Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Tenured and Promoted Faculty 2021-2022

Tenured Faculty 2021-22

Katherine Amato

Associate Professor

• PhD Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Home Department: Anthropology
• Profile

Dr. Amato studies the influence of gut microbes on host ecology and evolution. Her research examines how changes in the gut microbiota impact host nutrition, energetics, and health. She uses non-human primates as models for studying host-gut microbe interactions in selective environments and for providing comparative insight into the evolution of the human gut microbiota. Her main foci are understanding how the gut microbiome may buffer hosts during periods of nutritional stress and how the gut microbiome programs normal inter-specific differences in host metabolism. In this realm, she is also interested in global variation in the human gut microbiome and its implications for local human adaptation. Dr. Amato obtained her A.B. in Biology from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She completed a postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder. She joined the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern in 2015. She is also affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Graduate Program and sits on the Executive Committee of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. Dr. Amato is the President of the Midwest Primate Interest Group, an Associate Editor at Microbiome, an Editorial Board member at Folia Primatologica, and a Fellow for the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research’s ‘Humans and the Microbiome’ Program.

Piotr Dworczak

Associate Professor

• PhD Institution: Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Home Department: Economics
• Profile 

Piotr Dworczak is a microeconomic theorist whose research interests range from pure theory (mechanism and information design) to more applied topics (market design and financial over-the-counter markets). His most recent research deals with the problem of inequality in the context of designing markets and allocation systems. The novel theory of ``Inequality-aware Market Design" reexamines some of the fundamental results in economic theory (going back to welfare theorems) with the ultimate goal of providing guidance to policymakers who are concerned about inequality in the markets they control. Applications include the design of public housing programs, rent control policies, and schemes for allocating vaccines during a pandemic.

Piotr was the participant of the 2017 Review of Economic Studies tour for the most promising graduating doctoral students in economics and finance; he's the recipient of Amundi Smith Breeden First Prize, and the second-place Fama-DFA award. He is currently an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Economics, and an Associate Editor at Theoretical Economics.

Benjamin Golub

Associate Professor

• PhD Institution: Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Home Department: Economics
• Profile 

Ben Golub’s research focuses on social and economic networks, particularly in models of social learning, local public goods, peer effects, and the formation of social capital. A recurring theme is capturing aspects of networks through theory-based summary statistics that can be useful in empirical studies and policy analyses.

Daniel Krcmaric

Associate Professor

• PhD Institution: Duke University
• Home Department: Political Science
• Profile

Daniel Krcmaric is a scholar of international relations. His research addresses topics at the intersection of international security, international law, and human rights. Krcmaric is the author of The Justice Dilemma: Leaders and Exile in an Era of Accountability, a book that highlights the trade-offs associated with prosecuting heads of state for atrocity crimes. His current research projects examine America's relationship with the International Criminal Court, global policing and the pursuit of fugitives across national borders, and the role of leaders in international politics.

Onnie Rogers

Associate Professor

• PhD Institution: New York University
• Home Department: Psychology
• Profile 

Dr. Onnie Rogers is a developmental psychologist and identity scholar at Northwestern University where she directs the DICE lab (Development of Identities in Cultural Environments). Rogers is interested in social and educational inequities and the mechanisms through which macro-level disparities are both perpetuated and disrupted at the micro-level of identities and relationships. Her projects focus on how children and adolescents make sense of their racial, ethnic and gender identities; how cultural stereotypes and expectations shape the development and intersectionality of these identities; and the ways in which multiple identities influence adolescents’ social-emotional and academic outcomes. Rogers earned her PhD in developmental psychology from New York University and holds a BA in psychology and educational studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Chloe Thurston

Associate Professor

• PhD Institution: University of California, Berkeley
• Home Department: Political Science
• Profile 

Professor Thurston's research is on American political development, political economy, and public policy, with a particular interest in how politics and public policy shape market inequalities along the lines of race and gender.  She is the author of the 2018 book At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State (co-winner of the J. David Greenstone Award) and is currently completing a coauthored book examining the rise and retrenchment of debtor protections in the United States. Thurston received her B.A. in economics and political science from Johns Hopkins University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019-2020, she was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Promoted to Full Professor 2021-22

Erik Andersen

Professor

• PhD Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Home Department: Molecular Biosciences
• Profile

Erik Andersen is evolutionary geneticist with extensive experience in molecular, quantitative, and population genetics and genomics. He received his B.S. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University, where he also was awarded the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research given to the top undergraduate researcher each year. He received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was an Anna Fuller Cancer Research Fellow, studying the developmental genetics of chromatin remodeling in Caenorhabditis elegans advised by Dr. H. Robert Horvitz. His research interests shifted to quantitative genetics and genomics for his NIH NRSA Post-doctoral and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellowship with Dr. Leonid Kruglyak at Princeton University. Since 2013, his work at Northwestern University has focused on a central question in evolutionary genetics: what are the genes and molecular mechanisms that underlie phenotypic differences? These mechanisms from nematodes, as a model animal, enable large-scale genetics and genomics studies not possible in other animal systems. His laboratory, in the departments of Molecular Biosciences and Cell and Developmental Biology, has created huge species-wide collections of wild strains for multiple nematode species to allow them to answer questions of evolutionary relevance ranging from molecular interactions in epistasis to niche preferences in nature. He has contributed discoveries across genetic, genomic, physiological, systems, and ecological perspectives. His seminal contributions include advances in our understanding of quantitative trait variation, including toxicant responses, anthelmintic resistance, genome evolution, and niche adaptation as demonstrated in publications, including PLoS Genetics, Genetics, eLife, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Nature Ecology and Evolution, and Nature Genetics. Erik is a Pew Biomedical Scholar, a National Science Foundation CAREER recipient, Fulbright Global Scholar recipient, an American Cancer Society Research Scholar, a Human Frontiers Science Program Grantee, and a March of Dimes Basil O’Conor Awardee.

Lori Beaman

Professor

• PhD Institution: Yale University
• Home Department: Economics
• Profile

Lori Beaman is a development economist whose research interests are centered on three themes: (i) the role of social networks in the labor market, (ii) how to improve agricultural technology adoption in Africa, and (iii) understanding and alleviating constraints on women's mobility broadly defined, in the labor market and in politics. She is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Early Career Development grant, and an affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Her research has been published in Science, American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, among others.

Thomas Bozza

Professor

• PhD Institution: Tufts University
• Home Department: Neurobiology
• Profile

Thomas Bozza is a sensory neurobiologist who works on the molecular basis of olfactory function (the sense of smell) in mammals.  The Bozza lab is interested in two broad questions:  1) how chemical information is represented by molecular receptors and neurons in the peripheral olfactory system, and 2) how olfactory receptor genes are regulated in peripheral olfactory neurons.  The lab uses a wide variety of approaches including genetic manipulation, electrophysiology, optical imaging, gene expression analysis and behavior.  Their studies shed light on fundamental principles in neurobiology—how sensory information is represented in the brain, and how genes are switch on and off to determine the identity of cell types in the nervous system.  Bozza’s research has been published in high profile journals such as Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Cell, Neuron and Nature Communications, and his work has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, the Whitehall Foundation, and the Brain Research Foundation.  Bozza has taught undergraduate Physiology as part of the Biological Sciences program, and Developmental Neurobiology in the Neuroscience major, and has been actively involved in teaching and curriculum development for the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Graduate Program.  Bozza is currently a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and a fellow of the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching.

Aaron Brown

Professor

• PhD Institution: Tufts University
• Home Department: Mathematics
• Profile

Aaron Brown works in smooth dynamical systems and smooth ergodic theory.  Much of his recent work focuses on group actions on manifolds with a particular focus on questions of rigidity and classification of actions and their invariant structures.

Kyla Ebels-Duggan

Professor

• PhD Institution: Harvard University
• Home Department: Philosophy
• Profile

Kyla Ebels-Duggan specializes in moral and political philosophy as well as related questions in the philosophy of education and the philosophy of religion.  She works within a broadly Kantian ethical tradition.  In recent years, she has focused on three, inter-related topics: (1) Moral education and the formation of character; (2) The relationship between what is good and what is right—that is what is of value or worth wanting, on the one hand, and what we have reason to do, on the other; (3) The nature of valuing attitudes such as love, admiration, reverence, and respect and of our reasons for holding these attitudes.  She has held fellowships at Princeton University, The University of St Andrews, and Australia National University.  Her articles have appeared in Ethics, Philosophers’ Imprint, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, among other venues.

Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano

Professor

• PhD Institution: Stanford University
• Home Department: Physics and Astronomy
• Profile

Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano’s research centers on the development of cryogenic quantum detectors for particle physics, astrophysics, and quantum computing. These detectors are being deployed in space to study supernova remnants, kilometers underground to search for dark matter, at nuclear reactors to study neutrinos, and at testbeds for quantum computing.

Figueroa-Feliciano leads the NASA Micro-X Sounding Rocket, and is a member of the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment, the Ricochet neutrino experiment, and the CosmiQ quantum computing and sensor program.

Hongmei Jiang

Professor

• PhD Institution: Purdue University
• Home Department: Statistics and Data Science
• Profile

Hongmei Jiang’s research focuses on developing statistical methodologies and computational algorithms to analyze and understand massive amounts of -omics (e.g., genomics, epigenomics, and metagenomics) data, multiple comparisons and multiple tests, and longitudinal data analysis.

Jens Koch

Professor

• PhD Institution: Freie Universität Berlin
• Home Department: Physics and Astronomy
• Profile

Research in Koch’s group focuses on the theory, simulation, and advancement of hardware for quantum computing and quantum simulation using superconducting circuits and microwave photons. Koch’s expertise in superconducting qubits and circuit QED reaches back to contributions to the development of the original theory for the transmon and fluxonium qubits. Together with experimental collaborators, his group now works on next-generation quantum circuits with enhanced error protection, on devising protocols for gate operations and quantum-state readout, and on quantum simulation based on interacting photons in circuit-QED arrays.

Melissa Macauley

Professor

• PhD Institution: University of California, Berkeley
• Home Department: History
• Profile

Melissa Macauley specializes in late imperial and modern Chinese history, 1500 to 1958. Her research focuses the interrelated history of southeastern China and Southeast Asia; colonialism and imperialism in East and Southeast Asia; and legal culture in Chinese social history. Her recent book, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021 and was awarded the Bentley Book Prize of the World History Association in 2022. Her first book, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China, was published by Stanford University Press in 1998 (a Chinese translation was published by Beijing University Press in 2012). She currently is writing a comprehensive history of the South China Sea, tentatively titled A People’s History of the South China Sea.

Susan Pearson

Professor

• PhD Institution: University of North Carolina
• Home Department: History
• Profile

Susan J. Pearson is a historian of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. She is particularly interested in the cultural politics of reform, the expansion of the state and forms of governance, and the development of American liberalism.

Professor Pearson is the author of the prize-winning book, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and essays and articles in The Journal of American History, History and Theory, The Journal of Social History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

Pearson’s new book, The Birth Certificate: An American History, examines both how birth registration became compulsory in the United States and how birth certificates became trusted forms of identification. She shows how states and the federal government used birth registration to collect, collate, and disseminate knowledge about their populations, and she shows how birth certificates became central to the administration of social policy and citizenship. Far from acting as neutral recorders of facts, birth certificates opened and closed the gates to school, work, entitlements, pensions, passports, drivers’ licenses, even land. They were instruments in a state that sorted and allocated goods according to age, gender, race, and citizenship status.

Mar Reguant

Professor

• PhD Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Home Department: Economics
• Profile

Professor Reguant uses high-frequency data to study the impact of auction design and environmental regulation on electricity markets and to quantify the impact of carbon trading on energy-intensive industries.  In her recent work, she explores the application of machine learning to the energy efficiency context, the equity implications of the energy transition, and the impact of transmission to facilitate the expansion of renewable production. In her work, she emphasizes the use of diverse empirical techniques to address current energy and climate policy questions. Some of her policy work has been focused on advising the California Air Resources Board on the design of their cap-and-trade market and the French government on its climate policy strategy. She has published in the most prestigious economics journals and has held various leading editorial roles. She has been awarded several awards, including an NSF CAREER grant in 2015, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2016, and a PECASE award in 2019.

Alvin Tillery

Professor

• PhD Institution: Harvard University
• Home Department: Political Science
• Profile

Alvin B. Tillery, Jr. is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy and a leading expert on race relations and diversity, equity, and inclusion in Corporate America. His research and teaching interests are rooted in race and American political thought. His book Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, US Foreign Policy and Black Leadership in America (Cornell University Press, 2011) won the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. He served as co-chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Class Inequalities in the Americas. He is a frequent commentator in the national media on diversity issues, racial politics, and presidential leadership.

Kelly Wisecup

Professor

• PhD Institution: University of Maryland - College Park
• Home Department: English
• Profile

Kelly Wisecup is a literary and cultural historian whose work brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. Across several books and collaborative digital projects, her research seeks to understand the many avenues through which Indigenous peoples—published authors and otherwise—created, interacted with, used, and read books, manuscripts, newspapers, and other texts.  Her recent scholarship traces relationships between 18-19th -century Indigenous literatures and colonial archives, examining how Indigenous communities made compilations, intentionally-assembled texts like recipes, scrapbooks, and lists, and how the travels of those texts into colonial archives constituted acts of anti-colonial criticism.  She is the author of two books, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale, 2021) and Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).  In addition, she is editor of a scholarly edition of Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow’s Good News from New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), and with Lisa Brooks, she co-edited Plymouth Colony: Narratives of English Settlement and Native Resistance from the Mayflower to King Philip’s War (Library of America, 2022).