Competitive searches bring outstanding faculty

The University of Washington Bothell welcomes 21 new faculty hires in time for the 2016-2017 school year. Eleven are in School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (IAS). Nine are in School of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM). And, one is in the School of Business.


Most are new to the campus but a few have experience at UW Bothell and are taking new positions. Fourteen are lecturers.


“The sizable number of lecturers in this cohort also stands as evidence of our continued commitment to increasing multiyear, full-time lecturer appointments resulting from competitive searches,” said Susan Jeffords, vice chancellor for academic affairs.


The new faculty enrich research capacities and increase opportunities for community impact, she says.
“They also enable the further development of existing degrees and programs and support the launch of new degree opportunities for UW Bothell students,” Jeffords said.

The 11 new faculty members in IAS build on its strength in interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship, says Dean Bruce Burgett.


“We are thrilled to have been able to recruit such a dynamic and exciting cohort of new faculty,” he said.
Founded in 1990, UW Bothell now has nearly 5,000 students and offers 46 degrees, 21 minors and nine certificates.


New UW Bothell faculty:

School of Business

Codrin Nedita, lecturer
Nedita recently served as an assistant professor at Eureka College. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010.


School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

Peter Brooks, lecturer
Brooks earned an MFA from New Mexico State University in 2011, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in May 2016. Additionally, Brooks has an MA in higher education administration.

Silvia Ferreira, lecturer
Ferreira earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from UC Santa Barbara in April 2016. Her research spans rhetoric and composition and different fields of literary study using multilingual archives and digital technologies to draw attention to diverse voices.


Maryam Griffin, assistant professor
Griffin recently served as a UC president’s postdoctoral fellow in Asian-American studies at UC Davis. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from UC Santa Barbara in 2015 and a J.D. with critical race studies specialization from the UCLA School of Law in 2008.


William Hartmann, assistant professor
Hartmann earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from University of Michigan in 2016. His program of research explores the promise and shortcomings of established approaches to culture while extending these efforts through ethnographically-informed qualitative and mixed-methods research with American Indian communities.


Alka Kurian, senior lecturer
Kurian has been with UW Bothell since 2010. She earned her Ph.D. in film, media, and cultural studies from the University of Sunderland, UK, in 2009. Kurian’s research focuses on the contemporary postcolonial thought examined through representations in literature and film.


Jed Murr, lecturer
Murr has been with UW Bothell since 2012. He earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 2014. Murr’s research interests include cultural studies and transnational American studies, 20th-century American ethnic literatures and cultures, U.S. racial formation and critical race theory, visual art and culture, black studies and comparative ethnic studies, globalization, violence and social movements.


Alice Pedersen, lecturer
Pederson has been with UW Bothell since 2014. She earned a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Washington in 2014. Her research interests span from trans-Atlantic literature and culture, to compositions studies, to critical race studies, to the study of contemplative practice.


Thea Quiray Tagle, lecturer
Tagle most recently served as the chancellor’s postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned a Ph.D. in ethnic studies from UC San Diego in 2015. Her research employs an interdisciplinary cultural studies approach informed by scholarship in gender and sexuality studies, critical geography and comparative ethnic studies. Her research investigates Filipino diasporic visual art and performance praxis and the global reorganization of urban space.


Deirdre Vinyard, senior lecturer
Vinyard has served as an assistant professor in culture and community at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She earned a Ph.D. in English, composition and rhetoric from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2005. Her research focus is a multi-institutional study conducted with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Nova Southeastern University titled, “The Language Repertoires of First-Year Writers: A Cross Institutional Study of Multilingual Writers.”


Lee Ann Wang, assistant professor
Wang most recently served as a UC president’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law. She earned a Ph.D. from the program in American culture, Asian Pacific Islander American studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2012. Her research analyzes the emergent paradigm of protection and punishment in U.S. immigration law through an ethnographic study of Asian-American legal practices that help survivors of gender and sexual violence obtain legal status and remain within the nation-state.


Anida Yoeu Ali, artist in residence
Ali was the McGill Distinguished Lecture and Visiting assistant professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She earned an MFA in studio arts (performance) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Her research with collaborative Studio Revolt centers around investigations of storytelling and narrative works that move people toward claiming their stake in the world, redefine the peripheral as a place for engagement, and question if limitations can be turned into the aesthetic basis for powerful works of art.


School of STEM
Division of Biological Sciences

Salwa Al-Noori, lecturer
Al-Noori has served as a senior fellow-trainee in the University of Washington, Department of Oral Health Sciences. She earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine in 2000. Her doctoral work centered on studying the cellular mechanisms underlying the selective vulnerability of hippocampal interneurons to excitotoxic injury.


Alaron Lewis, lecturer
Lewis has taught at UW Bothell since 2011. She earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Yale University in 2006. In her Ph.D. studies, she applied molecular biological and genetic strategies to dissect the role of SUMOylation in protein function.


Michelle Price, lecturer
Price has served as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She earned a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Wisconsin in 2009. She has been very active in outreach events at museums throughout the country and in Europe, including the Natural History Museum in London, England.


Jesse Zaneveld, assistant professor
Zaneveld has served as a research associate at Oregon State University in the Department of Microbiology. He earned a Ph.D. in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. His current research project is “The Global Coral Microbiome Projects: Co-diversification of threatened reef-building corals and their associated microbiotas.”

Division of Computing and Software Systems

Jeffrey Kim, lecturer
Kim has been an affiliate instructor with UW Bothell CSS since 2013, and has served as the director of the Institute for National Security education and Research. He earned a Ph.D. in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine, in 2000. He has over 20 peer-reviewed publications and numerous conference abstracts and poster presentations. His teaching interests lie in systems analysis and design, programming fundamentals, software engineering and cyber security.


Arkady Retik, lecturer
Retik has taught with the University of Washington Bothell and was a professor in the School of Engineering and Built Environment at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. He earned a Doctor of Science from Technion, School of Graduate Study, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1990. His areas of research and study include artificial intelligence, robotics, large engineering DBs, design evaluation and management, knowledge representation, optimization and fuzzy logics and linear programming, and 3D visualization using VR and AR.


Dong Si, assistant professor
Si recently served as an assistant professor of computer science at Northwest Missouri State University. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Old Dominion University in 2015. His research interests include large-scale data discovery, feature detection and pattern recognition, computer vision, machine learning and data mining, geometric modeling and simulation, and bioinformatics.

Division of Engineering and Mathematics

Nicole Hoover, lecturer
Hoover was a magna cum laude graduate in mathematics from San Jose State University and later earned an M.A. in mathematics from the University of California Davis. She served in several instructional capacities at UC Davis, Cosumnes River College and the University of New Orleans. Hoover was the director of the Quantitative Skills Center at UW Bothell from 2006 to 2009. She returned to UW Bothell as a part time instructor in 2012 and was appointed as a full time instructor in 2015.

Division of Physical Sciences

Joey Key, assistant professor
Key has served as a research assistant professor at the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley since 2013. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from Montana State University – Bozeman in 2010. Her primary research interest is gravitational wave data analysis, specializing in parameter estimation for all classes of gravitational wave sources.

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