Faculty Fellows and Faculty Ambassadors
Learn more about Northwestern Buffett's Faculty Fellows and Faculty Ambassadors below.
Northwestern Buffett Faculty Fellows
Northwestern Buffett Faculty Fellows are full-time, tenure-line Northwestern faculty who provide thought leadership for the development of sustained research excellence and global engagement at Northwestern Buffett.
Diego Arispe-Bazán is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist. His research centers on the production and circulation of history via linguistic and discursive strategies. More specifically, he focuses on the schism that divides different community’s valorizations of the colonial past in Latin America, and how differences in dialectal Spanish forms reaffirm ideas of national belonging which are, in fact, ordered around colonial racial and gender hierarchies.
Vilna Bashi Treitler is Osborn Professor of Sociology with a joint faculty appointment at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. She is a sociologist and visual artist. Her scholarship theorizes about international migration, race and ethnicity and the dynamics of hierarchical socioeconomic structures both domestically and internationally. She has published several articles and books, including The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fictions into Ethnic Factions (Stanford, 2013), a comparative historical analysis of US ethnic groups’ racialization named to the Zora Canon, the top 100 books ever written by an African American woman.
Laura Brueck
Associate Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literatures and Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Contact:
laura.brueck@northwestern.eduNicholas Diakopoulos
Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Computer Science (by courtesy), School of Communication
Contact:
nad@northwestern.eduElizabeth Gerber
Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Communication Studies and (by courtesy) Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering
Contact: egerber@northwestern.eduElizabeth Gerber is Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Communication Studies and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Northwestern University. She is also Co-Director of Northwestern’s Center for Human Computer Interaction + Design. Gerber is known for her expert ability to develop rigorous theories and relevant applications at the intersection of human-centered design and organizational behavior. She uses the behavioral sciences to inform the design of innovative processes, products and services and publishes work relevant to the design, management and human computer interaction communities.
Neha Jain teaches and writes on international law, human rights law, comparative law and criminal law. She is the author of Perpetrators and Accessories in International Criminal Law (2014), and her work has appeared in numerous journals. Her article “Manufacturing Statelessness” was awarded the 2022 Francis Deák Prize for best article by the American Journal of International Law. Jain holds several leadership positions in international law associations. She is Vice-President of the European Society of International Law and a member of the Executive Council and Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law. In 2022, Jain was appointed as Supervising Editor of AJIL Unbound and she serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and European Journal of International Law.
Michael S. Kang is the Class of 1940 Professor of Law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. He is a nationally recognized expert on campaign finance, voting rights, redistricting, judicial elections and corporate governance. His recent work focuses on partisan gerrymandering; the influence of party and campaign finance on elected judges; the de-regulation of campaign finance after Citizens United and so-called “sore loser laws” that restrict losing primary candidates from running in a general election.Anto Mohsin
Assistant Professor in Residence in the Liberal Arts Program, Northwestern University in Qatar
Contact: anto.mohsin@northwestern.eduReynaldo Morales
Assistant Professor, Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications
Contact: ramoralesc@northwestern.eduReynaldo A. Morales is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University with a joint faculty appointment at the Medill School of Journalism and Media and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Reynaldo has been a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)-Commissions on Ecosystem Management (CEM), Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (CEESP), Species Survival Commission, and Seed Conservation Specialist Group since 2018. He is also an international fellow of the Forum for Law, Development Environment, and Governance (FLEDGE) based in India. His research is about shifts in science education and research related to the restoration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and biodiversity governance.
Hatim A. Rahman's research investigates how artificial intelligence, undergirded by algorithms, is impacting the nature of work and employment relationships in organizations and labor markets. His current research uses field data collected through participant observation, interviews and archival sources to study how sophisticated algorithms are being used by digital platform organizations in ways that disrupt how people work and are evaluated.
Ozge Samanci
Associate Professor in Radio/Television/Film, School of Communication
Contact: ozge@northwestern.eduOzge Samanci is an Associate Professor in the Northwestern School of Communications’ Radio/Television/Film department and affiliated with the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs’ Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program. Samanci is a media and comic artist whose areas of interest include interactive media art, installation art, virtual reality storytelling, interaction design, full-body interaction, location-based art, comics and graphic novels. Her recent interactive art installations have roots in the natural sciences and explore the tendency of human beings to perceive themselves above all ecosystems.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma
Professor of Black Studies and Asian American Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Contact: n-sharma@northwestern.eduNitasha Tamar Sharma is Professor of Black Studies and Asian American Studies in the Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Director of the Asian American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and the Comparative Race and Diaspora Graduate Cluster. Dr. Sharma is an Associate Editor of American Quarterly and serves on the Executive Council of the American Studies Association. Currently, she is working on a project on the history of Black music in the Hawaiian Islands and engaging in preliminary work on race and US imperialism in the de/militarizing Pacific.
G. Jeffrey Snyder's research interests include nanomaterials for thermoelectrics; band structure engineering of thermoelectric materials; zintl materials for thermoelectric power generation; solid-state physics and thermodynamics of thermoelectric materials; thermoelectric engineering; transport measurements at elevated temperatures and energy efficiency.
V.S. Subrahmanian
Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering
Contact: vss@northwestern.edu
V.S. Subrahmanian is Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science with a joint faculty appointment at the McCormick School of Engineering and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Subrahmanian is a world leader in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, predictive modeling, probabilistic inference and machine learning, social media, and counterterrorism. He leads the Northwestern Security and AI Lab (NSAIL), which performs fundamental research on artificial intelligence relevant to these and other questions related to cybersecurity and international security, more broadly.
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya
Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Environmental Policy and Culture Program, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Contact: kimberly.suiseeya@northwestern.eduKimberly R. Marion Suiseeya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Environmental Policy and Culture Program at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. She is an environmental social scientist with expertise in environmental justice, global environmental politics, Indigenous politics and community-driven research. Her research examines how Indigenous communities shape and are impacted by multilateral environmental agreements like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Faith Summersett Williams, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She is trained as a pediatric psychologist and works as an implementation scientist at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital where she leads the research program for the Substance Use and Prevention Program. Her academic and clinical interests are focused on health equity and justice to center the values and needs of historically marginalized communities.
Northwestern Buffett Faculty Ambassadors
Northwestern Buffett Faculty Ambassadors provide strategic counsel to Northwestern Buffett leadership and represent Northwestern Buffett across the Northwestern campus. Their primary role is to support activities that generate Northwestern faculty interest in Northwestern Buffett’s Idea Incubation Process.
Jennifer L. Chan, MD, has worked and collaborated with NGOs and UN agencies for over 10 years supporting organizations as a public health specialist, deputy of health operations, humanitarian data specialist and most recently advising humanitarian organizations. During her career she has performed rapid assessments, evaluated public health programs, completed ICT assessments and helped design and implement community-based information exchange programs. During the West Africa Ebola response, she helped build the NetHope Crisis Informatics Program and currently acts as an advisor to the program. She currently advises NetHope, previously acted as an advisor for the United Nations Center for Humanitarian Data, and as an external advisor to the International Federation of the Red Cross 2018 World Disaster Report. She is a member of Northwestern Buffett's Defusing Disasters Global Working Group.Mark is an historical archaeologist who specializes in materiality, slavery and inequality. These key themes intersect in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries Atlantic and Indian Oceans and form a foundation on his research on the African Diaspora and Colonial Contexts. His research uses slavery’s archaeological record to map alternative geographies of the 18th and 19th-century world. His current research on the labor histories and social lives of two communities in the Caribbean and South India, explores a ‘prehistory’ of the global south by mapping the movement of people, objects and ideas between two oceans.Seda Öğrenci
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering
Contact: seda@northwestern.edu Seda Öğrenci is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at the Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering. Her research interests include design automation, thermal aware design of circuits and systems, thermal sensing and cooling systems for high performance systems and power and energy aware memory systems.
Ted Sargent
Lynn Hopton Davis and Greg Davis Professor, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, McCormick School of Engineering
Contact: ted.sargent@northwestern.eduTed Sargent is Lynn Hopton Davis and Greg Davis Professor at Northwestern University, with appointments in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry and the McCormick School of Engineering Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and is affiliated with the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern. He leads the Sargent Group, which unites chemistry, physics and engineering in research and development laboratories at Northwestern University.
Jim Speta has been a member of the faculty since 1999. His research interests include telecommunications and Internet policy, antitrust, administrative law, and market organization. He teaches in the Law School and in the Joint Program in Law and Business operated by the Law School and the Kellogg School. A 1991 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Speta joined the Northwestern faculty following a one-year visit. He had previously clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and practiced appellate, telecommunications and antitrust law with the Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin.
