Chris Abbyad’s research focuses on Black/White racism in healthcare, racism experienced by pregnant Black women, smoking cessation, waterpipe use by university students, and smoking during pregnancy. Abbyad also has an interest in cultural awareness and competency having taught nursing in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.
Samy Ayoub specializes in Islamic law, modern Middle East law, and law and religion in contemporary Muslim societies. He focuses on issues concerning law, its interaction with religion, and the role of religion in contemporary legal and socio-political systems within a global comparative perspective.
Social Work, Health Social Work, Human Rights and Justice
Noël Busch-Armendariz's research, teaching, and praxis focus on violent crime, human rights, social justice policy, international social work education, restoration, and peacemaking. Busch-Armendariz has worked collaboratively with others for 30 years who believe everyone deserves to live peacefully and prosperously.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Chadi El Mohtar's research involves engineering pore fluids and soils for resilient response to adverse and unforeseen loading conditions, with minimal compromise to the performance under normal working loads. In particular, he has focused on the understanding of viscous flow within porous media through relating rheological properties of fluids and suspensions to the mechanical and hydraulic characteristics of geomaterials.
Janet Ellzey's research focuses on combustion of biomass and on the development of environmental technologies such as low emissions combustors. Her interests also focuses on using additive manufacturing to design novel reactors. Ellzey leads efforts for engineering students to apply their skills to solve challenges in low-income or marginalized communities.
Brian Evans' research and teaching interests are in the processing of signals to increase connection speeds and reliability in communication systems and improve visual quality of video and still images. His research group develops signal processing theory and algorithms with implementation constraints in mind, and translates algorithms into design methods and embedded prototypes.
Anthropology, French and Italian, Latin American Studies, European Studies, Middle Eastern Studies
Sofian Merabet is a socio-cultural anthropologist with expertise in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, including Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and the Arab Diaspora in South America. His interdisciplinary research analyzes the human geography of queer identity formations and the social production of queer space as constitutive features of wider class, religious, and gender relations.
Na'ama Pat-El is a linguist primarily working with classical Semitic languages. Her interests are historical linguistics, and language change, especially syntax, language contact, and dialectology.