New Arts and Sciences Faculty: Fall 2026

Nicholas Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. He comes to Tufts from the Ohio State University where he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University and at the University of Texas at Austin. Before that, he was a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow & Lecturer at the James Madison Program, Department of Politics. His research focuses on the history of German philosophy, the critics and defenders of liberalism, and American political thought. Anderson has published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Review of Politics and American Political Thought. He is working on a book project on hope and project in Kant’s political philosophy. He received his PhD from Boston College. At Tufts, he will teach courses on The Meaning of America and Rousseau and German Romanticism in fall 2026. 

Jessica Asiello is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy. She joins Tufts from Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions where she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy. She has experience as a Lecturer and Academic Mentor at Boston University and in clinical practice at MGH with specialty experience in the intensive care unit setting. Her research interests include acute care and ICU rehabilitation, heart failure and mechanical circulatory devices, functional cognition, and healthcare quality improvement. Asiello has authored peer-reviewed and professional publications and presented her research at the American Occupational Therapy Association National Conference, Massachusetts Association for Occupational Therapy Conference, and the AOTA/OTCAS Education Summit. She earned her Doctor of Occupational Therapy from Boston University. 

Rajendra Beekie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics. He comes to Tufts from Imperial College London where he was a Research Associate. Beekie’s research focuses on partial differential equations and fluid mechanics. His work has been published in scholarly journals including Journal of Mathematical Fluid Mechanics and Communications in Mathematical Physics. He completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University and holds a PhD from New York University. 

Charles Cifarelli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics. He joins Tufts from Stony Brook University where he was a Simons Instructor. Previously, he was a Thematic CRM-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Quebec in Montreal. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université de Nantes, Laboratoire de Mathématiques Jean Leray in France. His work has received funding from the National Science Foundation and has been published in journals including Journal of Differential Geometry, Journal of Geometric Analysis, and Geometric and Functional Analysis. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Tyler Colasante is an Assistant Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. He is an applied developmental scientist examining children’s social-emotional development and mental health within family, educational, and digital contexts across cultures. His current research examines how AI can complement the human relationships that support social-emotional learning and thriving in early childhood. He joins Tufts from Leipzig University where he was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education and Managing Director of the Humboldt Science Center for Child Development. Previously, he was Managing Director, Research at the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto. Colasante has more than 70 peer-reviewed publications. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto.  

Bastien Craipain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies. Before coming to Tufts, he earned his PhD at the University of Chicago and served as the Gabrielle Muir Assistant Professor in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University. His research and teaching focus on the relationship between literature and the social sciences in the nineteenth- and twentieth century Francophone world, with a specific anchoring in Haitian and Caribbean studies and Black Atlantic history. The recipient of various awards, grants, and fellowships, he has published in scholarly journals and edited volumes in both English and French, and is now working on his book manuscript tentatively titled Patterns of Indiscipline: Race, Science, and Literature in the Haitian Atlantic. Combining archival research, textual analysis, and theoretical exploration, the book examines how Haitian intellectuals and writers contributed to the transformation of the human and social sciences in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 

Rebecca Delker is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Biology. Previously, she was an Industry Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology at Manhattan College. Her teaching is informed by more than 15 years of biomedical research experience. She conducted postdoctoral research at Columbia University and received her PhD from Rockefeller University. 

Christopher Desjardins is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Biology. He is a computational biologist who received his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rochester (2007–2010). He has experience at the Broad Institute in Cambridge where he worked as a Bioinformatics Scientist and a Senior Computational Scientist. Most recently, he’s been the Director of Customer Solutions Architecture at Paradigm4 in Waltham, MA. Dr. Desjardins has been published in top journals such as Clinical Infectious Diseases, Nature Microbiology, and Nature Genetics. He joins Tufts to help lead a new Bioinformatics Master’s Program.

Jie Gao is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Chemistry. She joins Tufts from the University of Oklahoma, where she was an Associate Professor at the School of Sustainable Chemical, Biological, and Materials Engineering. Prior to her academic career, she worked at GE Global Research as a Research Scientist and later as a Lead Scientist. Her research and teaching interests include advanced materials, membrane technologies, water treatment, and biosensing. At Tufts, she will focus on hands-on laboratory instruction, innovative course design, and student-centered learning. Gao has published her work in Chemical Engineering Education and Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, among others. She earned her Ph.D. through a joint doctoral program at East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, China and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. She is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP)®. 

Smita Gopinath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. Most recently, she was an Assistant Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research is focused on understanding the role of the vaginal microbiome in host immunity and protection against sexually transmitted viral and bacterial pathogens. She has published in scholarly journals including Cell, Host & Microbe, The Journal of Immunology, and Nature Microbiology. Gopinath’s work has been funded by the Searle Fellowship, Merck Fellowships, NIH R21 grants, and a Massachusetts State grant aimed at developing microbiome-based therapeutics. She completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University and earned her PhD at Stanford University. 

Malte Hendrickx is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He recently received his PhD from the University of Michigan. Hendrickx is a philosopher working on issues at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, such as the nature of effort, difficulty, burnout and moral motivation. He has published his work in peer-reviewed journals such as MIND, Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Life Worth Living Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Weinberg Center for Cognitive Science and the Neubauer Faculty Program.

Neel Joshi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Before joining Tufts he was an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at Harvard and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute. Joshi’s research program is at the interface of synthetic biology, organic chemistry, and materials science. His work focuses on rewiring microbes to make engineered living systems with new and useful properties for biomanufacturing, biointerfaces, and biotherapeutics. He is an author or corresponding author on more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and is also an inventor on several patents. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and completed a postdoc at Boston University.   

Nicole Faraci-Kahn is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Education. Her research interests include civic engagement in youth, political participation in youth, and democratic and civics K-12 education. Before coming to Tufts, she completed a clinical postdoctoral fellowship at Kendall Psychological Associates in Salem, MA. She received her PhD in School Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Kiley Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She comes to Tufts from Princeton University where she was a Dicke Postdoctoral Fellow. She researches experimental particle physics. Her research centers on analyzing the proton-proton collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider and measured by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. She has been an author for the ATLAS Collaboration and CMS Collaboration on more than 485 articles and preprints in peer-reviewed publications. She earned her PhD from Columbia University.

Jonathan Knapp is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Visual and Material Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. His research and teaching areas include film and media theory; film and media history; nonfiction film and theory; ecocinema and ecocriticism; posthumanism; experimental cinema; affect theory; media and paranoia; and aesthetics of horror. He joins Tufts from Wellesley College where he was a Visiting Lecturer in Cinema & Media Studies. He has also previously held teaching positions at Emerson College, Tufts, and Boston University. Knapp is the co-author of the book Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). He received his PhD from Harvard University. 

Jet Lem is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. He comes to Tufts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Merging his interests in materials science, physical chemistry, and mechanical engineering, his research program will use in situ optical spectroscopy to uncover how materials respond to and/or resist mechanical strain. Lem has published research in peer-reviewed journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and Nature. In 2025 he was awarded the People’s Choice Best Poster at the Mach Conference at Johns Hopkins University. He earned his PhD from MIT. 

Chinmay Lohani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, working in industrial organization and public economics. His research studies the forces that shape which firms compete in a market–strategic conduct, financial frictions, regulation–and what those competitive outcomes deliver for consumers and welfare. He was a PhD Dissertation Fellow at the New York Federal Reserve and was a PhD Research Intern at Microsoft Research. Before beginning his PhD, he was a Predoctoral Fellow at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. 

Andreas Mang is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics. He joins Tufts from the University of Houston where he was an Associate Professor of Mathematics. The goal of his research is the design of principled and scalable algorithms at the interface of machine learning, optimization, and scientific computing that integrate data with simulation to enable data-driven discovery and support decision making in challenging problems in the applied sciences. He has published his work extensively in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Computational Physics, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation– including a CAREER award, the Simons Foundation, and Nvidia Corporation. Mang completed his postdoctoral work at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Doctorate in Engineering Sciences from the University of Lübeck in Germany.

Eugenia Menaguale is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. She recently completed her PhD in Economics at Princeton University. Managuale’s research interests include macroeconomics, technological change and labor markets, innovation and market structure, and aggregate productivity. Her research particularly focuses on how decisions by firms impact aggregate economic outcomes. In 2025, she was a Summer PhD Fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. More recently, she was a finalist for the 2026 European Central Bank Young Economist Prize.
 

Adam Smercina is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research centers on how galaxies form and evolve over time, from small dwarf galaxies to large galaxies like the Milky Way. He comes to Tufts from the Space Telescope Science Institute where he was a NASA Hubble Fellow. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Washington. Smercina has received funding from organizations such as NASA and published research in academic journals such as The Astrophysical Journal. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan. 

Daryl Spurlock is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Romance Studies. He recently received his PhD in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures from Indiana University with a dissertation titled “A Republic if You Can Print It: Statehood, Public Formation, and the Politics of Proof in Territorial New Mexico’s Spanish-Language Press (1890-1910).” Since 2023 he has been a Lecturer at Tufts teaching Latino history, beginning-intermediate Spanish, and Latino film. He has also taught at MIT, Cornell University, Indiana University, University of Central Arkansas, Hendrix College, and La Universidad Católica-Duoc in Santiago, Chile. 

Christopher Swetcky is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Through his production company No Swet Productions, he has been the technical designer, automation engineer, and technical director for many live entertainment projects including the creation of multiple international and domestic productions for Beth Morris Productions, Fin Productions, Geoff Sobelle, American Repertory Theater, Tait and IA Stage. Previously, he was also a Production Manager/Faculty in Production Management at California Institute of the Arts as well as an Associate Professor of Theater Technology/Technical Director/Production Manager at The Pennsylvania State University. Swetcky is the author of the book Power-line Communications, Performance Testing and Verification for use in an Entertainment Venue (Yale University, 2010). He received his MFA in Technical Design and Production from the Yale School of Drama. 
 

Bin Yang is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies. He earned his M.Ed. in Curriculum and Teaching Methodology from Beijing Language and Culture University, with a focus on technology-enhanced Chinese language education. Previously, he was a Preceptor in Chinese at Harvard University. His research interests include Chinese linguistics, language pedagogy, instructional technology, and AI-assisted language learning.