Faculty

Nora Fisher Onar is assistant professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include the theory and practice of international relations, foreign policy analysis, comparative area studies (Turkey; Middle East; Europe), political ideologies, gender, and history/memory. She received her doctorate from Oxford and holds master’s and undergraduate degrees from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown universities, respectively. She speaks five languages, has...

Todd is an adjunct professor in the department of Economics at the University of San Francisco and a lecturer in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He has worked at many Silicon Valley high-tech companies in various capacities. He has 20+ years experience in the software industry in telecommunications, medical, financial software, and analytics. His experience includes performance engineering, tools development, product development, product...

I am excited about using high-precision control of light to create and control extremely brief pulses of electrons! My main tools are ultrafast lasers and field emission tips. Much of my earlier graduate work concentrated on improving the exquisite control of light fields achieved by the optical clock and ultrafast laser communities. With undergraduate research students at USF, we investigate the ultrafast field emission process. Students have designed, built, and characterized femtosecond...

Karen Francis, PhD, is a professor and co-chair in the Kinesiology Department at the University of San Francisco. She teaches courses in the areas of movement science: Motor Learning, Measurement and Statistics, Neuroscience, Professional Practicum and serves on committees for both the Gerontology and Neuroscience Minors. Dr. Francis's research interests are focused on how we control and coordinate movement and how aging and disease affects our ability to control movements. In one line of...

Patricia teaches bioinformatics, clinical decision support and other courses in the health informatics program and the computer science department. She’s primarily interested in working with students to apply data analytics to the health domain, with the goal of producing software tools that perform analyses for clinicians, researchers, and the public. Collaborating with her students is a big priority for Patricia; a number of them are co-authors of her peer-reviewed articles, and their work...

Karen M. Fraser earned her PhD from Stanford University, where she studied both traditional Japanese art and the history of photography. Her research focuses on modern Japanese visual culture, with particular interests in Japanese photography from ca. 1860 through the 1930s, cross-cultural interactions and influences between Asia and the West, gender issues, and museum and exhibition history. Professor Fraser’s teaching experience includes survey and upper-level courses covering both...

College of Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Eileen Chia-Ching Fung has dedicated more than 20 years of service to USF, including more than 10 years in the dean’s office. Interim Dean Fung was awarded the James Irvine Dissertation Fellowship in 1997, and hired as a full-time faculty member in the Department of English in 1998. She served as chair of the English department and director of the Asian American Pacific Studies Program before her appointment as associate dean of arts and humanities in...

Cathy Gabor received a BA in English from Bethany College in West Virginia, an MA in English from Indiana University, and a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas Christian University. Prior to her arrival at USF in 2012, she was the Writing Program director at San Jose State University. At USF, she teaches RHET 101, 110, 110N, 120, and 205. Cathy's research and teaching interests range from service-learning to writing in electronic environments. Her work has appeared in Reflections: A...

Prof. David Galles received his BS from Stanford University and his MS and PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles. His areas of interest include causal networks, programming languages, artificial intelligence.