From A (Alaa Abdelfattah) to Z (Meiqing Zhang), a new cohort of scholars expands the scope of inquiry at Oxy
Occidental’s latest cohort of tenure-track faculty spans disciplines from science and technology to history, culture, and public policy. Together, they reflect the College’s ongoing investment in intellectual range—and in the questions shaping our world.
Who’s new at Oxy?
Alaa Abdelfattah (assistant professor, economics) studies the distributional effects of public policy and national economic shocks on local labor markets. She is particularly interested in spatial inequality and the factors that contribute to wage and firm dispersion across space and over time. Her recent work studies the effect of large firms' subsidies on workers' wages and employment options. In another project, she evaluates the effect of COVID on employer's skill demand across different markets that were unequally affected by COVID due to their industrial composition. Abdelfattah has a Ph.D. in economics from UC Davis.
Eric Bjorklund (assistant professor, sociology) specializes in health, inequality, and political sociology. His research examines how the distribution of power within society shapes material conditions and formal political processes in ways that generate and reinforce health disparities. Most recently, his focus has been on the sociopolitical determinants of county-level disparities in alcohol, suicide, and substance/opioid mortality rates. He also utilizes a mixed methods approach to analyze white reactionary conservative politics in the United States. Bjorklund has a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona.
Manuela Borzone (assistant professor, Spanish and French studies) is a literary scholar whose work focuses on the representation of the Argentine gaucho in literature, illustration, and film. She has earned several awards, including best peer-reviewed article, distinguished teacher, and scholar of the year, and her research has appeared in award-winning collections. At Oxy, she teaches a variety of courses which range from Spanish language to upper-level literature and culture. Borzone has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and comes to Occidental from Nebraska Wesleyan University, where she taught for three years.
Kai Yui Samuel Chan (assistant professor, politics) teaches classes on political theory, democratic theory, and transnational politics. His research concerns individuals and communities traversing state borders. Chan’s current book project, Entangled Peoplehood, examines self-determination in light of the challenges confronting colonized, indigenous, and exiled peoples as they navigate an existing global order of nation-states. His previous research has been published in American Journal of Political Science, Political Studies and the European Journal of Political Theory. Chan has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in political science with a specialization in political theory.
Margaret Gaida (assistant professor, history) studies cross-cultural knowledge transmission in the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular focus on astronomy, astrology, optics, and magic. A historian of science, her work draws on manuscript studies in Latin and Arabic, the history of the printed book, and the material and visual culture of premodern scientific practice. She is currently writing her first book, tentatively titled The Lost Art of Arabic Astrology. Gaida also maintains active research interests in the history of the occult sciences more broadly, as well as in women’s history. Gaida received her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and comes to Occidental from Caltech, where she taught courses in the humanities for the last five years. This spring, she will be a Museum Fellow at the Getty Research Institute.
Alberto López Martín (assistant professor, Spanish) specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Spanish cultural production, with a focus on contemporary poetry, comic, and graphic novels. An economist by training, his research explores representations of ecosocial crises through the theoretical frameworks of ecocriticism and affect and emotion studies. His scholarly interests also include Spanish for specific purposes and ecopedagogy. His first book, Poéticas indignadas (Outraged Poetics), examines evolving notions of poetic commitment in the Spanish literary scene in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession. López has a Ph.D. in Spanish from Florida State University. He comes to Occidental from Valparaiso University, where he was an associate professor of Spanish.
Frank Macabenta (assistant professor, biology) focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying collective cell behavior leading up to organogenesis. Through a combination of confocal microscopy and the vast array of genetics, cell biology, and molecular biology tools available to the Drosophila fruit fly model system, he seeks to uncover the gene regulatory networks that control cell fitness determination, intercellular communication, and collective migration leading up to the assembly of the larval midgut muscles. Macabenta has a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from Rutgers University. He comes to Occidental from Cal State Monterey Bay, where he was an assistant professor of biology.
Carla Macal (assistant professor, critical theory and social justice) studies the intersections between state violence and intergenerational healing. Her book-in-progress, Healing Cartographies: GuateMaya Feminists Weaving Transformative Memory Across the Hemisphere, follows the oral and embodied testimonies of Guatemalan and Maya women survivors of the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War (assistant professor, 1960-96) and their production of counter-cultural memory. Macal also is the creator of Ixoq Arte, a natural body care product created to preserve ancestral Indigenous knowledge. She comes to Occidental from UC San Diego, where she was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Literature.
Dustin “Dusty” Madison (assistant professor, physics) is an astrophysicist working on new and creative ways to study the gravitational Universe. He studies gravitational waves—tiny ripples in the fabric of space that can teach people about some of the most extreme systems in the universe, like black holes orbiting each other. Madison’s efforts have mostly been as a member of NANOGrav, a pulsar timing array using world-class radio telescopes to monitor the precise clock-like behavior of pulsars as they float about in a churning sea of gravitational waves. He has a master’s and Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University and did his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley.
Alyssa Rodriguez (assistant professor, biology) examines the molecular mechanisms underlying human disease including chemotherapy resistance. She studies proteins involved with DNA repair and genome stability. Her research team utilizes molecular biology techniques, biochemical assays, and computational modeling to understand protein-DNA interactions at the amino acid and nucleotide level. Rodriguez has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and structural biology from Vanderbilt University and received her B.A. in biochemistry from the University of San Diego. She comes to Oxy from UC San Diego, where she was a National Institutes of Health-Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award (IRACDA) Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
Summer Sloane-Britt (assistant professor, art and art history) has a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She researches the global history of photography, particularly the intersection of photography and liberation movements. Her dissertation explores the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) photography department, emphasizing their innovative contributions to the 1960s Black Freedom Movement. At the Institute, Summer co-curated the 2021 exhibition Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O: To Do All at Once and a recent group exhibition on Chicane muralism in Los Angeles. Sloane-Britt has held positions at the Billie Holiday Theatre, the National Gallery of Art, the Grey Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Joel Walsh (assistant professor, computer science) analyzes the intersection of educational technology, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing. He specializes in designing novel learning technologies that utilize machine learning, multimodal models, and knowledge representation. He comes to Occidental from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, where he was an AI research intern at Finetune Learning, and previously taught high school mathematics in Los Angeles. He has a Ph.D. in STEM education and an M.S. in computational science, engineering, and mathematics from UT Austin.
Madeline Wander ’08’s (assistant professor, urban and environmental policy) doctoral research examined the relationship between mobility and racial-spatial isolation in suburban environments, particularly in Southern California. A scholar of transportation and racial-spatial inequality, her commitment to social justice and experience as a community organizer drives her research and teaching. An urban and environmental policy major at Oxy, she received a master’s in urban and regional planning and a Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA.
Tiffany Wheatland-Disu (assistant professor, Black studies) is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History and Culture of the 20th and 21st Century African Diaspora. Her research and scholarship bridge the histories of decolonization, Black radicalism, and Black political thought. In 2025, Wheatland-Disu earned her Ph.D. with distinction in History from Howard University where she was awarded several fellowships including the prestigious, Sasakawa Young Leaders Foundation Fellowship. Her dissertation, A History of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), 1968-1998: A Pivotal Moment in Black Internationalism, investigates the transnational dimensions of political thought and praxis inspired by Kwame Nkrumah’s 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana. Previously, she served for more than a decade as a lecturer of Africana studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY in New York City. Beyond the classroom, she has worked extensively in the nonprofit sector, advocating for social justice for underserved immigrant communities of African descent.
Vanessa R. Yingling (professor, kinesiology) is a biomechanist, educator, and researcher focused on bone strength development and health, with a particular interest in translating her research into programs or information to benefit the public. Yingling has a B.S. from UC San Diego; an M.S. from State University of New York, Buffalo; and a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo. Her postdoctoral fellowship was at Washington University in St. Louis Medical School in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. She comes to Occidental from Cal State East Bay, where she was a professor of kinesiology.
Meiqing Zhang (assistant professor, computer science) comes to Oxy from Wesleyan University, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow in computational social science. Zhang has a B.A. from Harbin Engineering University; a master’s from the University of Chicago; and a master’s in computer science and Ph.D. in communication from USC, specializing in political and computational communication. Her research draws on computational methods, including machine learning and natural language processing, to study media and politics. She has taught natural language processing, social data science and machine learning methods in audiovisual analysis.
Top photo: Seated, l-r: Associate professors Meiqing Zhang (computer science) and Frank Macabenta (biology), and professor Vanessa Yingling (kinesiology). Standing: Associate professors Eric Bjorklund (sociology) and Alyssa Rodriguez (biology).
