Faculty

Rachel Brahinsky serves as director of the graduate program in Urban and Public Affairs. She also teaches in the undergraduate Urban Studies program. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching center around the challenges of race and inequality in the context of rapidly changing American cities. Her current projects are focused on the San Francisco Bay Area. View more information on Dr. Brahinsky’s publications and research.

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...

Chris is always happy to talk about the work that Community Connections does in providing technology access to the poor and underserved, both in San Francisco and in Peru. Dave Wolber and Chris also have a collection of projects related to providing greater transparency in and access to politics, including opencampaigns.com, which allows citizens to track the influence of campaign financing, and the California Budget Simulator, which allows students and citizens to better understand the CA...

Brandon Brown pursued doctoral training in superconductivity and low-temperature physics, with postdoctoral work in science communication. Once at the University of San Francisco, he shifted his research focus to sensory biophysics. His laboratory, his research students, and various collaborators have explored the electric and magnetic sensory abilities of a variety of creatures. Currently, he is completing a book about the life and work of German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947), to be...

Carolyn Brown received her PhD in English from the University of California–Davis. Her specialization is Shakespeare and Renaissance / Early Modern literature, from a feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, and /or political perspective. She has published in several anthologies on Shakespeare and the following journals: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900; Texas Studies in Literature and Language; Studies in Philology; American Imago; Literature and Psychology; Clio: A Journal of Literature...

Sarah Burgess is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies, Gender and Sexualities Studies, and Critical Diversity Studies. Working at the intersections of rhetorical theory, political theory, legal theory, philosophy, and gender and sexualities studies, she examines the rhetorical contours of recognition in order to understand the possibilities and limits of justice. She recently edited a special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric that brought together authors from several disciplines to...

John Callaway received his PhD in Oceanography and Coastal Sciences from Louisiana State University in 1994. Prior to his position at USF, John was the Associate Director of the Pacific Estuarine Research Laboratory (PERL) at San Diego State University. At USF, Professor teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in introductory environmental science, applied ecology, wetlands, and restoration ecology. His research expertise is in wetland restoration, specifically wetland plant ecology and...

Professor Camblong's research has been centered on miscellaneous topics in quantum field theory, gravitational physics, and many-body theory. His main focus has been on developing general frameworks, with applications to fields as diverse as condensed-matter physics, molecular physics, nuclear physics, elementary particle physics, and quantum gravity. Some of the highlights of his published research over the past decade include collaborative work on: a geometrical and gauge-invariant approach...

Melissa Ann Canlas is Assistant Professor in International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco (USF). Her work focuses on Ethnic Studies, issues of educational equity, critical leadership, critical pedagogies, and human rights, particularly for immigrant and refugees and students of color. She has over fifteen years of work as an educator, and her work experience includes teaching a wide variety of Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies classes at the undergraduate...

Lucia Cantero is an anthropologist concerned with the intersection of aesthetics, politics and identity. Her areas of research include Latin America and the Black Atlantic, political economy, visual culture, urban ethnography, transnationalism and globalization, media and cultural studies and critical theory. She is particularly drawn to issues of branding, advertising and markets as sites for the construction of political subjectivity and the ways this process inflects constructions of race,...