New Faculty Members Join NSM
Dean Dudley is excited to welcome new faculty to NSM. Read more about them below:
Damian Dechev - Professor and Chair - Department of Computer Science
Dr. Dechev’s research focuses on concurrency and multiprocessor programming, particularly the design and verification of lock-free and wait-free data structures that make software on modern multicore systems more reliable, scalable, and efficient. His work spans distributed systems, high-performance computing, and scalable AI infrastructure, and includes a decade-long collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories. He earned his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University under Bjarne Stroustrup. From 2021 to 2025, he served as a program director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). He joins UH from the University of Central Florida, where over 16 years, he graduated 10 Ph.D. students, expanded undergraduate research opportunities, and mentored junior faculty in securing federal research funding.
Gen Li - Assistant Professor - Department of Computer Science
Dr. Li received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Clemson University in 2026. His research focuses on developing efficient and trustworthy machine learning through algorithmic and system-level innovations that make large-scale models more computationally scalable, resource-efficient, and reliable in real-world deployment. His work spans efficient model training and inference, model compression, and algorithm-system co-design, while also addressing critical challenges in robustness, safety, and responsible generative AI to ensure that future AI systems are both practically deployable and aligned with ethical principles.
Roshni Jaffery - Instructional Assistant Professor - Department of Biology & Biochemistry
Dr. Jaffery is an instructional assistant professor in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston. She earned her Ph.D. in biology from UH, where her research focused on the role of the immune system in Parkinson’s disease, with an emphasis on understanding how immune dysfunction and neuroinflammation contribute to disease progression and identifying potential therapeutic targets. In her current role, Dr. Jaffery is passionate about undergraduate education and is committed to creating an engaging, inclusive learning environment that fosters curiosity, critical thinking, and student success in the life sciences.
Emani Hicks - Assistant Professor - Department of Computer Science
Dr. Hicks conducts research in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), personal and health informatics, user experience, design, and human-centered artificial intelligence. She investigates how technologies mediate awareness, learning, and social interaction, combining design, data, and social practice to create systems that help people thrive and participate within broader social ecosystems. Her current research examines the use of wearable and mobile technologies supported by artificial intelligence to facilitate awareness of noise sensitivity experiences among people with noise sensitivity and their care networks. Before joining the University of Houston, she completed her Ph.D. in informatics from the University of California, Irvine.
Alexandra Brown-Suedel - Instructional Assistant Professor - Department of Biology & Biochemistry
Dr. Brown-Suedel is a cell biologist who earned her Ph.D. in Houston at Baylor College of Medicine. Her graduate research explored the non-canonical, pro-survival roles of caspases — proteins best known for their function in programmed cell death. While mentoring and teaching younger graduate students, she discovered a passion for sharing science with others. Now, as an instructional professor at the University of Houston, she hopes to spark curiosity and excitement about science in the next generation of students.
Zhenbang Dai - Assistant Professor - Department of Physics
Dr. Dai’s research is mainly focused on developing and leveraging first principles theories to understand and predict emergent phenomena in quantum materials. His interests include, but are not limited to, excited-state quasiparticles such as exciton polarons, bulk photovoltaic effects in symmetry-breaking systems, and nonlinear electron-phonon couplings in highly anharmonic systems. He is also actively collaborating with experimental colleagues on designing next-generation functional materials for energy-harvesting, light-emitting, and information-processing applications.
Travis Griggs - Instructional Assistant Professor - Department of Earth & Atmospheric Science
Dr. Griggs earned his Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the University of Houston (Go Coogs!), where his research focused on mobile air quality measurements specializing in overwater atmospheric measurements around Galveston Bay. His passion for atmospheric science has evolved into a love for teaching climate science. As a full-time instructional faculty member, he is excited to engage a diverse group of students and inspire a lasting appreciation for Earth and atmospheric sciences that extends beyond the classroom.
Ji-Yoen Kim - Assistant Professor - Department of Biology & Biochemistry
Tauopathies, including Alzheimer’s disease, are characterized by propagation of toxic tau pathology in a prion-like manner, driving neurodegeneration and worsening clinical symptoms over time. Dr. Kim’s research goal is to understand how toxic tau species are formed and propagate under disease conditions.
Dr. Kim’s laboratory employs a multidisciplinary approach that integrates molecular and cellular biology, biochemistry, mouse and human genetics, and neural engineering. In particular, her lab will discover genes and molecular pathways that regulate tau propagation in mouse brain using a novel in vivo CRISPR/Cas9 screening approach.
Levent Sari - Assistant Professor - Department of Biology & Biochemistry
Dr. Sari’s research integrates AI-driven and physics-based atomistic modeling, molecular simulations, and biophysical/biochemical experiments to uncover the molecular mechanisms, transition states, and critical seed structures that drive the aggregation of intrinsically disordered proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases, including tau, amyloid-β, and α-synuclein. Computational predictions are experimentally tested using a broad range of biochemical and biophysical approaches. Dr. Sari’s central research goal is to develop a detailed mechanistic understanding of neurodegenerative disease initiation and progression at the molecular level, and to translate these insights into effective therapeutic strategies.
Joshua Garber - Assistant Professor - Department of Earth & Atmospheric Science
Dr. Garber uses the metamorphic record of Earth’s lithosphere to characterize plate tectonic processes and their relationship to geochemical cycling over various scales. This research includes fieldwork, elemental and isotopic analyses (particularly laser ablation ICPMS), thermodynamic modeling, and statistical analyses. More recently, he has leveraged his expertise to focus on chemical sediments as recorders of the composition of Earth’s oceans through time, as well as historical to modern industrial wastes as potential rare-earth element resources.
Romina Dimarco - Instructional Assistant Professor - Department of Biology & Biochemistry
Dr. Dimarco is an ecologist fascinated by the complex relationships among plants, herbivores, and fungi as well as the processes that shape the spread of invasive species. She is particularly interested in how plant chemical traits influence interactions between plants and other organisms. Beyond her research, she is deeply committed to teaching and enjoys helping students become engaged with science, develop their curiosity, and succeed in their academic journey.
Marianne Kramer - Instructional Assistant Professor - Department of Biology & Biochemistry
Dr. Kramer is a plant molecular biologist whose research focuses on how RNA-based mechanisms regulate gene expression and shape plant responses to their environment. She helped develop technologies to pinpoint the developmental onset of transgene silencing and to comprehensively profile transgene-derived transcripts, combining these approaches with machine learning to reveal that aberrant RNAs generated by ribosome stalling can trigger RNA decay and silencing pathways.
Pranav Mantini - Instructional Assistant Professor - Department of Computer Science
Dr. Mantini is a researcher specializing in computer vision, image processing, and machine learning. His foundational research addresses core challenges in person re-identification, anomaly detection, and advanced neural network architectures-work that has been recognized with a U.S. patent and best-paper awards. His current research investigates geometric frameworks and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods for Contrastive Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
Paula Mateo - Instructional Assistant Professor - Department of Earth & Atmospheric Science
Dr. Mateo earned her undergraduate degree in geology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina and her Ph.D. in geosciences from Princeton University. Her scientific background is in micropaleontology and geochemistry, which she used to reconstruct environmental changes at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 66 million years ago. Her work explored how massive volcanic eruptions in India and the Chicxulub asteroid impact in the Yucatán Peninsula contributed to the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, which eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs and many other forms of life. As an educator, she is passionate about making Earth science engaging, accessible, and relevant to students from a wide range of backgrounds.