Faculty

Bernadette Barker-Plummer received her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, her MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and her BA from Edinburgh University in Scotland. Her research interests are in media, social movements, and social change. Some of her work can be found in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Journalism Quarterly, Journalism Monographs, and Peace Review. She teaches Gender and Media, Introduction to...

Professor Benning received her PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder in Environmental, Population and Organismic Biology. Her research interests include landscape ecology, urban ecology and resource conservation and management. Her most recent research focuses on remote sensing and GIS technologies in the study of tropical rainforest dynamics in Hawaii and riparian corridors in southern African savannas.

Professor Benson's research areas include operating systems, parallel computing, and programming languages. He has designed and developed several run-time systems and tools for parallel programming languages and libraries. Specifically, he led the development of USFMPI, a multi-threaded implementation of MPI 1.2 for Linux using either Myrinet or Ethernet. In addition, Professor Benson co-created FlashMob Computing and he implemented much of the software that enabled the harnessing of 700...

Amrita Bhattacharyya is an environmental geochemist. After completing her BS in Chemistry and MS in Environmental Chemistry from University of Calcutta, India, she moved to the USA to pursue her PhD in Environmental Chemistry at Pennsylvania State University. She continued to pursue her research in environmental chemistry as a post-doctoral fellow at Colorado State University before joining the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2015. At USF,...

Paula Birnbaum is the Academic Director of the Museum Studies Master of Arts Program and Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at USF. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art and holds a doctorate in Art History from Bryn Mawr College. Professor Birnbaum is a former Fulbright Scholar and fellow at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. Birnbaum’s research focuses on modern and contemporary art in relationship to gender and sexuality, as well as...

Tom Böttger is from Berlin, Germany and is first and foremost a teacher. He enjoys teaching the large introductory physics courses as well as hands-on courses like Electronics and Digital Electronics.In his research he studies optical, dynamical, and magnetic properties of solids, specifically optical materials doped with rare earth ions. This work is centered on understanding the fundamental material physics at the microscopic scale, but also geared towards the development of optical materials...

Professor Karen Bouwer enjoys teaching all levels of French and Francophone language, culture and literature as well as classes on African literature and film. Her research interests include Francophone African literature, African cinema and gender. Her book Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

Professor Rachel Brahinsky teaches in the Urban and Public Affairs graduate program, the undergraduate Urban Studies program, and the Politics Department. She earned a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, where she focused on the human and social geography of cities, with an emphasis on the politics of race and place. Her research and teaching center around the challenges of race and inequality in the context of rapidly changing American cities, with a longtime focus on the San Francisco Bay Area...

David is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco. His research interests are natural language processing, machine learning, and databases — specifically on the personal and cultural/demographic information transmitted during speech and typing. This research may lead to more accurate speech recognition systems. Prior to joining USF, David was a research assistant in the Speech Lab at Queens College and an instructor at Hunter College. He has previously worked for the City of...

Christopher Brooks is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at USF, with a joint appointment in the Department of Engineering. He joined USF in 2002 after completing a PhD in computer science at the University of Michigan. He also holds an MS in computer science from San Francisco State University, and a BA and JBA in English and journalism, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin. From 2010-2019, Professor Brooks served as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences...