Meet the
New Faculty!

Emory College of Arts and Sciences welcomes an exceptional group of 22 new faculty members who joined us recently and who reflect ambitious recruitment and hiring over the past two years.

These new faculty bring extraordinary scholarly and pedagogical creativity across the humanities, the arts, and the natural and social sciences. 

Our newest faculty continue to enhance the diversity of the Emory community and their contributions will push the boundaries of discovery and scholarly impact in the liberal arts and sciences.

The College also celebrates several faculty recipients of named chairs and faculty who have been promoted to associate and full professors with tenure, and senior lecturers.

Sa’ed Atshan
Acting Associate Professor
Anthropology

Sa’ed Atshan completed his PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University (2013). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Atshan held positions at Swarthmore College, University of California, Berkeley, and Brown University. His research interests are peace and conflict studies, anthropology of policy, critical development studies, gender and sexuality, and religious studies. Dr. Atshan’s articles have been published in a number of leading journals including Conflict and Society, Comparative Literature and Culture, and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. He has also published two books, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020) and The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020).

Marcela Benitez
Assistant Professor
Anthropology

Marcela Benitez completed her joint PhD in Biological Anthropology and Biopsychology at the University of Michigan (2016). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in Spring 2021, Dr. Benitez held positions at Georgia State University and University of Michigan. Dr. Benitez’s research interests focuses on behavioral endocrinology, biological anthropology, animal behavior, evolution of communication, and primatology. Her articles have been published in American Journal of Primatology, Scientific Reports, and International Journal of Primatology.

Anita Devineni
Assistant Professor
Biology

Anita Devineni completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco (2012). Dr. Devineni will join the faculty at Emory in Spring 2022. She completed postdoctoral research at Columbia University (2021) and held a teaching position at City College of New York. Dr. Devineni’s research interests focus on how the brain translates sensory information from the external world into adaptive and flexible behavioral responses. Her articles have been published in J Neurosci, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and eLife.

Aisha Finch
Acting Assistant Professor
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Aisha Finch completed her PhD in History at New York University (2007). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Finch held positions at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Finch’s research interests are political movements in African Diaspora, gender ideologies, and black feminist thought. Her articles have been published in a number of leading journals including Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Women and Social Movements in the United States, and Journal of Women’s History.

Zhiyun Gong
Lecturer
Quantitative Theory and Methods

Zhiyun Gong completed her PhD in Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University (2013). Prior to re-joining the faculty at Emory in Spring 2022, she held positions at Clemson University, Emory University (2015 – 2019), and the University of Iowa. Dr. Gong’s research interests include extreme value theory, actuarial science, risk management, time series analysis, probability, limit theory, and stochastic processes. Her articles have been published in Journal of Time Series Analysis  and Journal of Southwest University (Natural Science Edition).

David Gorkin
Assistant Professor
Biology

David Gorkin completed his PhD in Molecular Biology and Human Genetics at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (2013). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in Spring 2021, Dr. Gorkin  held a position at the University of California San Diego.  Dr. Gorkin’s research focuses on epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation during mammalian development and cellular differentiation. His articles have been published in Nature Communications, Nature Neuroscience, and Cell.

David Hirshberg
Assistant Professor
Quantitative Theory and Methods

David Hirshberg completed his PhD in Statistics at Columbia University (2018). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Hirshberg held positions at Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Project Evolution, Wheeler High School, and Brown University. Dr. Hirshberg’s research interests are developing methods to evaluate policy changes and health interventions. His articles have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics of Sciences, and Epidemiology.

Wei Huang
Assistant Professor
Economics

Wei Huang completed his PhD in Economics at Harvard University (2016). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Huang held positions at the National University of Singapore and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Huang’s research interests include public economics, labor economics, and health economics. His articles have been published in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Public Economics, Labor Economics, Health Economics, and Journal of Labor Economics.

Sameena Mulla
Acting Associate Professor
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Sameena Mulla completed her PhD in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University (2008). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Mulla held positions at Marquette University. Dr. Mulla’s research interests include racialization, sexual violence, legal and medical anthropology, policing, and subjectivity. She is the author of The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses and Sexual Assault Intervention, for which she was awarded the Margaret Mead Award in 2017, and Bodies in Evidence: Race, Science, Gender and Sexual Assault Adjudication. She is the co-editor of Feminist Anthropology, the official journal of the Association for Feminist Anthropology.

Kristin Phillips
Assistant Professor
Anthropology

Kristin D. Phillips completed her Joint PhD in Anthropology and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2009). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021 as an Assistant Professor, Dr. Phillips taught at Emory and Michigan State University. Dr. Phillips studies inequality and activism in issues of food, energy, environment, and development. Her recent monograph, An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun (2018: Indiana University Press) won the 2020 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize and was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 African Studies Association’s Book Prize. She has also published articles in Political and Legal Anthropology Review, African Studies Review, and the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.

Jennifer Rieser
Assistant Professor
Physics

Jennifer Rieser completed her PhD in Physics at the University of Pennsylvania (2015). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in Spring 2021, Dr. Rieser held a position at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Rieser’s research is at the interface of soft matter physics and organismal biophysics; she is particularly interested in how the physics of flowable natural materials like sand and mud affects animal morphology and behavior. Her articles have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review Letters, and Science, and her recent work on sidewinding snakes was featured in The New York Times.

Kate Rosenblatt
Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor
Religion and The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies

Kate Rosenblatt completed her PhD in History at the University of Michigan (2016). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Rosenblatt held a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory University and a position at the University of Michigan. Dr. Rosenblatt’s research interests are modern Jewish history, modern US history, and women and gender studies. Her articles have been published in Forward and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History.

Jitendra Thakur
Assistant Professor
Biology

Jitendra Thakur completed her PhD in Genetics and Cell Biology at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advance Scientific Research (2012). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in Spring 2021, Dr. Thakur held a position at the University of Washington. Dr. Thakur’s research focuses on genetics, cell, and developmental biology. Her articles have been published Genes & Development, Genome Research, and Eukaryotic Cell.

Emily Wall
Assistant Professor
Computer Science

Emily Wall completed her PhD in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology (2020). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Wall held a postdoctoral position at Northwestern University. Dr. Wall’s research focuses on decision making using data visualization and visual analytics. Her articles have been published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and her book chapter was featured in Cognitive Biases in Visualizations.

Ruoxuan Xiong
Assistant Professor
Quantitative Theory and Methods

Ruoxuan Xiong completed her Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University (2020). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Xiong was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Dr. Xiong’s research is at the intersection of econometrics and operations research, focusing on factor modeling, causal inference, and experimental design, and with applications in finance and healthcare. Her articles have been featured in the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, eLife, KDD, and AAAI.

Liana Yepremyan
Assistant Professor
Mathematics

Liana Yepremyan completed her PhD in Computer Science at McGill University, Canada (2016). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2021, Dr. Yepremyan held a position at the University of Oxford. Dr. Yepremyan’s research focuses on extremal combinatorics and graph theory. Her articles have been published in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, and Journal of Graph Theory.