Anthropology
David Forrest
Associate Professor
David is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on sexual risk behavior and substance use among people who use drugs, men who have sex with men, and heterosexuals at increased risk for HIV infection. His methodological interests include rapid assessment and the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data to understand the motivations behind actions that lead to risk of infectious disease. He is also interested in environmental history and human-environmental interaction in communities undergoing change. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Urban Health, AIDS and Behavior, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, and the Harm Reduction Journal.
Lydia Light
Assistant Professor
I am a proud UM alumna! I received my BSc from the University of Miami in 2001 with double majors in Motion Pictures and Anthropology. After several years working as an editor for reality-based television in Los Angeles, I received my MA (2011) and PhD (2016) in Anthropology from the University of Texas at San Antonio. My research focuses on the behavioral flexibility of primates living in challenging environments. I began my career as a Lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2016 and later transitioned into a position there as an Assistant Professor.
Art & Art History
Sanaz Haghani Nouri
Assistant Professor
Sofia Valiente Noailles
Full time lecturer
Sofia Valiente Noailles is a full-time Lecturer of Photography in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami. As an artist and a visual anthropologist Sofia’s work explores the complex histories involving Everglades’ drainage and South Florida’s development at large. Specifically, her work looks into counter-histories—critically interrogating the constructions of narratives, authority, agency, and truth-making. Sofia’s books: Miracle Village (2014); Foreverglades (2019); and debut film Ivy Ridge (2024) have received awards from World Press Photo, Knight Foundation, Cannes Indie Shorts, and the State of Florida, Department of Cultural Affairs. Sofia’s work has been published in numerous media outlets including: Time, the Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR, and American Photo Magazine. Her projects have been exhibited internationally in various museums and photography festivals around the world.
Biology
Alyssa Laffitte-Peslak
Full-time Lecturer
Nat Clarke
Assistant Professor
Nat Clarke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. Previously, he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at MIT, working with Prof. Adam Martin. He completed his Ph.D. in 2018 with Chris Lowe and James Nelson at Stanford University. His research is focused on understanding the evolution of multicellularity in animals. In particular, he studies the evolution and function of cell adhesion proteins to understand how animal tissues are built. To do this, his lab utilizes a range of methods in embryology, cell biology, and biochemistry to explore how cells stick together in non-bilaterian animals (cnidarians, sponges, etc.).
Patrick Lariviere
Assistant Professor
Chemistry
Danila Barskiy
Associate Professor
Danila Barskiy is an Associate Professor at the Frost Institute for Chemistry and Molecular Sciences, University of Miami. His lab develops next-generation NMR methods by combining hyperpolarization with ultralow-field detection and quantum sensing. He has received the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Helmholtz Centers, and the 2025 Varian Young Investigator Award. Danila earned his Ph.D. at Novosibirsk University (Russia), followed by postdoctoral appointments at Vanderbilt University and UC Berkeley, and an independent group leader position at the University of Mainz (Germany). His team works toward portable quantum sensing devices and high-sensitivity NMR-based assays for chemistry and biomedicine.
Jason J. Calvin
Assistant Professor
Dr. Jason Calvin attended Brigham Young University where he worked with Dr. Brian Woodfield to measure low temperature heat capacities of materials. He graduated with his B.S. in Chemistry with minors in Physics and Mathematics in 2018. He then attended the University of California, Berkeley where he worked with Dr. Paul Alivisatos on quantum dot thermodynamics and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2022. After graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University with Dr. Jarad Mason engineering microporous water. He joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Miami in 2025.
Lukun Wang
Lecturer
Oswaldo Nunez
Lecturer
English
Kimberly Reyes
Assistant Professor
Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, pop culture critic, and visual culture scholar. She is the author of the critically acclaimed/award-winning books Bloodletting (Omnidawn, 2025), vanishing point. (Omnidawn, 2023), Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn, 2019), Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), and the essay collection Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2019). Reyes has received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and CantoMundo. An active Fulbright scholar, Dr. Reyes holds advanced degrees from University College Cork, San Francisco State University, Columbia University, and the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.
Meghna Sapui
Assistant Professor
Meghna Sapui is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. She works on the literature and culture of the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on South Asia where this empire enfolded local understandings of caste, religion, and environment to formulate new forms of literary and gustatory tastes. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, Victorian Studies, Global Food History, and The Palgrave Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science. Meghna received her PhD in English from the University of Florida and was a Junior Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows before joining the University of Miami.
Melanie White
Visiting Assistant Professor
Dr. Melanie White is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University. Her research explores how Black Central Americans have confronted racialized and gendered colonial violence since the 17th century. Her manuscript, Sovereign Mosquitia, traces how Afro-Indigenous women’s performance, art, and organizing on the Miskitu Coast has crafted a vision for the region rooted in intimate, rather than settler, sovereignty. Dr. White’s work has been supported by the ACLS and Ford Foundation, with publications in Small Axe and Caribbean Quarterly. She holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University and is the co-founder of The Black Central Americas Project.
History
Kevan Malone
Visiting Assistant Professor
Kevan Malone is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History, where he teaches U.S. history since the Gilded Age. He holds a PhD in history from the University of California, San Diego and an MA in American studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Kevan's first book project--"Line in the Watershed: Tijuana, San Diego, and the Political Ecology of the U.S.-Mexico Border"--examines the economic, political, and environmental relations of the U.S. and Mexican border cities of San Diego and Tijuana through the prism of the built and natural environments in the transboundary basin of the Tijuana River. Research for this project has been funded by the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Huntington Library, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the UCLA Library Special Collections, and the Hill fellowship for the UC San Diego Special Collections and Archives. Before coming to the University of Miami, Kevan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. His writings can be found in The Washington Post and The San Diego Union-Tribune as well as on The Metropole, the blog of the Urban History Association.
Mathematics
Orlando Alonso
Full-time Lecturer
I hold an Ed.D. in Mathematics Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, awarded in 2009. From 2000 to 2007, I was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Mathematics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where I completed all coursework and passed the qualifying exams. I earned an M.A. in Mathematics Education from City College in 2000. Earlier in my career, I pursued a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Las Villas Central University Marta Abreu, Cuba. I also hold a Licentiate in Mathematics Education from the Higher Institute of Pedagogy Felix Varela, Cuba, obtained in 1980.
Richard Horja
Research Assistant Professor
The broad topic of my research is the classical subject of algebraic geometry and its interactions with mathematical physics. The focus of my current work is on mirror symmetry, a fascinating mathematical relationship initially proposed by string theorists which has become a major research topic in different areas of mathematics. After earning my Ph.D. in Mathematics from Duke University, I held teaching and research positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, The Fields Institute of the University of Toronto, University of Vienna.
Wonsang Cho
Full-time Lecturer
The Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages & Literatures
Maria Veliz
Full-time Lecturer
Philosophy
Hwan Ryu
Full-time Lecturer
Hwan Ryu is a Full-time Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He primarily works on issues in metaphysics and philosophy of science, including topics such as dispositions, powers, multi-track dispositions, laws of nature and the nature of properties. His current research project is to develop a power-based non-Humean metaphysics of fundamental reality based on an anti-reductionist realist view of multi-track dispositions as powers. He is also interested in structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of AI, logic, and applied ethics. Hwan earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Miami, and his B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy from Seoul National University.
Political Science
Julia Wester
Senior Lecturer
Dr. Wester is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist. Her research focuses on role of social norms, emotion, and community organizing in shaping environmental decisions and policies. studying social and environmental organizing landscape in Miami. She also collaborates on a number of projects on sharks & rays, fishery interactions, and conservation. She received her PhD from the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy at the University of Miami. Before that she received an Msc with Distinction in Biodiversity Conservation and Management from Oxford University and worked as a Legislative Aide in South Florida, focusing on environmental policy.
Kaitlyn Chriswell
Assistant Professor
Kaitlyn Chriswell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami. She studies political violence and democracy with a particular emphasis on citizen-state relations. Her book project examines how the local presence of criminal groups affects whether and how citizens interact with the state through a mixed-methods study of municipalities across Mexico. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Center at Brown University prior to joining the University of Miami. Her published research can be found in Comparative Political Studies and World Politics.
Sarah Chung
Lecturer
Psychology
Diana Chirinos
Assistant Professor
Jacob Miller
Assistant Professor
Jacob Miller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology (Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division). Previously, he was a Wu Tsai Institute postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, working with Profs. John Murray and Amy Arnsten. He completed his Ph.D. in 2021 with Mark D’Esposito at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on how the architecture of the human prefrontal cortex supports a remarkable array of flexible cognition and behaviors. His lab uses the tools of functional and anatomical neuroimaging, combined with computational modeling of neural circuits and behaviors, and analyses of large-scale neurophysiological data.
Sociology and Criminology
Kasim Ortiz
Assistant Professor
Dr. Kasim Ortiz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, with a secondary appointment in Global Health Studies. Dr. Ortiz is a medical sociologist and health disparities scholar whose research investigates how racialized and sexualized social structures shape health inequities across the life course. His work centers on the question: What new evidence emerges when we center sexually dispossessed populations in efforts to eradicate intergenerational racial and ethnic health inequities?
Dr. Ortiz’s research program employs computational, demographic, and community-engaged methods to examine multilevel determinants of health, including a focus on racial capitalism, aging, and the criminal legal system. Dr. Ortiz earned his doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of New Mexico, and holds a Master in Science in Urban Planning from Savannah State University, and a obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of West Georgia.
Theatre Arts
Burton Tedesco
Assistant Prof. of Practice
Mysia Anderson
Visiting Assistant Professor
Writing Studies
Alyssa Altonaga
Lecturer
Alyssa M. Altonaga teaches Legal Writing & Rhetoric I and II in the Department of Writing Studies. She earned her J.D. from the University of Miami School of Law and is a practicing attorney in Florida. Outside of teaching and her practice, she volunteers with non-profit organizations centered on criminal justice reform. Her research interests include collateral consequences of criminal convictions and the effect of media reporting and rhetoric on criminal cases. Her work has been published by the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Magazine.
Carolene Kurien
Lecturer
Carolene Kurien earned a BS in Neuroscience & English and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of Miami. Her creative work has received support from MacDowell and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and her poems have been published in North American Review, Sixth Finch, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
Ligia Mihut
Associate Professor
Ligia A. Mihut (mee-hootz) is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Writing Studies and faculty in the Innovation and Society co-major. Ligia received her PhD in English (Writing Studies) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of research include transnational literacies, community-based research, emergent technologies, and emotion studies. Her ethnographic book, Immigrants, Brokers, and Literacy as Affinity features the power of storytelling and empathy of Romanian immigrants in pursuit of the American Dream. Ligia has also published in College Composition and Communication, Literacy in Composition Studies, Reflections, and several edited collections.
Sajjad Mahdavivand
Lecturer
Sajjad Mahdavivand Fard is a lecturer at the department of Writing Studies. He earned his Doctor of Education degree from Texas State University in 2025. His research focuses on the impact of Generative AI on writing and its implications for pedagogy and literacy.
Sarah Fischer
Assistant Professor
Sarah Fischer is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at the University of Miami. She earned her PhD from Indiana University and completed her undergraduate education at the University of Florida. Her research and teaching center around digital rhetorics, multimodal composition, and embodiment.
Seth Goldwaser
Lecturer
I was a full-time lecturer at UM’s philosophy department during the 2024-2025 academic year. I have a Doctorate in Philosophy from University of Pittsburgh's Philosophy Department. Prior to coming to Pitt, I received my BA in Philosophy from Auburn University after transferring from Winthrop University.
I work primarily on mental action, memory, and imagination. I also have interests in epistemic injustice as well as biological normativity and function.
My doctoral research focuses on skillful mental action, proposing that the activity of constructing representations in imagining is skillful and that mnemic processing that results in declarative remembering is an extension of this skillful activity.
