Swarthmore College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in suburban Philadelphia, has appointed five new assistant professors this fall. All five of the new faculty members are women.
Morgan Parker is a new assistant professor of English literature. Previously, she taught as an associate adjunct professor at the University of California, Irvine, and as a visiting faculty member at New York University and Columbia University. She is the author of You Get What You Pay For (Penguin Random House, 2024). Parker received a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and anthropology from Columbia University and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from New York University.
Emma Rackstraw, an assistant professor of economics. specializes in labor and public economics, the economics of crime, experimental and behavioral economics, and the economics of discrimination. She previously served as a sector lead for Crime and Political Economy & Governance at the James Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Rackstraw holds a bachelor’s degree in economics with a minor in music from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.
Federica Zoe Ricci is an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics. She specializes in Bayesian statistical methods, statistics, and data science education. Her research focuses on developing scalable statistical models for the analysis of large networks, such as those found in sociology and biology applications. Dr. Ricci earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and management for arts, culture, and communication and a master’s degree in economic and social sciences from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. She recently completed her Ph.D. in statistics at the University of California, Irvine.
Ranysha Ware is a new assistant professor of computer science. Her research focuses on networking, distributed systems, and applied machine learning. Dr. Ware previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Ware earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Iris Yoon was appointed an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics. Dr. Yoon uses techniques from topology to infer structural information from data, particularly data arising from biology and neuroscience experiments. She previously taught as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford Mathematical Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Swarthmore College, Dr. Yoon earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and computational science from the University of Pennsylvania.