafari is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Operations and Information Management (OPIM) area of the McDonough School of Business. His areas of research interest and expertise are machine learning methods for business applications, statistical models for natural language processing, anomaly detection and (healthcare) fraud analytics, Bayesian modeling, and online auctions. He has taught courses in the areas of business analytics, machine learning, business analytics capstone project, data, models, and decisions, and optimization methods at MBA, MSBA, undergraduate, and executive education programs.

Prior to joining Georgetown, he was an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Analytics at Babson College and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences at The George Washington University School of Business. He was also a senior statistician consultant at Integrity Management Services, where he was responsible for developing statistical models for fraud and abuse detection in Medicare and Medicaid programs. He received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Sharif University of Technology, his M.S. in Computer Science/Operations Research from Bowling Green State University, and his Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from The George Washington University School of Business.

Carla Shedd

Dr. Carla Shedd is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University whose research and teaching focus on: race and ethnicity; criminalization and criminal justice; education; law; social inequality; and urban policy. Shedd received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University and has previously served on the faculty at Columbia University and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Shedd’s award-winning first book, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice, examines the symbiosis between public school systems and the criminal justice system, specifically highlighting the racially stratified social and physical terrain youth traverse between home and school in Chicago. Shedd’s second book project, When Protection and Punishment Collide: America’s Juvenile Court System and the Carceral Continuum, draws on her one-of-a-kind empirical data to interrogate the deftly intertwined contexts of schools, neighborhoods, and courts in this dynamic moment of public policy shifts in and beyond NYC.

Casey Brown

Casey L. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. Her research focuses on interpersonal emotional processes in connection with mental and physical health across the lifespan, with a particular focus on aging dyads. Her research is currently funded through an R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Aging. Casey earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, completed her clinical internship at the University of California, San Francisco, and received her BA in cognitive science and psychology from the University of Virginia. She is excited to join the faculty at Georgetown!

Yunan Ji

Yunan Ji is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. Her research focuses on the design and regulation of health care markets. Her work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her studies have been cited by Bloomberg, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She received her Ph.D. in Health Policy and Economics from Harvard University and her B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Brown University.

Nardos Ghebreab

Nardos Ghebreab is a scholar-practitioner whose life’s work underscores racial equity in education for liberation. A trained sociologist and education researcher, Nardos roots her work in interrogating education policies and practices to reveal ways they shape racialized experiences and schooling outcomes of BIPOC K-12 students, teacher candidates, and in-service teachers. With her research, Nardos theorizes on ways to redesign schools and teacher education to foster anti-racism. 

Nardos has held positions in K-12 schools, higher education, and the non-profit sector. Beginning her professional career in the classroom, Nardos instructed middle and high school students in various math and college preparation courses before transitioning into instructional leadership as primarily an instructional coach. She’s also held positions in the nonprofit sector, and she taught undergraduate and graduate level on issues surrounding education policy, critical pedagogies, and education justice.

Nardos recently earned her Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning, Policy, & Leadership with a concentration in Urban Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. She also holds a Master of Science in Education Research from Georgia State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Georgetown University (#HoyaSaxa). 

A self-proclaimed amateur comedian by nature, Nardos spends her free time cracking jokes with friends, creating unique DIY Pinterest projects while ignoring the instructions, and passionately sideline-coaching NCAA basketball games from her couch.

Alexander Slaski

Alexander Slaski is a visiting assistant professor in the department of Government. He was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he was working on a project funded by the European Research Council to study sovereign debt in the EU, Brazil, and around the world. Before Leiden, Dr. Slaski was a postdoctoral fellow at Tulane University at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2018, with a dissertation entitled “Multinational Investment and Domestic Policymaking in Latin America”. Before Princeton, Dr. Slaski held a two-year position as the head of a research platform at Stanford’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. Dr. Slaski’s research lies in comparative and international political economy, with a focus on the political economy of foreign direct investment, investment incentives, and currency flows in the developing world, particularly Latin America. His current book project examines how multinational firms shape regulatory policy in developing economies. His work has been published or is forthcoming in outlets including the Review of International Organizations, the Review of International Political Economy, and International Studies Quarterly. In his free time, he likes to rock climb and compete in triathlons.