New Arts and Sciences Faculty: Fall 2025

Allie Balter-Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences. Balter-Kennedy joins Tufts from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University where she completed her PhD and a Postdoctoral Research position. Her research  addresses questions of past ice sheet-extent and examines subglacial processes in the rock record using cosmogenic-nuclide techniques. Her work on the Greenland ice sheet has been highlighted in the New York Times and she has published research in journals such as Geochronology, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, and The Cryosphere. 

Douglas Blackiston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. He first came to Tufts in 2012 as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and most recently has been the Principal Scientist at the Allen Discovery Center, where he has been part of the team that created the computer-designed organisms known as xenobots. He is also a Visiting Scholar and Principal Investigator at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. He studies many aspects of developmental biology to learn about the molecular, genetic, and environmental signaling mechanisms driving behavioral phenotypes, and then uses these mechanisms to exert control over form and function, sensory-motor integration, and regenerative outcomes. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Cozzarelli Prize, awarded by the National Academy of Sciences for the most impactful research in engineering and applied sciences. He has published his work in many academic journals including PloS Computational Biology, Nature Machine Robotics, Soft Robotics, Nature Regenerative Medicine, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fun fact: His research has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, BBC World News, and the Guardian, and as exhibits in the Design Museum of London, the CCCB, and the Copernicus Science Centre. Blackiston received his PhD from Georgetown University. 

Pannill Camp is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. His research focuses on exchanges between theater, architecture, and philosophy in eighteenth-century France, French freemasonry as a set of performance practices, and the antecedents of performance theory in social thought from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. He joins Tufts from Washington University where he was an Associate Professor of Drama. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Harvard University. Camp is the author of The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which received Honorary Mention for the 2015 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and was short-listed for the Kenshur Prize in 18th-Century Studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals including Theatre Journal, Philological Quarterly, the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Performance Research. He earned his PhD from Brown University.

Amy De’Ath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She comes to Tufts from King’s College London where she was Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory specializing in late twentieth and early twenty-first century poetry and poetics. Her first book of literary criticism, Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in February 2026. Amy is also the author of a book of poetry, Not a Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024), and a poetry anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press, 2015), co-edited with Fred Wah. She received her PhD from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Kate Franklin is the Arthur H. Dadian and Ara Oztemel Chair in Armenian Art and Architectural History in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She is an archaeologist of medieval Armenia and the Caucasus and is particularly interested in the experiences of medieval travel, intimacies of medieval embodiment, and the profound and mundane practices of medieval and early modern hospitality. Before coming to Tufts she was a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was also previously the Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago, a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Project Manager at the Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership at the University of Chicago. Franklin is the author of Everyday Cosmopolitans: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia (University of California Press, 2021), the co-author of Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2023), and a co-editor of Incomplete Archaeologies: Assembling Knowledges in the Past and Present (Oxbow, 2015). She completed her PhD at the University of Chicago. 

Jaye Gardiner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. Prior to joining Tufts, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and then an Assistant Research Professor at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Her research program uses live-cell imaging to study cell-cell interactions - be it to understand how viruses spread directly from infected to uninfected cells, or to study the mechanisms of pancreatic cancer cell proliferation. Gardiner is the recipient of the MOSAIC Postdoctoral Career Transition Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Emerald Foundation’s Black in Cancer Postdoctoral Fellowship, the American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the NIH T32 Cancer Biology Postdoctoral Training Grant. Her work has been published in Cancer Research, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Scientific Reports, Journal of Virology, and Journal of Research in STEM Education. Fun fact: Gardiner is a co-founder of JKX Comics whose mission is to promote scientific literacy through comics. She earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

James Golden is Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of the Museum Studies Program. Prior to joining Tufts, he was the Director of Museum Education and Interpretation at Historic Deerfield, one of America’s leading decorative arts museums.  He also previously served as the Director of Education at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, CT. He has taught courses as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University, Trinity College, and the University of Hartford. After completing his D.Phil from the University of Oxford, UK, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research focuses on museum interpretation and cultural history. 

Jana Grcevich is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She joined Tufts in Fall 2024 as a part-time Lecturer. She has also taught as an Adjunct Professor at Cooper Union School of Art, the City College of New York, and the American Museum of Natural History. After completing her PhD at Columbia University, she was a Kathryn W. Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. She is the author of Vacation Guide to the Solar System (Random House, 2017), a fantastical astronomy book for popular audiences. 

Tony Haouam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies. He recently completed a joint PhD in the Department of French & Institute of French Studies at New York University and at Université Paris VIII - Saint-Denis, Center for Media, Technology, and Cultural Studies. His research explores humor, race, and spectatorship across the Francophone World, with a focus on stand-up, caricatures, comedy films, and graphic novels. He has taught at Bard College, NYU, Université Paris III, V and VIII, the Paris Museum of Natural History, and the École Normale Supérieure. His work has appeared in L’Esprit Créateur and European Stages, and he has served as Assistant Editor of French Politics, Culture & Society.

Sina Hazratpour is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Most recently before coming to Tufts he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Category Theory at Johns Hopkins University. He also previously completed postdoctoral research positions at the University of Leeds and Stockholm University and was a Developer of Linear Algebra Game in Lean4 at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. Hazratpour’s work centers on category theory and its applications to logic and semantics, with a focus on emerging mathematics foundations such as Homotopy Type Theory. His other main research interest is formalization of mathematics in interactive theorem provers, particularly in Lean 4. He has published his work in journals such as Mathematical Structures in Computer Science and Theory and Application of Categories. He completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK. 

Demond Hill is an Assistant Professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. With a communal devotion to promoting mental health equity, he joins Tufts from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, where he served as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Grounded in critical perspectives, his research centers on the mental health and well-being of Black children and their families. As a former K-12 educator and mental health professional, Hill’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research and Social Sciences, as well as in public scholarship outlets like the Greater Good Science Center. He has received numerous awards for his scholarship and community engagement, most recently being named a Top 30 Young Innovator in Behavioral Health. In 2024, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Social Welfare.

Soubhik Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He comes to Tufts from New York University where he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Prior to that he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is broadly interested in physics beyond the Standard Model and is currently focusing on the physics of inflation, axion cosmology, gravitational waves, and collider probes of dark sectors. His work has been published in the Journal for High Energy Physics and Physical Review. Kumar received his PhD from University of Maryland, College Park. 

Amber LaMarca is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy. She recently completed her PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences at MGH Institute of Health Professions. Her research is focused on improving physical activity levels in the home and community settings for patients with stroke using the intersection of emerging technologies, behavior science, implementation science, and neurorehabilitation principles. She is also a physical therapist and has a Doctorate of Physical Therapy from Northeastern University. For 8 years she worked as a Physical Therapist at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, working primarily with patients with neurological conditions with a special interest in stroke rehabilitation. 

Paige McGinley is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research and teaching interests include theater and performance history and historiography; activism and performance; race, ethnicity, and performance; and contemporary theater. She joins Tufts from Washington University in St. Louis where she was an Associate Professor of Performing Arts and Director of the Program in American Culture Studies. Previously, McGinley was an Assistant Professor at Yale University. She is the author of the book Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Duke University Press, 2014), which received the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theater and Drama Society and the American Society for Theatre Research’s Errol Hill Award. Her essays on topics ranging from performance in the civil rights movement to Black performers in Tennessee Williams’ plays have been published in TDR, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, American Quarterly, and American Literature. She is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Her forthcoming book, People Get Ready: Performance and Practice in the Civil Rights Movement will be published in the Performance and American Cultures Series by New York University Press in 2026. 

Elizabeth Newman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Newman earned her PhD from Tufts in 2019. She returns to Tufts from Emory University where she was an Assistant Professor. Prior to joining Emory as a faculty member, she worked there as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research interests include multidimensional algebra, numerical linear algebra, machine learning, deep neural networks, and optimization. She has published her research in journals such as, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and Journal of Open Source Software. Newman’s scholarship is supported by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the National Science Foundation, and with contracts with Sandia National Laboratories. 

Randi Rotjan earned her PhD from Tufts and returns to Tufts as an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology. Previously, she was a Research Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at Boston University and prior to that, an Associate Research Scientist at the New England Aquarium. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Currently, her research group examines how tropical and temperate marine species, communities, and ecosystems respond to the many global stressors impacting our oceans. Rotjan has published her scholarship in many journals including Coral Reefs, Frontiers in Marine Science, Marine Ecology Progress Series, Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. She is currently a Lead Scientist at Blue Nature Alliance and is also a member of the Board of Directors for The Nature Conservancy – Caribbean. Amazing fact: when a hurricane wiped out her field site when she was a graduate student, she quickly raised several thousand dollars, returned to Belize, and reinstalled all of her fish exclosure cages. That study is one of her highly cited papers. 

Khoa (“kwa”) Tran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. He comes to Tufts from the University of Pennsylvania where he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Epigenetics Institute. His research explores how dysregulation of cellular metabolism impacts epigenetic control of genetic programming of cells, expression of inflammatory genes, and ultimately on patterns of senescence and aging. He has published his work in journals such as EMBO J., Cell Reports, Molecular Cell, Nature Communication, and Journal of Biological Chemistry. Along with fellow new Biology faculty member Jaye Gardiner, Tran is a co-founder of JKX Comics whose mission is to promote scientific literacy through comics. Tran earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Anna Zink is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health. Her research is at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and policy, with a focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence and their role in guiding clinical and policy decisions. Her research integrates methods development with empirical evaluation to study the use and impact of AI. She collaborates with health systems and policymakers to ensure her work informs the people and institutions shaping care delivery. Her scholarship has been published in journals such as PNAS, JAMA Internal Medicine and The American Journal of Managed Care. She joins Tufts from the Chicago Booth Center for Applied AI where she was a Principal Researcher. She holds a PhD in Health Policy and a secondary degree in Computational Science and Engineering from Harvard University.