Omoniyi Afolabi’s researches the interface between literature, historicism, and culture studies with particular focus on Afro-Brazil. He has published in the areas of culture, literature, and religion, drawing parallels between the centrality of Yoruba mythology in the African diaspora as well as the place of the African cosmological and strategic essences in the New World or global studies.
Richard Albert's research interests are constitutionalism, democracy, and the rule of law, with specific focus on constitutional reform, constitution-making, and comparative constitutionalism.
Jorge Almeida’s neuroimaging research focuses on the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to investigate biomarkers of mood disorders, especially bipolar disorder, using standard neuroimaging data analysis along with effective connectivity and pattern recognition analysis. He also works at the Bipolar Disorder Center, which is evidence-based and outcome-driven to achieve higher levels of health care value at the lowest cost.
Journalism and Media, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Rosental Alves' research focuses on international reporting (emphasizing the work of foreign correspondents), journalism in Latin America (especially the struggle for a free press in the hemisphere), and Internet journalism (the creation of a new genre of journalism for the digital medium).
Owen Anderson is a scholar whose expertise is in oil and gas, particularly with regards to international petroleum law, transactions, and taxation. He has written extensively on water law and domestic and global petroleum law.
Eric Anslyn's research focuses on physical organic and supramolecular chemistry. Anslyn utilizes mechanistic insights and knowledge of photophysics to devise sensing systems for real-life applications.
Eugenio Arima's research aims to understand the motivations that drive humans to act upon and transform tropical landscapes and the impact of those changes on people and environments. He is studying how the growing demand for avocados in the U.S. has led to significant socio-environmental consequences in Mexico, where most of the supply comes from.
Spanish & Portuguese, African and African Diaspora Studies
Jossianna Arroyo-Martinez's research interests center on Latin American and Caribbean literature and cultures, Luso-Brazilian literature and cultures (1800s to present), the relationships between literature, ethnographic and sociological discourses in Latin America, Afro-Diasporic literature and cultures, and critical discourses of race, gender and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial societies.
Vaibhav Bahadur’s research covers the topics of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, thermal management and surface science with applications in energy, water, and environmental protection.
Benjamin Baird's research spans several areas in human cognition, including metacognition, sleep and public health. He uses a range of methods, including behavioral testing and multimodal neuroimaging techniques to study the brain basis of human cognitive processes.
Aaron Baker's research is focused on application of the tools of engineering, glycobiology, and molecular biology to increasing the understanding vascular disease. Baker's goals are to improve design of implanted vascular devices, develop technology to enable high-throughput study and drug discovery in the cardiovascular field, and to enhance cellular and protein therapies for ischemic disease.
Doris Baker's research interest is to develop and test interventions that improve the outcomes of English learners using evidence-based practices and technology. She is also interested in the development of formative assessments that can measure student academic growth, the examination of the effect of parental support on their children’s academic outcomes, and the enhancement of teacher pedagogical practices and content knowledge.
Ethel Bayer-Santos' lab is focused on micro-biological conflicts and the weapons used by bacteria to target competitors. The group uses Salmonella and a specialized contractile nanoweapon called T6SS to understand how enteric pathogens overcome colonization resistance imposed by members of the microbiota and establish an infection.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Amit Bhasin’s research focuses on developing models that relate material properties to performance of asphalt binders and mixtures, including evaluating the impact of chemical modifiers, additives, and other agents, developing comprehensive models for undamaged behavior and damage evolution in asphalt binders and mixtures, and characterizing physical and chemical properties of asphalt binders and aggregates.
Germanic Studies, Linguistics, Linguistics Research Center
Hans C. Boas' main research revolves around the relationship between syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and the structure of the lexicon, which he approaches from a contrastive perspective (English/German). The theoretical frameworks he works with are primarily Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics with a strong bias towards corpus-based research methods.
Nathaniel Brickens is an internationally acclaimed trombone player and educator. He has traveled and performed both national and internationally as a free-lance trombonist, as conductor of the UT Trombone Choir, and as a music educator.
Daniel Brinks' research is on the role of the law and courts in supporting democratic rights. Over the years, he has addressed the use of courts and law to enforce social and economic rights in the developing world, the development of the rule of law and new constitutional orders in Latin America, the judicial response to police violence in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, judicial independence, and the role of informal norms in the legal order.
David Buss' primary interests include the evolutionary psychology of human mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, social reputation (prestige and status), the emotion of jealousy, homicide and anti-homicide defenses, and stalking.
Elena Cáceres is a theoretical physicist working in string theory and gravity. She has worked in different aspects of gauge/gravity duality, supergravity solutions and holography. Her work is focused on the relationship between quantum information theory, gravity, and spacetime.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Carlos Caldas' research interests are in the areas of information technologies and sensors for construction engineering and project management, advanced data analysis techniques, project performance assessment, productivity improvement, knowledge management, and infrastructure systems.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's research demonstrates the deep formative role of "Latin America" to the colonial history of the U.S. and to the history of "Western" modernity as a whole, not just slavery, globalization, and capitalism but also science, abolitionism, and democracy.
David Cannatella's research focuses on the higher-level phylogeny of amphibians, biodiversity of neotropical frogs, signal evolution in frog mating calls, behavioral ecology of poison frogs, and relationship of bioinformatics and systematics. Cannatella also studies the systematics and evolution of salamanders, birds and bird fossils, and in the past, lizards and snakes.
Anthropology, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Paola Canova conducts research among indigenous peoples of Paraguay, mainly in the Gran Chaco region. She also conducts research among among rural mestizo communities, and Mennonite migrants to the region. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, indigeneity, political ecology and the state.
Kerry Cook's research centers on predicting and understanding climate change and climate variability around the world, including Africa, South America, and the central U.S. Her group uses numerical models of the climate system, including atmosphere, ocean, and vegetation components, along with observational analysis to improve understanding about processes at the earth's surface interact with atmospheric circulation and precipitation fields.
Advertising & Public Relations, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Isabella Cunningham's research is in the area of legal and ethical aspects of advertising and promotional communications. In addition, she is particularly interested in the management of the communications effort, which includes media effectiveness and message appeals.
Earth and Planetary Sciences, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Ian Dalziel's research is focused on understanding global tectonic processes and to mapping out the geography of ancient times on a dynamic Earth. His 60 years of field experience have been devoted to work in the British Caledonides, the Canadian Shield, the Andes, and Antarctica.
Jens Christian Dammann's main fields of research are corporate law and European Union law; his other areas of interest include contracts and comparative law. His main focus is on U.S. law but he has also focused on European Union law and German law.
Penelope Davies specializes in the architectural history of ancient Rome. She has published numerous articles and essays in scholarly publications about Roman art and architecture.
Noah De Lissovoy's research focuses on critical and emancipatory approaches to pedagogy, curriculum, and cultural studies. He is particularly interested in problems posed for educators by globalization, the intersecting effects of race, class and capital in schools and society, developing the theoretical resources for social movements, and extending and rethinking the traditions of critical pedagogy and philosophy.
Celina de Sá's research focuses on performance and race through grassroots social networks in West Africa, looking at the Afro-Brazilian martial art, capoeira, as a window into the contemporary dynamics of both racial self-making and coloniality in Senegal.
Anthony Di Fiore conducts long-term behavioral and ecological field research on several species in the primate community of Amazonian Ecuador. He investigates the ways in which ecological conditions (such as the abundance and distribution of food resources) and the strategies of conspecifics together shape primate behavior and social relationships and ultimately determine the various kinds of primate societies.
Anthony Dudo researches the intersection of science, media, and society. He is interested in scientists' public engagement activities, media representations of science and environmental issues, and the contributions of informational and entertainment media to public perceptions of science. His work examines factors influencing scientists' likelihood and goals to engage publicly, and the growing community of science communication trainers.
Law, Human Rights and Justice, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, Jewish Studies
Ariel Dulitzky is a leading expert in human rights, particularly in Latin America and the United Nations and regional (particularly the inter-American) human rights system and enforced disappearances. Dulitzky has published extensively on human rights, the inter-American human rights system, racial discrimination, indigenous rights, the rule of law in Latin America, enforced disappearances, and sports and human rights.
Public Affairs, Middle Eastern Studies, Geography and the Environment, Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, South Asia Institute, Jewish Studies, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, IC2 Institute
David Eaton's research focuses on sustainable development in international river basins, evaluation of energy and water conservation programs, and prevention of pollution.
María Luisa Echavarría's research focuses on international business, language and culture, heritage language learners, and Spanish for healthcare providers.
Zachary Elkins’ research focuses on issues of democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. Much of his research is on the origins and consequences of national constitutions.
Patience Epps’ research is focused on Indigenous Amazonian languages, particularly the Naduhup language family of the northwest Amazon. Her work engages with language description and documentation, linguistic typology, language contact and language change, and Amazonian prehistory.
Andrew Esbaugh's research focuses on the interaction between physiology and the environment in marine fish. His interest lies in the integrative roles of respiratory gas exchange, acid-base balance and osmoregulation, and how these systems are adapted to allow fish to thrive in a diverse array of environments.
Mechanical Engineering, Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Ofodike Ezekoye is an expert in combustion and heat transfer in high temperature and reacting systems, such as combustion engines, furnaces, and structural fires. His research covers a range of applications from fundamentals of combustion systems to scientific support of the fire service in developing fire fighting tactics.
Public Affairs, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Raissa Fabregas is an applied microeconomist with research interests in development and labor economics. Her work is primarily related to understanding constraints on learning and the accumulation of human capital in developing countries and evaluating interventions and policies that could mitigate those barriers.
African and African Diaspora Studies, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Nessette Falu is a cultural anthropologist and Black queer and feminist studies scholar with research at the intersections of gynecology, structural violence, reproductive justice, erotic power, autonomy, and ethics. In her book, she argues Brazilian Black lesbians protect themselves against violence within gynecology healthcare through self-worth grounded in knowledge production and praxes toward social change, self-care and communal action.
Stephen Finn specializes in collaborative/therapeutic assessment, personality assessment, and other topics in clinical psychology like gender identity.
Vivian Flanzer's research areas include cross-cultural pragmatics; foreign language education; language teaching, culture and technology; creation of pedagogical materials; Brazilian culture and society; and language, ethnicity and identity.
Sergey Fomel's research interests include computational and exploration geophysics, seismic imaging, wave propagation, seismic data analysis, inverse problems, and geophysical estimation.
Greg Fonzo’s research focuses on understanding mechanisms of affective disorder psychopathology and treatment, and leveraging this understanding to improve clinical care and patient outcomes.
Joshua Frens-String is a historian of modern Latin America. His research interests include revolution in modern Latin America, popular politics, labor history, global agricultural history, food politics, and U.S.-Latin American relations.
Sociology, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Daniel Fridman is interested in the intersections of economy and culture, neoliberalism and financialization, economic policy in Latin America, consumer culture, gift-giving, the sociology of money, and the construction of economic subjects.
History, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Seth Garfield's primary specialization is Brazilian history and environmental history. He also explores the broader questions of race and ethnicity in Latin America, indigenous policy, and comparative frontiers.
Kenneth Gentle has been engaged in a variety of experiments on nonlinear plasma waves, weak plasma turbulence, strong plasma turbulence, and tokamak confinement physics. His research has concentrated on questions of particle and electron transport, perhaps the least understood of the transport channels as it does not seem to be diffusive -- the thermal flux is not proportional to the temperature gradient.
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Information, Risk and Operations Management, Computer Science, Medicine
Joydeep Ghosh's research interests lie primarily in data mining and web mining, predictive modeling and predictive analytics, machine learning approaches such as adaptive multi-learner systems, and their applications to a wide variety of complex real-world problems.
Lawrence Gilbert's research ranges from the analysis of coevolved traits of insects and plants to experimental population dynamics and developmental genetics of mimetic color patterns in Heliconius butterflies. Gilbert is also interested in applying findings of basic evolutionary ecology to conservation of diversity and better management to agroecosystems.
Diane Ginsburg's research interests are pharmacy law and professional ethics. Her work focuses on the legal and regulatory aspects of pharmacy and healthcare.
Information, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Edgar Gómez-Cruz has published widely on several topics relating to digital and algorithmic culture in top journals, particularly in the areas of material visual practices, digital ethnography, and critical approaches to digital technologies. His research focuses on the datafication and automation of everyday life in the Latin America, using a decolonizing approach.
Celeste González de Bustamante's research focuses on historical and contemporary issues related to media in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America. She also is advancing research about Filipina/o/x American communities and media in the 20th-century.
Francisco Gonzalez-Lima's lab focuses on the mission to prevent neurocognitive and emotional disorders, understand the underlying brain mechanisms, and advance innovative non-invasive treatments. Areas of research interest include transcranial infrared brain stimulation, near infrared spectroscopy, neurocognitive enhancement, mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, dementia, bipolar disorder and neurotherapeutics.
Benjamin Gregg's research focuses on social and political theory, bioethics of human genetic engineering, politics of artificial intelligence, and human rights.
Law, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Patricia Hansen's research interests include international trade and investment, regional economic integration, environmental protection, consumer protection, international economic law, judicial reform and judicial independence in Latin America, and federal civil procedure.
Keith Hawkins' research interest is in using multi-object spectroscopic surveys to better understand the chemo-dynamic properties of the Milky Way. His expertise is in high- to low-resolution spectroscopy and stellar chemical abundance patterns.
Medicine, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Kristine Hopkins' research focuses on reproductive health issues in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico border, and Latin America. Hopkins focuses on studying the availability of contraception among women in the postpartum period, access to health services among women in community colleges, and health care organizations' ability to provide family planning services.
Earth and Planetary Sciences, Institute for Geophysics, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Brian Horton's research focuses on sedimentary basin development and mountain building processes. He utilizes sedimentology, stratigraphy, geochronology, structural geology, and geochemistry to understand modern and ancient sedimentation, river drainage patterns, sediment provenance, and orogenesis.
Wendy Hunter's research focuses on comparative politics, with an emphasis on Latin American affairs. Her interests are social policy issues in Latin America and politics of education and health reform.
Robert Jansen studies plant molecular systematics and evolution with a primary focus on comparative genomics of plastids, their utility for understanding genome evolution and phylogenetic relationships of angiosperms, and coevolution between plastid, mitochondrial and nuclear genomes.
Shalene Jha's lab investigates ecological and evolutionary processes from genes to landscapes, to quantify global change impacts on plant-animal interactions, movement ecology, and the provisioning of ecosystem services. More specifically, the lab investigates how global land use change influences gene flow, foraging patterns, and population viability for plants and animals.
Shardha Jogee's research seeks to address central questions on the evolution of galaxies as a function of cosmic epoch, mass, and environment. These include how galaxies grow their stars, black holes, and dark matter halos across cosmic time and vastly different environments, the role played by theoretically predicted growth modes, and how galaxy clusters, some of the largest bound structures in the Universe, form.
Theresa Jones’s research focuses on the plasticity of neural structure and synaptic connectivity in adult animals following brain damage and during skill learning. Additional research focuses on motor skill learning-induced plasticity of motor cortex and cerebellum and on the intercoordination of glial, vascular and neuronal plasticity.
Marcelo Jorge de Paula Paixão studies race relations and inequalities in Brazil and Latin American. He analyzes statistics of race, ethnic, and gender inequality by investigating public policy issues, models of socioeconomic development and the labor market. Paixão is also interested in areas of public policy monitoring and evaluation, poverty reduction programs, educational and health systems, and land reform.
Spanish & Portuguese, Marketing, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Orlando Kelm is a linguistics professional whose interests center on the use of language and culture for professional purposes, such as Business Spanish & Portuguese. Kelm's research focuses on the creation of instructional materials, including the use of innovative technologies in foreign language instruction.
Richard Ketcham's research has two primary directions. One is concerns low-temperature thermochronology (fission-track, (U-Th)/He), from the theory underlying system kinetics to developing tools to derive geological thermal histories. The other is developing and applying 3D data processing methods for X-ray computed tomography across a wide range of fields, including petrology, planetary geology, paleontology, anthropology, and economic geology.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Medicine
Kerry Kinney's research examines the relationships between environmental exposures (microorganisms, allergens and chemicals), human health and the built environment, microbiome of the built environment (e.g., schools, homes), development and application of molecular tools for monitoring engineered and natural systems, biological treatment systems for water and wastewater.
Harold Kohl's research focuses on the area of physical activity and health, including conducting research, developing and evaluating intervention programs for adults and children, and developing and advising on policy issues.
Michael Krische's research lies at the interface of enantioselective catalysis, natural product total synthesis and chemical biology. His laboratory has developed a broad, new family of stereo- and site-selective C-C couplings that merge the characteristics of catalytic hydrogenation and carbonyl addition.
Karol Lang is an experimental particle physicist, whose research focuses on studies of neutrinos. Lang typically conducts research and development on particle detectors, such as those for large water Cherenkov detectors.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Fernanda Leite is an expert in construction engineering and project management. Her built environment research program sits at the interface of engineering and computing. Most of her work has been in building and infrastructure systems information modeling, collaboration and coordination technologies, sustainable systems, and circular economy in the built environment.
Yan Leng's research centers on using large-scale data sets, network theory, and machine learning techniques to understand human and organizational behaviors over networks.
Spanish & Portuguese, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Lorraine Leu's research explores how race informs space in Brazil. She examines racial injustice and how it is obscured by powerful national discourses of social harmony and color blindness.
Spanish & Portuguese, Jewish Studies, Comparative Literature, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Naomi Lindstrom carries out research in the intersection of Latin American studies, gender studies, and Jewish studies. She is the author of books and articles on 19th-, 20th-, and 21-century Latin American literature. Her work focuses on Latin American Jewish Studies, film, graphic narrative, and the comparative study of Jewish life in the Americas. She is also a literary translator and organizes a lecture series.
Christina Markert's research focuses on the properties of nuclear matter at high densities and temperatures, including the study of a new state of matter termed Quark Gluon Plasma. Her research group tries to reach the necessary conditions for a phase transition from a gas of protons and neutrons to this plasma type by using heavy ion collisions in particle accelerators.
Leticia Marteleto's research focuses on inequalities in women's reproductive behaviors and childbearing related to the Zika and Covid-19 outbreaks in Brazil.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Pawel Mitsztal's laboratory group is leading novel air quality measurements outdoors, indoors, and from individual sources. The group is interested in quantified understanding of the factors affecting human health. The specific research questions include sources and sink apportionments, fate and exposure risk of volatile organic compounds.
Nancy Moran's research intersects the fields of genetics and genomics, microbiology, entomology, and ecology. Her focus is on genome evolution in host-associated microorganisms, especially bacterial symbionts of insects, and on the consequences of symbiotic associations for biological diversity and ecological relationships.
Philip Morrison is a mathematical and theoretical physicist, who studies basic nonlinear plasma dynamics, Hamiltonian dynamics of few and infinite degree-of-freedom systems, computational algorithms that preserve geometric structure, and fluid mechanics.
Ulrich Mueller studies molecular ecology of organismal interactions. His research focuses currently on two projects: (a) population biology of fungus-growing ants, their cultivated fungi, and associated microbial mutualists; (b) microbiome breeding (artificial selection on microbiomes) to improve health of crop plants and bees.
Adele Nelson's work specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Latin America art, with a focus on the postwar and contemporary art of Brazil. Her research and teaching interests include transnational exchange between Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., the close study of objects, the history of art institutions, exhibitions, and pedagogy, and theories of modernism.
Government, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Daniel Nielson's research focuses on international development, foreign aid, the control of corruption, and international organization. He specializes in the use of transnational field experiments to learn about causal effects in political economy.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Atila Novoselic's research includes developing convective heat transfer models for application to building energy studies and, in the area of indoor air quality he is focusing on particle resuspension from surfaces and dynamics in the vicinity of occupants.
Peter Onyisi is interested in experimental investigations of electroweak symmetry breaking and searches for new particles and interactions. He also is involved with computing with large data sets of structured data.
David Zhigang Pan's research interests include electronic design automation, efficient machine learning, hardware acceleration, prototyping for analog/digital/mixed-signal designs, and emerging technologies.
Integrative Biology, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Jose Panero is interested in the distribution, diversity, and evolution of flowering plants. His research focuses on the elucidation of phylogenetic relationships among neotropical members of the sunflower family using traditional and molecular techniques. Another important activity of the lab is the documentation of the floristic diversity of the southwestern U.S. and Mexico.
Public Affairs, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Raj Patel is a research professor who studies the world food system and alternatives to it. He has testified about hunger and food sovereignty, and has written about food systems, economics, philosophy, politics, international development, and public health.
Steven Pedigo is an expert in urban economic development, regional cooperation and placemaking. Pedigo has developed strategies for more than 50 cities and regions in the United States and other countries.
Robert Peroni specializes in corporate tax, federal income taxation, international tax, natural resource taxation, and professional responsibility/legal ethics. He is an expert in international taxation and in energy taxation.
Alida Louisa Perrine analyzes contemporary cultural expression in opposition to gendered racism, especially in Brazil and Latin America. She specializes in social media and is interested in literature and media for youth audiences.
Keshav Pingali works in programming languages and compiler technology for program understanding, optimization, and parallelization. His research interests focus on methodologies and tools for programming multicore processors, with a focus on irregular applications from domains like graphics, social networks, and data mining.
Francisco Polidoro's research interests include knowledge management, social networks, strategic alliances, strategic management, technology and innovation management, and venture capital.
Linguistics, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
David Quinto-Pozos' research concentrates on child and adult acquisition of signed language, constructed action, language contact and change, and signed-spoken language interpretation. Primary languages in Quinto-Pozos's studies include American Sign Language, Brazilian Sign Language, Mexican Sign Language, English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Geography and the Environment, History, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Carlos Ramos' major interests are in the field of hydro-geomorphology, or the study of the interactions among humans, land forms, land-shaping processes, and both surface and near-surface hydrologic processes from the perspective of natural hazards, soil/water/coral reef conservation, and watershed management.
Cory Reed's research focuses on early modern theatrical performance, including the representation of identity in 16th- and 17th-century literature, literary and cultural responses to the emergence of scientific discourse in early modern Spain, and cognitive cultural studies. His teaching includes studying historical moments of cultural contact in Spain, Mexico, and the American southwest.
Sonia Roncador's research interests include Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures, including gender and race, questions of immigration, domestic servitude, and women's education. She is also interested in Brazilian and Trans-Atlantic cultural studies. Her projects focus on the overlap of discourses on immigration and slavery and servitude in order to reveal the cross-currents of the Portuguese and African Diasporas in Brazil.
Surya Santoso's research lies in the broad area of power systems analysis, electric power quality, distributed energy resource integration, and time-domain modeling and simulation of electrical systems.
Seth Schwartz's research interests are identity, acculturation, cultural stress, crisis migration, adolescent development, family functioning, substance abuse, mental health, and well-being.
Brian Sedio's research seeks to understand the origins and maintenance of biodiversity in forest communities by integrating perspectives from analytical chemistry, community ecology, macroevolution, historical biogeography, and theoretical ecology.
Kamy Sepehrnoori's research is focused on development and application of compositional reservoir simulators for enhanced oil recovery along with reservoir simulators for naturally fracture reservoirs and unconventional resources, modeling of asphaltene deposition in reservoirs and wellbores, enhanced oil recovery processes, development of parallel reservoir simulators, and carbon dioxide sequestration.
Timothy Shanahan’s research group uses a combination of geochemical and stable isotopic proxy reconstructions of past climate along with climate model simulations to understand past and future climate change. The focus is the use of organic geochemical and stable isotopic techniques applied to marine, lacustrine and terrestrial sediment records to understand changes on time scales ranging from interannual to millennial, and orbital to tectonic.
Deirdre Shoemaker's research reads the story gravitational waves tell about how strong-field gravity works. Her lab uses numerical relativity and gravitational wave data to study black hole mergers.
Architecture, Geography and the Environment, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Bjorn Sletto's research focuses on indigenous resource management, sustainable development, and environmental planning in Latin America. He is particularly interested in the dichotomies and tensions between local knowledge and traditional environmental management systems, and formal planning and management approaches.
Anthropology, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Christen Smith researches engendered anti-Black state violence and Black community responses to it in Brazil and the Americas. Her work primarily focuses on transnational anti-Black police violence, Black liberation struggles, the paradox of Black citizenship in the Americas, and the dialectic between the enjoyment of Black culture and the killing of Black people.
Peter Stone's research focuses on artificial intelligence with the goal to create autonomous agents that can learn to interact with other agents in a wide range of environments. His research contributions are in the areas of machine learning, autonomous agents and multiagent systems, and robotics. Application domains include robot soccer, autonomous bidding agents, smart traffic management, general-purpose service robots, and autonomous vehicles.
Stephen Strakowski's work is dedicated to improving care and care access to young people needing mental health support. He continues to use neuroimaging to understand the brain processes that underlie bipolar disorder as well as the potential causes underlying race and ethnicity bias in psychiatric diagnosis.
Hirofumi Tanaka's interests focus on vascular aging that manifests as the stiffening of large elastic artery and vascular endothelial dysfunction, such as the physiological mechanism that mediate vascular aging, sequel or consequences of aging-related vascular dysfunction, and lifestyle modifications that prevent and reverse vascular dysfunction with aging.
Januibe Tejera's work connects contemporary music with oral music traditions, new technology, and theatrical elements, all with an eye toward music as a multi-sensory experience.
Januibe Tejera de Miranda's work connects contemporary music with oral music traditions, new technology, and theatrical elements, all with an eye toward music as a multi-sensory experience.
Elliot Tucker-Drob’s research addresses the questions of how and why different people progress along different life trajectories. His research on infant, child, and adolescent development primarily focuses on how social and educational experiences combine with genetic variation to impact cognitive development, and mental health over time.
Theatre and Dance, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, Native American and Indigenous Studies, LGBTQ Studies
Enzo Vasquez Toral is a Peruvian performer, scholar and educator whose expertise lies in the intersection of theatre and performance studies, queer and trans* studies and Indigenous studies in Latin/x America. As a theorist, practitioner and ethnographer, he engages with a transdisciplinary and decolonizing approach to research that centers performance as a site of alternative worldmaking.
Abigail Weitzman is a sociologist with a particular interest in gendered family dynamics and the social psychology of demographic processes. Weitzman studies diversity in young women's sexual and fertility desires, how and why such desires evolve during the transition to adulthood, and their influence on young women's reproductive behaviors. Her research explores how different types of sexual relationships emerge and progress among young adults.
Kurt Weyland's research focuses on the democratization and waves of regime change in Latin America and Europe, along with market reform, social policy, policy diffusion, and populism in Latin America. Weyland draws on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including insights from cognitive psychology, and has done extensive field research in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Venezuela.
Christian Whitman's research focuses on mechanistic and structural studies of enzymes involved in the bacterial catabolism of aromatic and halogenated compounds.
Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering
Guihua Yu's researches design and synthesis of functional nano-architectured materials, like organic and hybrid organic-inorganic nanomaterials, understanding of their chemical and physical properties, and development of large-scale assembly and integration methodologies to enable important applications in energy, environment and sustainability, e.g. fast-charging batteries, electrocatalysis, solar water purification, critical mineral recovery.
Hao Zhu's research interests are power grid resilience, machine learning for power systems, renewable integration, cyber-physical systems, and real-time decision making.
Aaron Zimmerman's research focuses on black holes and gravitational waves. He analyzes gravitational wave signals to infer the properties of the black holes and neutron stars that produce these faint signals. He also studies how black holes emit gravitational waves, using both computer simulations and pen-and-paper approximations.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Jorge Zornberg conducts research on soil reinforcement, new earth retention systems, transportation geotechnics, geosynthetics, unsaturated soils, liner systems, and numerical and physical (centrifuge) modeling of geotechnical and geoenvironmental systems.
Partnerships
Fundacao Getulio Vargas
Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
