Welcoming Our New Faculty
Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science is honored to welcome our newest faculty members for the 2022-23 academic year, who add to our growing community of distinguished scholars.
“We’re thrilled to welcome these scholars as they join the talented and accomplished A&S faculty,” said John Geer, Ginny and Conner Searcy Dean of the College of Arts and Science. “Their expertise, knowledge, and deep exploration will inject new energy, ideas, and collaboration into our thriving academic community. We look forward to supporting them in the years to come and ensuring they succeed at Vanderbilt.”
The new faculty members span more than 20 departments and programs. Many of them were hired across more than one department, further enriching the college’s interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research.
Please welcome the following faculty members joining us this year:
Jad Abumrad, Distinguished Research Professor, Program in Communication of Science and Technology and Department of Cinema and Media Arts. Audio storytelling; created the podcasts Radiolab, More Perfect, and Dolly Parton’s America.
Panka Bencsik, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and Public Policy. Economics of health and crime focusing on the opioid crisis, mental health, the U.S. criminal justice system, and gun violence.
James Bisbee, Assistant Professor of Political Science. Causal identification and data science methods to study how individuals adjust their political beliefs and behaviors based on information environments.
Adam Blandin, Assistant Professor of Economics. Intersection of macroeconomics, labor economics, and public economics, with a research focus on the workforce.
Heidi Bludau, Senior Lecturer, Department of Medicine, Health, and Society. Professional identity of healthcare workers, primarily nurses.
Jaime Bruce, Senior Lecturer, Department of Medicine, Health, and Society. Children in healthcare settings; building resiliency in families.
Ari Caramanica, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Archaeology; the modern-day climate crisis and resilient farming systems.
Gianni Castiglione, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Molecular basis of human blindness and aging by looking at how disease has evolved.
Boyoung Chang, Mellon Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture. Photography in and about modern and contemporary Korea.
Lydia Conklin, Assistant Professor of English. Complex realities of queer and trans lives.
Dusan Danilovic, Senior Lecturer, Program in Communication of Science and Technology. Fundamental energy transfer in organic light-emitting devices and molecular magnetism in complex organometallic materials.
Marcus Dillender, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society. Health, labor, and public economics focusing on insurance, occupational health, and public health issues.
Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History. Environmental history and the modern Middle East.
Calynn Dowler, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. Religious studies and environmental anthropology, exploring religious and ethical relationships with water in the Sundarbans delta of West Bengal, India.
Rebecca Epstein-Levi, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Practical ethics: questions of sexual, biomedical, disability, and environmental ethics through a Jewish lens.
Brenda Fabela Enriquez, Senior Lecturer of Physics and Astronomy. High energy physics, specifically in the supersymmetry as a model that solves conceptual and observational issues in the standard model of particle physics.
Alexis Finet, Lecturer, Department of French and Italian. Congolese literature and music.
Angus Galloway, Assistant Professor of the Practice, Department of Art. Drawing, painting, installation, and sound.
Julie Gamble, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Role of gender and infrastructure in the construction of collective life in Latin American cities and the global South.
Rebeca Gamez, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Ethnographic work; how marginalized youth navigate everyday forms of power and subordination across different spaces and places.
Jacob Haley, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics. Representation theory.
Nicole Hemmer, Associate Professor of History. The presidency and U.S. politics, with a particular emphasis on conservatism, media, and social movements.
Karan Jani, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Black holes, including testing Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with gravitational waves.
Monica Keith, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Biological anthropology and data science; local ecologies and biosocial determinants of health across globally diverse populations.
Daria Kim, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Synthetic organic chemistry; approaches to achieve selective reactivity in complex molecules containing many reactive centers.
Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, Assistant Professor of Physics. High energy nuclear physics; the space-time evolution of quarks and gluons produced during collisions of high energy ions as they transition to stable particles.
Andrea Locke, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemistry. Novel optical biosensing platforms to address current clinical diagnostic challenges at the point of care.
Hilario Lomelí, Mellon Assistant Professor, Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. Experiences of racialized children and youth in U.S. schools, highlighting the tensions between statecraft, care, and the neoliberal and carceral logics of disposability.
Alex Lupsasca, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Black hole physics, focusing on the study of black hole images.
Anna Marra, Senior Lecturer, Department of French and Italian. Gender, social justice, meditation, storytelling, and irony in Medieval and Contemporary Italy.
Sean McAfee, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics. Combinatorics and representation theory.
Kimberley McKinson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Cultural anthropology; ethnographic research in Jamaica.
Lin Meng, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Global change ecology; the response of terrestrial ecosystems to natural and anthropogenic changes.
Abdoul Karim Nchare-Fogam, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics. Theoretical and applied econometrics, development economics, behavioral economics.
Jean-Francois Paquet, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy. How hydrodynamics—the physical theory that describes the motion of water and air—can be applied to liquids that move so fast that we must consider the effect of Einstein’s relativity.
Taylor Rhoads, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics. Partial differential equations.
Norman Saliba, Senior Lecturer of German, Russian, and East European Studies. Romanticism, myth, and mythology in modernism, Catholicism in German and Austrian cultural history, and collecting and museum studies.
Mark Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies. Philippine history and Asian American history.
Alexander Schuppe, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Electrochemistry and transition-metal catalysis to solve impactful problems related to human health.
Claire Scott, Senior Lecturer, Department of German, Russian, and East European Studies. The intersection of German studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and media studies.
Keri Tallman, Senior Lecturer of Chemistry.
Alexandre Tiriac, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Factors that promote the development of neural circuits, including visual, somatosensory, proprioceptive, and motor circuits.
Oleksandr Vlasiuk, Senior Lecturer of Mathematics. Computational and convex geometry, geometric measure theory, and the behavior of minimizers of variational functionals.
Ian Wagner, Senior Lecturer of Mathematics. Number theory, modular forms, harmonic Maass forms, and L-functions.
Katherine Wen, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and Public Policy. Impact of public policy on health outcomes and health care utilization as it relates to infectious disease and the health of older adults.
Steven Wenz, Senior Lecturer of Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures, specializing in 19th century to present Argentina and Brazil.