Faculty

Stephanie Cooper, PhD is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology. She has taught a variety of courses within the field, including Exercise & Sport Psychology, Lifetime Fitness & Wellness, and Measurement & Statistics. Her research examines the acute effects of exercise on mental health. Specifically, she is interested in determining the optimal exercise dose and mode for eliciting the greatest improvements in anxiety, mood, and cognition. Professor Cooper aims to...

Melissa S. Dale has served as Executive Director of the Center for Asia Pacific Studies since August 2012. Prior to joining the faculty and staff at USF, she served as Associate Director of International Relations at the University of California, Berkeley (Nov. 2011 – Aug. 2012) where she worked in the areas of international relations and development for the entire campus with a particular focus on prospect development and stewardship for leadership and major gifts from the Asia-Pacific region...

Sergio De La Torre's project work has focused on issues regarding immigration, tourism, surveillance technologies, and transnational identities. These works have been exhibited in a variety of venues both national and international. He has received grants from the NEA, The Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, the Potrero Nuevo Fund, and the Creative Work Fund, among others. De La Torre's latest project is MAQUILAPOLIS (City of Factories), an hour-long video documentary made in...

Marilyn (Bordwell) DeLaure teaches courses in rhetoric, criticism, and social movements. Her research investigates how people effect social change, focusing especially on embodied performance. She has published essays on dance, civil rights rhetoric, and environmental activism, and is co-editor of Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU Press). She is also a producer of the award-winning documentary film MOTHERLOAD about the cargo bicycling movement.

Brian Komei Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also serves as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies. He has been at USF since 2001 and received the Distinguished Teaching Award (along with Ronald Sundstrom) in 2010. At the university, he has taught various courses in the Rhetoric and Language Department and has instructed creative writing...

Leslie Dennen is the director of the Writing Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Language. She received her Masters degree in Teaching English as a Second Language and Certificate in Composition from San Francisco State University. She received her Doctorate in Education from USF in 2007. Her dissertation investigated how student engagement in on-campus activities affected student identity and beliefs about their learning process. Her article "Writing Center for...

Nathan Dennis is an assistant professor in the Art History and Museum Studies programs at USF. He specializes in late antique and medieval art and architecture, particularly of the Mediterranean and Near East, including the material and visual traditions of Western Christian, Byzantine/Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and Islamic cultures. He received a PhD in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University, writing his dissertation on the pictorial, material, and liturgical strategies employed in...

Jennifer A. Dever is Professor in the Department of Biology. She received her PhD from Texas Tech University. Professor Dever studies the genetics of threatened and/or endangered populations of vertebrates, including crocodiles and foothill yellow-legged frogs. She employs molecular markers to assess the genetic structure of these populations, with the goal of species conservation. Several graduate and undergraduate students are collaborating with Professor Dever on this research. Watch her NPR...

Stephen Devlin is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Master’s in Data Science program (MSDS). He has also served as department chair and director of the undergraduate data science program. Stephen has a bachelor’s degree from Manhattan College in New York, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland. He was a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT before moving to the University of San Francisco. His research interests include both pure and applied...

Aleksandra Dimitrijevic Stamenov received her B.S. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Faculty of Chemistry, University of Belgrade, Serbia. For her thesis work she investigated activity and stability of microbial enzymes and their application in non aqueous catalysis. After graduate school she first completed a short training in proteomics and MALDI imaging mass spectrometry at INRA-Angers-Nantes Centre, France and then joined the lab of Dr. Dana Aswad at UC Irvine, for her postdoctoral work,...