Faculty Fellows and Faculty Ambassadors
Learn more about the Buffett Institute's Faculty Fellows and Faculty Ambassadors below.
Buffett Faculty Fellows
The Buffett Faculty Fellowship Program supports full-time, tenure-line Northwestern faculty who are conducting research outside of the contiguous United States.
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 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.
Iza Ding’s book project Green Waves documents global histories of modern environmentalism, zeroing in on cases across the United States, Europe and Asia. Ding demonstrates the malleability of environmentalism as a political idea from its conservative-romanticist origins, through a liberal movement galvanized by labor activists and anti-war protestors, up to the present, when conservatives are gradually discovering the political limits of climate-change skepticism and denial.
Katherine E. Hoffman
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Contact: khoffman@northwestern.edu
As the inaugural Buffett/Kaplan Global Humanities Fellow, Heather Jaber will work on her book project Feeling Like the Global South, which offers bahdala—the Arabic word for a humbling ridicule—as an emotions framework for the underlying economy of the Internet and the way it structures global belonging.
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.
Daniel Majchrowicz
Assistant Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Contact: dmaj@northwestern.edu
Reynaldo 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.
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. Currently, she is working on her graphic novel Not Here But Everywhere, which explores the core questions of international migration studies through an engaging, accessible story of transformational change, cultural difference and escape from trauma, featuring two main characters from Turkey and the United States.
Zekeria Ahmed Salem
Associate Professor of Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Director, Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa
Contact: zekeria.salem@northwestern.edu
Elizabeth Son, in Holding Histories: Korean Diasporic Women’s Art and Activism, explores how contemporary Korean diasporic women harness the power of embodied culture to grapple with histories of social and political violence. Her project showcases the richness of Korean diasporic women’s aesthetic innovations and activist collaborations in addressing issues around peace and security, racial and gender-based justice, and environmentalism and sustainability.
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.
Christopher Udry, in Economic Organization of Households and Communities in West Africa, will focus on changes in institutions, with particular attention to seasonality, risk and economic, social and environmental heterogeneity.
Buffett Faculty Ambassadors
Buffett Faculty Ambassadors provide strategic counsel to Northwestern Buffett leadership and represent the Buffett Institute across the Northwestern campus.
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 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.
