Please join us in welcoming 12 new professors to the University of Washington Bothell this academic year. Except for those noted below, they began classes alongside our students last month.
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Dr. Brandon Fleming, Assistant Teaching Professor
An assistant teaching professor as of Sept. 16, Fleming already has more than eight years of experience with the School of Business. He has taught ALTITUDE, a business leadership program for T-Mobile technology employees since 2020. He also was a lecturer for a four-course entrepreneurship curriculum he developed from 2012 to 2016.
His background includes applying economic, accounting and sociology frameworks to prescribe strategies for startups in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast Asia. He has mentored and collaborated with more than 100 entrepreneurs on topics such as product development, idea validation, innovation assessment and intellectual property.
Fleming received his doctorate in Corporate Strategy from the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.
Dr. Vivian Xiao, Assistant Professor
Xiao comes to UW Bothell from Vanderbilt University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Owen Graduate School of Management. Her research interest is in intersectionality, leader evaluation/selection, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Her work focuses on issues related to DEI. Specifically, she examines how workers’ multiple identities, such as their race and their gender, simultaneously influence their workplace outcomes (i.e., intersectionality); how these identities intersect with recent shifts in workplace contexts such as the rise of remote work; and how organizations respond to changing environments to implement policies that can help or hinder inequity.
Xiao received her doctorate in Organizational Behavior from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS & SCIENCES
Dr. Lupe Collins, Assistant Teaching Professor
Collins comes to UW Bothell from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a graduate teaching assistant. Her research focuses on Indigenous (Mixtec) literacies and knowledge, community literacies, oral histories, and border and migrant rhetorics.
Her teaching pedagogy focuses on creating a student-centered classroom that acknowledges the diverse backgrounds and learning styles of all students. Her philosophy of teaching is guided by three values: 1) building a classroom community grounded in respect for one another, 2) creating a student-centered classroom, and 3) acknowledging that active learning looks different from student-to-student and day-to-day.
Collins received her doctorate in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Stephie Kang, Assistant Teaching Professor
Kang was a writing instructor at Michigan State University prior to joining UW Bothell. Her research is on translingual practices of multilingual writers and surrounding politics of language ideologies and social justice.
Using sociocultural theory, Kang’s recent works focus on the broader trajectory of one’s transnational and multilingual experiences and contexts. In both research and teaching, she is dedicated to recognizing and leveraging fluid meaning-making and multilingual repertories as writing assets.
Kang received her doctorate in Rhetoric and Writing from Michigan State University.
SCHOOL OF STEM
Dr. Konpal Ali, Assistant Professor
Ali was a research associate at New York University in Abu Dhabi prior to joining UW Bothell. Her research is on wireless communication, focusing on the physical layer. She is interested in the performance analysis, optimization and design of large wireless networks that accurately model real-world networks.
Ali uses stochastic geometry tools to model large wireless networks and analyze their performance. This helps shed light on the design of current and future networks and how to deploy new technologies efficiently and effectively.
Ali received her doctorate in Electrical Engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
Dr. Miguel Balzan, Assistant Teaching Professor
Balzan comes to UW Bothell from ChampionX where we was a lead mechanical engineer. He also has taught at several universities, most recently as an associate professor at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also has worked in the energy sector
His area of focus is experimental and computational thermofluids. His post-doctorate work was in soft matter physics. He also has specialized experience in fluid dynamics for industrial applications (such as pipeline hydraulics and multi-phase flow transport), and in experiment and equipment design, testing and validation.
Balzan received his doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Dr. Dharma Dailey, Assistant Teaching Professor
Dailey has taught part-time in the School of STEM since 2021, focused on understanding the kind of collaboration practices, structures and resources that lead to high quality science and pro-social outcomes.
On behalf of UW’s Scientific Software Engineering Center launched in 2023, she is currently investigating collaborations between professional software engineers and scientists who are working together to improve open-source scientific software. She has mentored more than 20 data science teams in incorporating human-centered practices into their projects, and she convenes educators who want to exchange strategies for teaching and learning data for good.
Dailey received her doctorate in Human-Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington’s College of Engineering.
Dr. Elizabeth Field, Assistant Professor
Field is joining UW Bothell from the University of Utah, where she was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral scholar. Her areas of expertise lie in geometric group theory, geometric topology and low-dimensional topology.
Some of Field’s most recent work involves studying dynamical, geometric and topological properties of certain 2-dimensional surfaces and 3-dimensional manifolds. In particular, she explores how dynamical properties of the symmetries of certain surfaces affect the geometry of the 3-manifolds that are built from these surfaces.
Field received her doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Elizabeth Ostrowski, Assistant Professor
Ostrowski will join UW Bothell in December from the University of Auckland, where she was a senior research fellow at the Liggins Institute. Ostrowski’s research background is in microbiology, evolutionary genetics and genomics. Her research combines studies of natural populations with laboratory evolution experiments that identify genetic changes in real-time.
She has a longstanding interest in genetic conflict, i.e., when the evolutionary interests of different genetic elements are not aligned. Such conflict can occur among different genomes within a cell, among different cells in a body or among different species. It potentially influences diverse processes, from the origins of complex life to health and disease.
Ostrowski received her doctorate in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from Michigan State University.
Dr. Han-Wei Shih, Assistant Professor
Shih completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Washington before joining UW Bothell. His area of focus is the molecular cell biology of protozoan parasites.
He researches how cyclic adenosine monophosphate and calcium signaling impact cell differentiation and drug resistance in Giardia, which is responsible for waterborne and foodborne infections. With colleagues, he is developing advanced imaging techniques for drug screening in live mice, which could improve the effectiveness of testing new treatments.
Shih received his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University.
Jeff Stride, Assistant Teaching Professor
After 22 years of development work at Microsoft, Stride taught advanced computer science courses at North Creek High School in Bothell before joining UW Bothell. He said that, as a teaching professor, his area of focus is helping students succeed.
For seven years at North Creek, he inspired the next generation of computer scientists and ignited in them a passion for problem solving. At Microsoft, he focused on elevating the performance of his teams, establishing high standards, improving cross-boundary collaboration and creating win/win situations.
Stride received his Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Madhava Vemuri, Assistant Professor
Vemuri comes to UW Bothell from North Dakota State University, where he served as a graduate research assistant while completing his doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research focuses on monolithic integration, Beyond Moore technologies, on-chip power delivery, edge computing, artificial intelligence for integrated circuit design, and biomedical and agricultural projects.
At NDSU he worked on developing frameworks and methodologies for studying the newer generation of chip design using Beyond Moore technologies. He also investigated various circuit design and optimization techniques for advanced process nodes.
