College of Arts & Sciences Welcomes New Faculty and Staff for 2024-2025 Academic Year

Paul Emile Tang Abomo, S.J. is joining the Department of Government as the visiting Jesuit chair. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and government from Loyola University Chicago. Prior to Georgetown, he taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy.

Juhlee Bae is joining the Department of Economics as an assistant teaching professor. Prior to this role, Bae was an assistant professor in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University. Her research and teaching interests are macroeconometrics and forecasting.

Jessica Batychenko is joining the Department of English as an assistant teaching professor. Batychenko received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching focus on dialog as a powerful tool for learning and community engagement. Her experience spans various educational settings, including university classrooms, nonprofits and high schools.

Andrea Carosso is joining the Department of Physics as an assistant teaching professor. Carosso has bachelor’s degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Delaware and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focused on simulations of elementary particles like quarks and gluons. After earning his Ph.D., Carosso was a postdoc at George Washington University for four years, where he began teaching.

Zenobia Chan is joining the Department of Government as an assistant professor. Her research investigates how states use economic and informational means to influence other states’ policy in their own favor. She teaches courses in international political economy and quantitative methods. She received her Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.

Kelly Cole has been promoted to advising dean of undergraduate programs in the College of Arts & Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining the Dean’s Office, Cole taught several courses in the Department of English, including Cultural Narratives of the 1980s, Television and American Society and U.S. Film History. 

Lisa Cook has been promoted to office coordinator in the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

Carol Estela-Glagola is joining the Office of the Dean as a program manager and special assistant to the dean. Prior to the Hilltop, Estela-Glagola worked for Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she was a chef and project manager in Boston, MA, testing and editing the James Beard award nominated cookbook, The New England Kitchen.

Jonathan Fine is joining the Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor. Originally from Canada, Fine studies and teaches courses in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, aesthetics and ethics. He is writing a monograph on Plato’s ideas of beauty. As an advocate of liberal arts education, Jonathan is very excited to join the Georgetown community.

Darragh Gannon is returning to Georgetown as the associate director of Global Irish Studies and an assistant teaching professor of Irish history in the Department of History. He has published widely on British, Irish and Global History. Previously, Gannon came to the Hilltop as a visiting Fulbright scholar and, before that, he served as the head of Irish studies at University College Dublin. Gannon is a regular cultural commentator for international media, including ABC Australia, the BBC, Le Monde and TIME Magazine.

Yuan Gao, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, is starting a new role as a research technician. Gao came to the Hilltop in 2017 to study the social and environmental history of Central Asia with a focus on the Qing and Russian Empires in the Xinjiang region. 

Lydia Gibson is joining the Department of Anthropology as  an assistant professor. Gibson is a geographer, environmental anthropologist and postcolonial theorist whose research cuts across natural and social sciences to understand how social, political and ecological change, colonial histories and the materialization of environmental discourses and actions shape the rituals, livelihoods and experiences of traditional forest communities in the Caribbean.

Stephon Hamell has been promoted to assistant dean of undergraduate programs. Hamell holds a Ph.D. in educational leadership from the University of Rochester and an M.S. in higher education administration from Buffalo State University. As an advising dean in the College of Arts & Sciences, Hamell has mentored more than 380 computer science, math and physics majors. He oversees the College Academic Council and works closely with both the Center for Multicultural Equity & Access and the Community Scholars Program. 

Alainn Hanson is joining the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor as director of student and community relations. Hanson is a labor activist, student and aspiring educator. A recent graduate from American University, while in school Hanson became involved with student labor activism in the Washington, DC area. She comes to the Kalmanovitz Initiative through the WILL Empower Apprenticeship Program. In addition to her work with the Kalmanovitz Initiative, Hanson is beginning a master’s program in women, gender and sexuality studies at George Washington University, focusing on women and queer individuals’ experiences at work, interactions with power in the workplace and capitalism’s interactions with domestic labor.

Nikki Harris is joining the Office of the Dean as the assistant director of first generation student initiatives. Harris is a first-generation graduate from Southwest Virginia. She is a passionate advocate for student success. Harris has served in various roles across academic and student affairs, including academic advising, success coaching and TRIO programs. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in higher education and learning technologies at George Mason University.

William Hart is joining the Department of Performing Arts as department administrator. Prior to Georgetown, he worked at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles as the academy company manager. He holds a B.A. in theater and performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Matthew Hawks is joining the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant teaching professor. Hawks served for 30 years in the United States Navy, starting as a submarine warfare officer and finishing in the Naval Academy’s Department of Mathematics. Holding a Ph.D. in operations research, his research interests include statistics pedagogy and graph-theoretic change detection. He is married and the proud father of seven children.

Jaynell Hazard is joining the College of Arts & Sciences as the director and chief curator of Georgetown University Art Galleries and an associate professor of the practice in the Department of Art and Art History. Her career has been dedicated to amplifying diverse voices, supporting pioneering artists and bringing audiences together for discovery. Previously, Hazard served as the executive director and chief curator at Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art and worked at the UBS Art Collection and Blank Projects in Cape Town, South Africa.

Virginia Hill joined the Prisons and Justice Initiative as the director of operations. Hill is responsible for liaising between Georgetown departments and managing all operations, budget and financial administration, and program administration. Prior to joining PJI, Hill spent the previous eight years working and volunteering in the policy and advocacy space focusing on criminal justice reform. She worked in the Nebraska State Legislature as the Policy and Research Associate for Senator Ernie Chambers, the longest serving state senator in Nebraska’s history. Her research efforts led to the passage of LB 924, a bill requiring police departments to conduct annual implicit bias training. In addition to her legislative work, Hill chaired a policy subcommittee, Hold Cops Accountable, where she made policy recommendations around use of force that were adopted by the Lincoln Police Department.

Samantha Hossler has been with the Office of the Dean for nearly three years and began her new role as the senior events coordinator this summer. Prior to Georgetown, she spent years traveling, working in adventure tourism and organizing unique experiences around the world. Sam obtained her MBA in London and enjoys creative writing in her spare time.

Kleio Jiang is joining the Department of Psychology as a lab manager in Casey Brown’s CARES lab. Jiang graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2023 with a double major in psychology and cognitive studies, and minors in data science and communication studies. Prior to the Hilltop, Jian worked as a data research associate at NYU Medical School. 

Helal Mohammed Khan is joining the Program on Justice and Peace Studies as a lecturer. Before joining Georgetown, Helal taught at the University of Notre Dame, where he also completed his Ph.D. in peace studies and anthropology. He is a former graduate of Defence Services Command and Staff College and served in Bangladesh Army and United Nations.

Jungyoon Koh is joining the Department of Linguistics as an assistant teaching professor. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in linguistics from Georgetown. Koh is a discourse analyst interested in the intersection of language, society and technology. Her current research examines how users of conversational user interfaces, such as Siri and Alexa, navigate processes of meaning-making in interactions with and about technology. 

Kirsten Langlois is joining the Office of the Dean as a senior program administrator, providing support to the vice deans for faculty affairs and the Baker Scholars Program. Prior to this role, Langlois was at the University of Maryland, where she was the program coordinator for the Sadat Chair for Peace and Development and the Critical Issues Poll. She earned her B.A. in international studies from American University, with a focus on security, conflict resolution, and human rights.

Grace Lee joined the Dean’s Office as a digital communications specialist. Lee previously served as a program manager in the School of Foreign Service. She graduated with an international relations degree from Boston University and is pursuing a master’s degree in communication, culture, and technology at Georgetown. Lee is excited to bring her experience in nonprofit communications and graphic design to the College of Arts & Sciences. 

Meir Litvak is joining the Department of Government as the Aaron and Cecile Goldman visiting Israeli professor. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.A. from Tel Aviv University. Litvak is a professor in the Department of Middle Eastern History and a senior research associate at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University

Nicholas Lohman (SFS’24) has been promoted to the role of laboratory manager in the Clinical Aging and Relational Emotion Science Laboratory, or CARES lab. The lab, which is run by assistant professor Casey Brown, investigates interpersonal emotional phenomena in connection with mental and physical health across the life course. Lohman studied comprising culture, politics and psychology while an undergraduate. He is interested in the relationship between social ties, emotion regulation and psychological disorder outcomes. 

Jaime Madden is joining the Women’s and Gender Studies Program as an assistant teaching professor. Madden previously taught courses in the department as an adjunct. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown full-time, Madden worked as a lecturer in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland. Madden holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Daisha Miller is joining the Department of Psychology as a research associate. Miller, who recently graduated with a master’s degree in counseling, is a wife and mother of four young children. She has a passion for serving children and families, along with those impacted by domestic violence, homelessness and individuals with special needs. Miller aspires to become a licensed therapist, as well as pursue her Ph.D. in the near future.

Kelsey Alejandra Moore is joining the Department of History and the Department of Black Studies as an assistant professor and provost’s distinguished faculty fellow. Moore’s work focuses on rural Black southern histories, raising questions about race, religion and culture in the 20th century. Her current book, What the Dead Witnessed, interrogates how rural development in South Carolina’s Santee-Cooper basin inflicted spiritual, ecological and epistemic violence against Black and Indigenous peoples.

Mirtha Navarro is joining the Department of Chemistry as a visiting professor. Navarro has extensive experience in academia, international organizations and the private sector, especially in North and Latin America. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and her most recent academic position was as full professor at the University of Costa Rica. There, she established the BIODESS Group and the spin-off InnoBiotiQ, performing research and supporting companies to assess the quality of their natural products. Navarro has over forty international scientific publications and leads research at LANOTEC.

Lucy Neely has been promoted to the role of data collector and data manager in the Child Development and Social Policy Lab, which is run by faculty members Anna Johnson and Rebecca Ryan. Neely joined the Department of Psychology in 2021 as an Early Learning Project Fellow. Neely holds a B.A. in psychology, government and law from Lafayette College.

Emily Nix is joining the Department of Economics as a visiting assistant professor. Nix is a labor economist who studies the economic impacts of violence against women, the gender income gap, and inequality. Her research and expertise have been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, Financial Times, NPR, MSNBC and more. She has worked as a consultant to both the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and the World Bank. Nix is also an award-winning teacher who made news in 2020 when she created a DIY light board to enhance the remote learning experience for her students. Nix received her Ph.D. from Yale and her B.A. from UNC Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain scholar.

Van Tran Nguyen is joining the Department of Performing Arts as an assistant professor. A Vietnamese-American artist-scholar, filmmaker and curator, Tran Nguyen’s research investigates Asian-American performance and media(tions) of the diaspora. Tran Nguyen’s short film, ERIE COUNTY SMILE (2021), was supported by and made available via the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Her narrative feature film, The MOTHERLOAD will be released in 2025. She is currently a Fellow of the UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice.

Bruno Niederbacher, S.J., is joining the Department of Theology and Religious Studies as visiting Jesuit chair. Niederbacher is an associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Christian Philosophy at the School of Catholic Theology at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). He holds his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Freiburg in Breisgau and an MTh from Heythrop College in London. His main research interests are in medieval philosophy and in metaethics, especially in moral metaphysics and epistemology. Moreover, he reflects the epistemological presuppositions of the Ignatian Spirituality.

Daisy O’Brien is the special assistant to the Lab for Globalization and Shared Prosperity and the Montara Center for International Studies. At Georgetown, O’Brien majored in political economy and minored in french. 

Anna Pechnikova is joining the Department of Slavic Languages as a lecturer. Prior to coming to the Hilltop, Pechnikova worked as an adjunct professor at George Washington University and a lecturer and teacher at Saratov State University. 

Hannah Puckett is joining the Department of Psychology as a lab manager in the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Puckett graduated from Washington and Lee University with a major in cognitive and behavioral science and a minor in poverty and human capability studies.

Tess Renker is joining the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as an assistant professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Andean literature and film, with an emphasis on issues of indigeneity, migration, rurality and political violence.

Maggie Shideler is joining the Lab for Relational Cognition as a research coordinator. They graduated for Cornell University with a B.S. in global and public health sciences and a minor in statistics. At Cornell, they designed, implemented and evaluated educational programs aimed at increasing educational equity in college STEM courses through teaching STEM-based puzzle solving. She is interested in the application of psychology and neuroscience research to real-world learning, classrooms and curricula. 

David Shope is joining the Department of Philosophy as a visiting assistant teaching professor. Shope received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Riverside in 2021 and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the NIH Department of Bioethics in 2023. He primarily works on the philosophy of disability. His teaching focuses on encouraging a growth mindset, primarily using specifications grading.

Melinda Somers is joining the Department of Psychology as the lab manager for Abigail Marsh. Somers is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she received her B.S. in neuroscience. In Marsh’s Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience, she studies the neural and behavioral correlates of altruism and psychopathy.

Nefertiti Takla is joining the Department of History as an assistant professor of modern Middle Eastern history. She specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt with a focus on gender and sexuality.

Shanessa Bryant Taylor is joining the Prisons and Justice Initiative as the director of communications. Prior to this role, she served as the associate direct of advancement communications strategy and operations at Georgetown. She holds a B.A. in marketing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox is joining the Department of Linguistics as an assistant professor. His research seeks to understand the computational mechanisms that underlie language processing and language learning, both in people and in computational systems. Prior to coming to Georgetown, Wilcox was an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2022 in linguistics from Harvard University and his B.A. in 2015 from Stanford University in symbolic systems and Slavic languages and literatures.

Molly Wilder is joining the Department of Philosophy as an assistant teaching professor. Wilder received both her Ph.D. and J.D. from Georgetown University and is delighted to return. Her dissertation argued that lawyers can ethically promote the autonomy of their clients when employing a relational understanding of autonomy, and that doing so uniquely positions lawyers to promote and sustain democratic pluralism. Her broader research interests include autonomy, virtue ethics, feminist philosophy, pedagogy, professional ethics of lawyers, philosophy of tort law and minors’ rights. When not philosophizing, Molly enjoys reading and writing children’s fantasy, playing board and computer games and bad puns.

Xiuquan Zhou is joining the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor. During his postdoctoral research at the Argonne National Laboratory, he pioneered a novel rational approach to manipulate building blocks within solid-state materials. This method sheds light on a fresh pathway for materials design at the molecular level, enabling the tailoring of functionalities across a wide range of applications, including batteries, quantum computing, magnetism, energy storage, solar cells and catalysis. Zhou received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park. Zhou is originally from Yantai, a beautiful and small coastal city located on the Shandong Peninsula in China.