In 2023, the Buffett Institute expanded upon its Buffett Faculty Fellows Program, which brings world-class faculty to Northwestern through joint appointments in Buffett and one of Northwestern's schools, to offer internal fellowships to Northwestern professors looking to play a role in a robustly interdisciplinary community of faculty eager to explore the ways in which different forms of expertise and experience can mutually enrich their scholarship. We welcomed our initial cohort of Faculty Fellows in Fall 2023:

Laura Brueck

Laura Brueck is Associate Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literatures, and Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her work focuses on caste and race, Dalit literature and literary publics, genre fictions and the theory and practice of translation. She is the author of Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (Columbia University Press, 2014) and the translator of Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria (Navayana, 2013), as well as the co-editor of volumes on Indian sound studies, gender and the vernacular in Indian literature and Dalit literature in translation. She is currently co-editing the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literatures and writing a book on Indian detective fictions tentatively titled Indian Pulp: The Local and the Global in Indian Detective Fictions. She co-leads the Northwestern Buffett Global Working Group on Race, Caste, and Colorism which aims to cultivate a global network of scholars, artists, writers, translators, and activists around a shared political, intellectual, and aesthetic inquiry of race, caste, and colorism.

Nicholas Diakopoulos

Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University where he directs the Computational Journalism Lab and is director of Graduate Studies for the Technology and Social Behavior Ph.D. program. His research focuses on computational journalism, including aspects of automation and algorithms in news production, algorithmic accountability and transparency and social media in news contexts. He is the author of the award-winning book, Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media, published by Harvard University Press. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his Sc.B. degree in Computer Engineering from Brown University. 

Elizabeth Gerber

Elizabeth 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.  

At Northwestern, Gerber teaches classes on product and service design, which emphasize the design thinking methodology—a human-centered problem-solving approach focused on gaining inspiration from human needs, working in diverse groups to generate ideas and prototyping ideas for rapid feedback. She also advises students in the award-winning design initiative she founded called Design for America where students take on extracurricular design work for social impact. 

Michael S. Kang

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 research has been published widely in leading law journals and featured in the New York Times, Washington Post and Forbes, among other outlets. 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. The American Constitution Society profiled Professor Kang’s empirical work with Joanna Shepherd on judicial campaign ads and judges’ criminal law decisions in Skewed Justice. Kang received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago. He also received a PhD in government from Harvard University and an MA from the University of Illinois.  

Anto Mohsin

Anto Mohsin is Assistant Professor in Residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar and an affiliated faculty member of the Science in Human Culture Program. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of infrastructure, energy and environment of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He is a member of the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs’ Climate Crisis + Media Arts working group. At Northwestern Qatar he teaches undergraduate courses that examine science, technology, environment and disasters in society. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in several journals. His forthcoming book, Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development, will be published in Fall 2023 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Prior to joining Northwestern Qatar, he held a Henry Luce Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian Environmental Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He received his doctoral degree in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Cornell University.

Hatim A. Rahman

Hatim A. Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. His 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. 

Professor Rahman's research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly; the Academy of Management Journal; Organization Science; and Academy of Management Discoveries. His research has received several awards, including from the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award), INFORMS, Academy of Management, Psychology of Technology Institute, Industry Studies Association and ICIS. 

Prior to joining Kellogg, Professor Rahman received his Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Ozge Samanci

Ozge 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. Her interactive installations have been exhibited in numerous venues internationally and, in 2017, she received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. Her autobiographical graphic novel Dare to Disappoint (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015) received international press attention and was positively reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate and other media outlets. Her drawings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Slate Magazine, The Huffington Post, Airmail, Guernica and The Rumpus.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Nitasha Tamar Sharma is Professor of Black Studies and Asian American Studies. She is 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.  

Sharma is the author of Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021) and Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (Duke UP, 2010). Sharma is co-editor of Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018) and Who Is the Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies (Columbia UP, 2021). 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

G. Jeffrey Snyder is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. His 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. 

Snyder started working in thermoelectrics in 1997 after joining the Thermoelectrics group at JPL. In 2006, he started the Caltech Thermoelectrics Group.  He has over 400 publications in thermoelectrics with many influential contributions and was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics) for five consecutive years (from 2016 to 2020) with GoogleScholar H-index > 100. He has also mentored several award-winning students and postdocs in the field of thermoelectrics including three Goldsmid and two International Thermoelectric Society Young Investigator Award winners.

Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya

Kimberly 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.  

Kimberly Marion Suiseeya 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. She is a Commission Member of theInternational Union for Conservation of Nature's Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy, a Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance project and a member of the Earth System Governance project’s Planetary Justice Taskforce. Dr. Marion Suiseeya is also an experienced policy practitioner who has worked and conducted research in Guyana, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and the U.S. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Faith Summersett Williams

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. She combines this perspective with implementation and dissemination science frameworks to examine structural disenfranchisement with the goal of reducing inequities in healthcare.  

Her current research is focused on implementing evidence-based behavioral health interventions in clinical and community healthcare settings. Through her research she hopes to serve a particularly vulnerable pediatric population—adolescents diagnosed with chronic illnesses who are at high risk for alcohol and substance use disorders. Decades of research have uncovered racial and ethnic disparities among pediatric chronic illnesses. Dr. Summersett Williams is dedicated to establishing a universal standard of equitable healthcare for these communities on the periphery.