New Faculty, Administration, and B2F Scholars

Dr. Ignacio Escalante Meza will transition to Assistant Professor this year after two years as a Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at UIC. He is also a Research Associate at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center at the Field Museum of Natural History. Professor Escalante’s research focuses on the mechanisms of animal behavior in arthropods to understand their ecological and evolutionary consequences. Prior to joining UIC in 2022, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He completed his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an MSc and BS in biology from the Universidad de Costa Rica. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles, most recently in Behaviour, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. His research has been funded by National Geographic Grants, the National Science Foundation, and the Organization for Tropical Studies, and he has presented at dozens of conference and invited talks. He has served as an editor and referee for numerous journals, including PLOS One, Animal Behaviour, Communications Biology, and Insect Systematics and Diversity.

Dr. Ash Stephens will transition to Assistant Professor this year after two years as a Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at UIC. Dr. Stephens studies policing, surveillance, gender violence, critical trans studies, and abolitionist social movements. He has published in the Journal of Family Violence, Crime & Delinquency, and Critical Criminology and his work has been supported twice by the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund as well as Columbia University’s Beyond the Bars Fellowship from the Center for Justice, among others. He is a 2023 Michael Lynch Service Awardee, an honor given by the Queer/Trans Caucus of the American Studies Association and the Gay & Lesbian/Trans Caucus of the Modern Language Association. He has numerous public-facing publications, including at In These Times, Advocate, and the Transgender Law Center, and has presented at many conferences, roundtables, and invited talks.

Dr. Sarick Matzen will join the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in January, 2025. He is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Dr. Matzen studies low temperature geochemistry, focusing on urban soils and bringing geochemical tools to support food sovereignty and environmental justice movements. He received his PhD in soil biogeochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published most recently in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, PNAS Nexus, and Pteris Vittata, and the Journal of Hazardous Materials. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Phipps Conservatory Botany in Action Fellowship, and the Green Initiative Fun, and he has been recognized by the Clay Mineral Society Reynolds Award. He has received internationally competitive national lab time on eight different occasions. He has presented talks and posters at numerous national meetings and conferences, including the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting, and the Goldschmidt Conference.

Dr. Michelle Lee joins UIC as an Assistant Professor in the Program in Global Asian Studies from Case Western Reserve University, where she was a Humanities in Learning Leadership Series Postdoctoral Researcher in the History Department. Dr. Lee is also a faculty member in the Racialized Body Cluster at UIC, part of an initiative through the Office of the Provost that brings scholars together across disciplines to study emerging fields. She received her PhD in American Studies with a minor in Public History and Heritage Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has been published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures of the Americas and her research has been supported most recently by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Balch Institute Fellowship, an Education Justice Research Fellowship, and a Community Building and Programming Grant among many others. She has presented at many conferences and invited talks and served as an editor for the Asian American Studies Program Journal and a curator for the National Public Housing Museum, the Asheville Art Museum, and the Robert L. Ringel Gallery.

Dr. Gabriel Conant joins the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science as Assistant Professor from the Ohio State University, where he was an Assistant Professor. His research concerns model theory and applications to group theory and multiplicative combinatorics. He holds a PhD in Pure Mathematics from UIC. Before joining the faculty at OSU, Dr. Conant was a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, a Lumpkins Postdoctoral Fellow (Research Assistant Professor) at the University of Notre Dame, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at UND. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and been published most recently in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society, Mathematische Annalen, and Model Theory. He has given scores of talks worldwide.

Dr. Philip Engel joins UIC as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science from a year-long fellowship at the University of Bonn, and before that, the University of Georgia, where he was an assistant professor. Dr. Engel studies algebraic geometry and Hodge theory, especially degenerations of surfaces. He has been a research member at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (now known as the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute) and a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from Columbia University and a BS in Mathematics and Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has been funded multiple times by the National Science Foundation, and he has published most recently in Annals of Mathematics, International Mathematics Research Notices, and Crelles Journal and has presented many talks worldwide.

Dr. Caroline Terry joins the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science as Associate Professor from the Ohio State University, where she was an assistant professor. Her research is in model theory and finite combinatorics. She holds a PhD in Mathematics from UIC. Before joining the faculty at OSU, she was an L. E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago and a Brin Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland. She has been a long term visitor at the Fields Institute, a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, and a Program Associate at the Mathematical Sciences Research institute (MSRI). Her work has been supported by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation, including the highly competitive and prestigious Faculty Early Development Program (CAREER) Award. Her research has been published most recently in the Journal of Model Theory, Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B, and the Journal of the European Mathematical Society and has presented dozens of talks worldwide.

Dr. Ian Hayes will join the Department of Physics in January, 2025, as an Assistant Professor from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is a Research Associate in the Quantum Materials Center. His research focuses on the physics of strongly correlated electron systems. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his work has been published most recently in Communications Physics, Science, and Nature Physics. He has given numerous invited talks, including at the American Physical Society’s March Meeting sessions on uranium ditelluride and chiral superconductivity and at the Rice Quantum Materials Center/Frontier Condensed Matter Physics Seminar Series, to name a few.

Dr. Jin X. Goh joins the Department of Psychology as an Assistant Professor from Colby College, where he was Assistant Professor. His research interests include diversity science and intergroup relations, social identities and stigma, social interaction and perception, and nonverbal and verbal behavior. After receiving his PhD in Psychology from Northeastern University, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington for two years. His research has been supported by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the European Association of Social Psychology, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Russell Sage Foundation. His work has been published most recently in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, and Nature Reviews Psychology. He has been invited to give talks and workshops across North America and has given many conference talks and posters.

Sociology

Professor Sharmila Rudrappa joins UIC from the University of Texas at Austin, where she has been a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Center for Asian American Studies. Dr. Rudrappa is a sociologist who teaches and researches issues related to gender, race, labor, immigration, and reproductive markets. At UT Austin, Dr. Rudrappa served variously as the Director of the South Asia Institute and the Director of the Center for Asian American Studies. She has also been a Faculty Affiliate at the South Asian Institute and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice in the Law School. She is the author of two award-winning books, Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2015) and Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship (Rutgers Univ Press, 2004), as well as numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, including in Sociology, Critical Sociology, Contexts, and Gender & Society, to name a few. She has also published op-eds and reporting for The Conversation, Huffington Post, American Prospect, and more. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001.

Communication
Jeehuyn Jenny Lee joins the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago as a Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Scholar. She recently earned her PhD in Communication from the University of Washington, following her master’s in Media and Communication Studies and an undergraduate degree in International Studies at Korea University in South Korea.

Jeehyun’s research examines how online cultures and associated mechanisms such as algorithms and datafication shape and perpetuate inequalities along the lines of gender and race. During her PhD, she focused on how society’s minoritized members visibilize and are visibilized on social media through case studies including creator culture, social media popular culture and surveillance culture. As a Bridge to Faculty Scholar at UIC, she will continue this realm of research by focusing on minority representation in algorithmic cultures. Specifically, she plans to examine how algorithmic cultures unequally shape the experiences of society’s minoritized members and the regulatory frameworks that facilitate these processes. Ultimately, her work aims to produce knowledge that identifies, resists, and challenges inequity and harms in digital cultures.

Political Science
Kumar Ramanathan is a Bridge to Faculty Scholar in the Department of Political Science at UIC. He grew up in India and Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Northwestern University, and previously held positions as a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation and Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago.

His research explores how the politics of law and public policy shape inequality in the United States. This includes projects on civil rights and social welfare policies, urban politics, immigrant politics, and democratic accountability. His book manuscript, tentatively titled Building a Civil Rights Agenda: The Democratic Party and the Origins of Racial Liberalism, explores how party politics during the 1930s-60s shaped the content of landmark civil rights legislation. His research agenda on urban politics focuses on Chicago, including projects on the changing dynamics of factional conflict in the Chicago City Council and the politics of gentrifying neighborhoods.

Outside of his academic life, Kumar is active in neighborhood politics on the far north side of Chicago. He can often be found biking around Uptown or cheering at Chicago Sky games.