New Faculty at UW Tacoma in 2021-22

Lorne Arnold, Assistant Professor

Civil Engineering

School of Engineering & Technology

Ph.D. Geotechnical Engineering, University of Washington

Dr. Lorne Arnold is a triple alumnus of UW, having received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, and his master’s and doctoral degree in geotechnical engineering from the UW College of Engineering.

Prior to his appointment at UW Tacoma, Dr. Arnold spent seven years with the Seattle engineering firm of Hart Crowser, working on geotechnical engineering projects such as the Sound Transit rail vehicle maintenance base in Bellevue. As a Tacoma native, Arnold was instrumental in establishing a Hart Crowser office in the city.

Dr. Arnold’s research focuses on seismically-induced natural hazards, particularly related to rock-slope failure. His industry experience has driven a research interest in reliability-based approaches to geotechnical problems, site exploration methods, data analysis, and design and performance challenges in urban settings.

Prior to the official start of UW Tacoma’s new civil engineering program in fall 2022, Dr. Arnold will teach TCSS 325 Computers, Ethics and Society.

Samantha Asbjornsen, Practicum Support & Lecturer

Clinical Social Worker

School of Social Work & Criminal Justice

Master of Social Work, UW Tacoma

Samantha Asbjornsen received her undergraduate degree in comparative sociology in 1997 from the University of Puget Sound. She is an alumna of UW Tacoma, having received her M.S.W. in 2004 from the School of Social Work & Criminal Justice.

Asbjornsen has been a licensed independent clinical social worker (LICSW) since 2008. Her career as a practicing social worker spans 24 years working in the field of community social work in both government and private sectors in Washington State. She specializes in direct client services with extensive experience in medical and gerontological social work.

At UW Tacoma, she will be providing practicum support to BASW and MSW students pursuing a career in social work. Her teaching includes TSOCWF 300 Historical Approaches to Social Welfare.

Paria Avij, Assistant Teaching Professor

Chemical Engineering, Data Analytics

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Ph.D. Louisiana State University

Dr. Paria Avij has a background in chemical engineering and data analytics. While working during and after her Ph.D. at Louisiana State University, she collaborated on projects ranging from air pollutant dispersion to oil spill modeling to meteorological fog forecasting along the Gulf Coast.

She pursued her undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

During the current academic year, Dr. Avij is teaching TCHEM 139 General Chemistry Prep, and TCHEM 142 General Chemistry I.

Alireza Boloori, Assistant Professor

Business Analytics

Milgard School of Business

Ph.D. Industrial Engineering, Arizona State University

Alireza Boloori is an assistant professor of business analytics in the Milgard School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Arizona State University. Prior to joining UW Tacoma, he was an assistant professor at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics & Probability and the Department of Family Medicine.

His main research interest is in developing data-driven analytical models with applications in healthcare decision-making, delivery systems, and policy and operations. Dr. Boloori has had research collaborations with Mayo Clinic Arizona , and his research has gained accolades from Production and Operations Management Society, INFORMS IBM Service Science, and INFORMS Decision Analysis Society. His current work focuses on developing an evidence-based analytical framework to address the pain-versus-side-effects trade-off in the opioid prescription and abuse epidemic and developing a decision-making framework on utilization of telehealth in medical practice.

Dr. Boolori will be teaching TBUS 301 Quantitative Analysis for Business, TBANLT 550 Analytical Decision Making, and TBUS 330 Introduction to Information Technology during the 2021-22 academic year.

Matthew Ford, Assistant Teaching Professor

Mechanical Engineering

School of Engineering & Technology

Ph.D., mechanical engineering, Northwestern University

Dr. Matthew Ford received his B.S. in mechanical engineering and materials science from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to complete his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. After completing a postdoc with the Cornell Active Learning Initiative, he joined the School of Engineering & Technology at UW Tacoma to help establish its new mechanical engineering program.

His teaching interests include solid mechanics, engineering design, and inquiry-guided learning. He has supervised undergraduate and master’s-level student research projects and capstone design teams. He is active in the engineering education research community and has experience in qualitative and quantitative evaluation of learning. He is a member of the American Society for Engineering Education. Outside of work he rides and fixes bicycles and plays the harmonica.

In the 2021-22 academic year, Dr. Ford is teaching TME 315 Introduction to 3D Modeling, Design and Analysis; TME 341 Mechanical Design and TME345 Machining Fundamentals.

Emese Hadnagy, Associate Professor

Civil Engineering

School of Engineering & Technology

Ph.D. civil engineering, University of New Hampshire

Dr. Emese Hadnagy is an associate professor and the chair of the civil engineering program at UW Tacoma. She has a broad interest in environmental pollution prevention and hazard mitigation in water and other environments. The common thread of her research is to understand the physicochemical processes that control the fate, transport, and remediation of environmental contaminants. She has a strong interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education and in sustainability aspects of water resources and environmental engineering.

Prior to joining UW Tacoma, Dr. Hadnagy was an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of New Haven where she also directed the fully online and the in-person graduate environmental engineering programs.

In the 2022-23 academic year, Dr. Hadnagy will teach courses in environmental and water resources engineering as part of UW Tacoma’s new B.S. civil engineering degree program.

Matthew Harvey, Assistant Professor

Economics

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Ph.D. economics, University of South Carolina

Dr. Matthew Harvey is a public economist with a particular focus on policing and race. He received a B.A. in economics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in economics from the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.

Harvey’s current research looks at how shocks to trust in institutions can affect individual behavior, with a focus on the impact of police-related fatalities on trust. He is also interested in an area of economics called behavioral game theory, in particular the role of race in explaining why people make choices that are not always in line with utility-maximizing assumptions.

Dr. Harvey’s upcoming teaching includes TECON 200 Introduction to Microeconomics and TECON 201 Introduction to Macroeconomics.

Kurt Hatch, Professor of Practice, Educational Administration Program Director

Educational Leadership

School of Education

Ed.D. University of Washington

A former teacher, instructional coach, award-winning principal and associate director for the Association of Washington School Principals, Dr. Kurt Hatch has provided leadership in local, state-wide and international settings. With an Ed.D. in equity-centered systems leadership from the University of Washington, Dr. Hatch currently serves as professor of practice and director of the Educational Leadership Program in the School of Education.

Hatch’s work also includes policy analysis, advocacy and facilitating professional learning on systems improvement; distributed leadership; equity, bias and race; and multi-tiered systems of support.

In his work with the Educational Leadership Program, Hatch mentors early-career principals and trains school leaders on the implementation of a school-wide student discipline system that can recapture thousands of hours of instructional time, increase teacher efficacy and eliminate the use of suspensions.

Ling-Hong Hung, Research Assistant Professor

Bioinformatics and software engineering

School of Engineering & Technology

Ph.D. biochemistry, University of Western Ontario

Dr. Ling-Hong Hung is newly appointed as a research assistant professor in the School of Engineering & Technology. He has been at UW Tacoma for more than seven years as a research scientist with the Center for Data Science.

His work focuses on making fast cloud-based analysis of “big” biomedical data accessible to scientists and clinicians. With funding through grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, he is co-founder and chief technology office of Biodepot LLC, a bioinformatics start-up that uses technology developed at UW Tacoma.

Dr. Hung has a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Western Ontario. He has been a software developer for more than 20 years and has taught courses in biochemistry and software engineering. Aside from Biodepot LLC, current projects include using serverless cloud instances for supercomputing, real-time DNA sequence analysis using hand-held devices, and combining genomics with bio-imaging data.

In the current academic year, he will teach TCSS 506 Practical Full-Stack Development.

Angela Kitali, Assistant Professor

Civil engineering

School of Engineering & Technology

Ph.D. civil engineering, Florida International University

Dr. Angela Kitali received her Ph.D. in civil engineering from Florida International University in December 2020. Before joining the faculty at UW Tacoma, she was a postdoctoral research associate at FIU. Kitali’s research focuses on using real-time data and applying data-driven, statistical, and machine learning approaches to improve highway safety and traffic operations. She has co-authored over sixty journal papers, conference proceedings, research reports, and technical articles.

Dr. Kitali has been recognized with various national, regional, and local honors and awards, including the 2020 Eno Transportation Fellowship and the 2019 Women’s Transportation Seminar Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship. She is a young member of the standing committee on freeway operations at the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. Currently, she serves on the Journal of Advances in Transportation Studies editorial board.

Dr. Kitali will be teaching TME 351 Engineering Probability and Statistics during the 2021-22 academic year.

Jeong-Ah Lee, Assistant Teaching Professor

Physics

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Ph.D. physics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Dr. Jeong-Ah Lee is an assistant teaching professor in the UW Tacoma School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences. Previously, she was a physics lecturer at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and, prior to that, an instructor in physics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg. She received a Ph.D. and M.S. in physics from Virginia Tech and a B.S. in physics from Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea. Her main interest is physics pedagogy and physics education research (PER).

Upcoming courses that Dr. Lee will teach include TPHYS 121 Physics-Mechanics and TPHYS 122 Physics-Electromagnetism and Oscillatory Motion.

Anna Lovász, Assistant Professor

Economics

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Ph.D. economics, University of Washington

Dr. Anna Lovász is an assistant professor of economics at UW Tacoma and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics in Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests include labor, education and behavioral economics. She studies the causes of gender inequality in the labor market, focusing on the interactions of parenthood, individual choices and policies.

She received her Ph.D. in economics from the UW in Seattle in 2008. Her dissertation studied the effect of increased competition on the gender wage gap in Hungary following its transition to democracy. She teaches labor economics, behavioral economics, introductory economics and statistical literacy courses.

Her courses at UW Tacoma this academic year include TCORE 103 Introduction to Social Science, TECON 450 Labor Economics and Policy and TECON 201 Introduction to Macroeconomics.

Keva Miller, Dean and Professor

Social work

School of Social Work & Criminal Justice

Ph.D. social work, Fordham University

Dr. Keva Miller is the inaugural dean of the School of Social Work & Criminal Justice. She joined UW Tacoma from Portland State University, where she was a professor and associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Social Work.

Dr. Miller is nationally recognized for her scholarship in the areas of criminal justice and child welfare. She has authored numerous publications, reports, and presentations that emphasize racial disproportionality and disparities within criminal justice and child welfare systems and examine the impacts on children and families. Her scholarship also examines risk, protection, and resilience among BIPOC and highly stressed populations.

Prior to her 13-year tenure at Portland State University, she held academic appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, Fordham University, and Columbia University.

Laura Murphy, Assistant Teaching Professor

Chemistry

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Ph.D. chemistry University of Washington

Dr. Laura Murphy is an assistant teaching professor in the Division of Science & Mathematics. She has an undergraduate chemistry degree from Pacific Lutheran University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry from the UW in Seattle.

While pursuing her doctorate, she worked on developing innovative methods for creating the feedstocks for high-performance plastics, resins, adhesives and composites.

In the 2021-22 academic year, Dr. Murphy will teach TCHEM 251 Organic Chemistry I and TCHEM 405 Biochemistry I.

Jessi Quizar, Assistant Professor

American studies and ethnicity

School of Urban Studies

Ph.D. University of Southern California

Dr. Jessi Quizar is an assistant professor in the UW Tacoma School of Urban Studies. She is a scholar of racial capitalism, grassroots planning, and urban land and resources struggles in the U.S. Her work centers on the organizing and theorizing of Black and Indigenous communities to shape cities.

She received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California’s American Studies and Ethnicity program, an M.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her B.A. from Colorado College. Prior to UW Tacoma, Dr. Quizar held an assistant professorship at Northern Arizona University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. She received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council for her dissertation on Black-led urban agriculture in Detroit.

She is currently writing a book exploring the ways anti-Black racism and settler colonialism operate together in processes of gentrification in Detroit. When she is not reading, writing or teaching, she is raising her twin four-year-olds, cooking elaborately and exclaiming about the natural beauty of her new Pacific Northwest home.

During the 2021-22 academic year, Dr. Quizar will be teaching TURB 312 Race and Poverty and TCMP 582 Movements and Organizing.

Saumya Sankaran, Assistant Teaching Professor

Molecular and cell biology

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Ph.D. molecular and cell biology, Stanford University

Dr. Saumya Sankaran is an assistant teaching professor of molecular and cell biology in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Science’s Division of Science & Mathematics. She earned her B.S. and M.S. in biology from Brandeis University and her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Stanford University, where her doctoral research focused on ways in which DNA structure in some cells is organized into compact, efficient packages; the role of proteins called histones in this packaging; and the processes of signaling and transcription by which histones take part in DNA replication.

Sankaran pursued pedagogy training in a postdoctoral teaching fellowship in Stanford’s first-year critical-thinking-focused curriculum, teaching courses on life science topics such as cancer and neuroscience from multidisciplinary perspectives.

Prior to joining the faculty at UW Tacoma, she was an assistant professor of biomedical science at the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine where she helped develop an integrated curriculum and taught the inaugural class at the new medical school.

In upcoming quarters, she will be teaching TBIOL 120 Introductory Biology I, and TBIOL 140 Introductory Biology II.

Hui Suk So, Assistant Teaching Professor

Finance

Milgard School of Business

M.S. Accounting, University of Washington Tacoma

Hui Suk So is an assistant teaching professor in UW Tacoma’s Milgard School of Business. She has an undergraduate business degree from UW’s Foster School of Business and a graduate accounting degree from the Milgard School.

Prior to joining the UW Tacoma faculty, she worked as a real estate financial professional with Vulcan, Inc., Wright Runstad & Company, Equity Office Properties Trust and The Norman Company.

Her areas of expertise include financial statement analysis, capital budgeting and forecasting, cash flow analysis, asset valuation, return calculations, office/retail leasing analysis and contract administration. She directs the financial literacy initiative for the Milgard School’s Center for Financial Literacy.

In the 2021-22 academic year, So will be teaching TBUS 350 Business Finance, TFIN 425 Finance and Investments, TFIN 431 Financial Statement Analysis, TBECON 423 Financial Markets and Institutions and TBECON 220 Introduction to Microeconomic Theory.

Shamay Thomas MSN, ARNP, FNP-C, Assistant Teaching Professor

Nurse practitioner

School of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership

Ph.D. nursing (in progress), University of Washington

Shamay Thomas is a nurse practitioner with over twelve years of nursing experience treating and attending to patients in a variety of medical settings. She is passionate about instructing and mentoring nurses and students.

Thomas is an undergraduate alumna of Pacific Lutheran University, received her master of science in nursing from the University of South Alabama, and is currently in the nursing Ph.D. program at the University of Washington School of Nursing in Seattle.

Prior to her UW Tacoma appointment, she was a nurse practitioner and a registered nurse at MultiCare Health System for more than a decade.

Thomas’s research focuses on how racism and misogyny may intersect and influence the health of Black women and how individuals create healthy spaces for themselves.

In winter and spring 2022 quarters, Thomas will teach TNURS 414 Health, Communities and Populations and TNURS 451 Portfolio Completion.

Jeff Walters, Assistant Professor

Civil engineering

School of Engineering & Technology

Ph.D. civil engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

Dr. Jeff Walters is an assistant professor of civil engineering in UW Tacoma’s School of Engineering & Technology. Through his research, he seeks to develop improved engineering practice and policy for sustainable rural and urban infrastructure system design and management in developing world contexts. He uses an emerging approach called “complexity science” to address complex systems and problems that don’t lend themselves to linear cause-and-effect thinking.

He received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2015, and was an assistant professor at Universidad Diago Portales, Chile, from 2016 to 2018, and at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, from 2018 to 2021. Dr. Walters is the co-founder of Open Water Systems, a consulting group dedicated to employing systems thinking and modeling approaches in sustainable development projects.

Dr. Walters will be teaching TME 223 Engineering Dynamics during the 2021-22 academic year.

Davon Woodard, Assistant Professor

Urban studies

School of Urban Studies

Ph.D. planning, governance and globalization, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Dr. Davon Woodard joined the School of Urban Studies at UW Tacoma in 2021. He earned his Ph.D. in planning, governance and globalization, in conjunction with a certificate in urban computing at Virginia Tech. During this time, he served as a National Science Foundation research trainee. His dissertation research explored the ways in which historical racializations of urban place remain present and inform and frame contemporary digital and non-digital interactions between Black individuals, communities and institutions in Chicago and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Woodard holds M.S. degrees in economics and policy analysis, and an MBA centering on predictive analysis from DePaul University; a certificate in nonprofit strategic planning from Stanford University; and a B.S. in interdisciplinary public policy and psychology from Michigan State University. His research interests include critical urban theory and emancipatory planning; urban analytics, data science and open data; globalized cities and cities in the global context; and mixed methodologies, including traditional mixed methods, qualitative mixed methods, digital ethnography and social network analysis.

Professionally, prior to joining the academy he spent over a decade in nonprofit and government management and fundraising in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. He served in a variety of resource development and strategic partnership roles in several mission-driven organizations spanning community-based health, performing arts, parks and recreation and LGBTQ community development. Outside of his professional work he remains committed to combatting issues of food and housing insecurity, and racial and gender-based injustices, locally and globally.

During the 2021-22 academic year, he will be teaching TCMP 554 Community Development and TURB 316 Cities and Belonging.