Twenty new faculty members have joined the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Nine of the new faculty members are women.
Mal Ballinger is the new curator of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates. She is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Dr. Ballinger’s lab focuses on traits such as hibernation physiology, body size and shape, and gene expression variation in wild rodent populations. Dr. Ballinger is a graduate of Black Hills State University in South Dakota, where she majored in biology. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota Duluth and a Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Gabriella Carini is a professor of physics and a professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the College of Engineering. She also serves as the director of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). She held leadership roles at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for more than two decades. Dr. Carini earned an undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. in electronic engineering from the University of Palermo in Italy.
Kennia Coronado is an assistant professor in the department of government and the Latina/o studies program. Her research focuses on American politics, with substantive interests in political behavior, political communication, and the political representation of Latinos and other underrepresented minorities in the United States. Dr. Coronado is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Diana Fu is an associate professor of Chinese politics and director of the Levinson Program in China and Asia-Pacific Studies. Her research examines popular contention, repression, civil society, and authoritarian citizenship in contemporary China. She is the author of the award-winning book Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Dr. Fu previously taught at the University of Toronto. She earned a Ph.D. in politics at the University of Oxford in England.
Katherine Irajpanah is an assistant professor in the department of government. Her research examines issues at the intersection of political violence, international law, and U.S. foreign policy. She is completing a book on the impact of international norms on military strategy and conflict outcomes. Dr. Irajpanah is a graduate of Stanford University, where she majored in international relations. She earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University.
Nicola Denzey Lewis is a professor of classics. She previously held an endowed chair at Claremont Graduate University in California. She is studying how ancient Roman Christian funerary inscriptions from Rome’s catacombs reveal how ordinary people negotiated religious change. She is the author of several books, including The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Dr. Lewis is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where she majored in religious studies. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in New Jersey.
Kristina Rogahn is an assistant professor of Asian studies. Prior to joining Cornell, she was a lecturer in Tamil at Stanford University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of South Asian literature and religion, specializing in Tamil poetry and literary theory from the ancient to modern periods. Dr. Rogahn is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she majored in comparative literature. She holds a master’s degree in South and Southeast Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in religion from the University of Toronto.
Melissa Sands is a professor in both the government department and in the Brooks School of Public Policy. She is interested in how people’s everyday experiences affect their political behavior. From 2021 through 2026, Dr. Sands was an assistant professor of politics and data science at the London School of Economics. Earlier, she was an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced. Dr. Sands earned a master of public administration degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
Bonnie Teece is an assistant professor of astronomy. She is conducting research on life detection on Mars and icy ocean worlds like Europa and Enceladus. She also examines the chemistry of asteroids, chondrites, and other planetary bodies in our solar system. Dr Teece earned her Ph.D. at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. She then had a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.