Faculty & Staff

Lauren Sassoubre holds a PhD and MS in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University and an MS in Marine Science from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Her research focuses on environmental waters along urbanized coastlines and how we can use molecular (DNA-based) techniques to better understand the sources and fate of coastal microbial pollution and improve monitoring and management of coastal resources such as fisheries. This research has implications for protecting human and...

Noopur Agarwal is a practicing visual communication designer dedicated to increasing critical public engagement with issues of global and local concern. Her practice is based both on service: working collaboratively and interdisciplinarily to make a strategic difference within an organization; and authorship: producing exploratory works. Her creative output often takes the form of “experiential graphic design” (physical and digital interactive environmental graphics) and includes brand identity...

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...

Assistant Professor Johnathan Cromwell's research focuses on how people collaborate with each other as they define, solve, and change problems while working on creativity and innovation projects in organizations. This work helps advance a nascent theoretical framework called "dynamic problem solving," which aims to explain when, why, and how people can fluidly shift between different models of problem-solving as they work within various constraints in organizations.

Cromwell's teaching...

My research interests are in observational cosmology. Fourteen years after the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe (Nobel Prize 2011), a standard model of the universe (and its variations) has been established but fundamental questions about the nature of dark energy remain unanswered. Along with collaborators in the Supernova Cosmology Project led by Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, I am working on the following projects and would like to engage...

An associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science since 2016, Dr. Amalia Kokkinaki holds a PhD degree from the University of Toronto in Canada and joined USF after completing her postdoctoral research at Stanford University. She is an environmental engineer with expertise in groundwater flow, fate and transport of contaminants, and biological treatment of organic pollutants. Her research is in the nexus of mathematical and statistical modeling of the physical, chemical and...

Tom MacDonald received his PhD from Stanford University. Professor MacDonald's research focuses on designing computer simulations of problems of pollution migration and using the results to engineer systems to contain pollutants and prevent further spreading. He has also published his research on the neural network application for bioremediation. Recently he has co-authored papers dealing with environmental risk and the precautionary principle.

Julio Moreno is a professor of history and affiliated engineering faculty at the University of San Francisco. Born in the Salvadoran countryside, Professor Moreno fled his country's civil war at the age of fourteen and navigated the US educational system as an undocumented immigrant. He is the recipient of distinguished awards that include research fellowships on the globalization of U.S. business, technology, and diplomacy at the Library of Congress and the Institute for Historical Studies at...

Hana Mori loves teaching structural materials engineering and experimental methods for engineering and architecture. She was the first chairperson of the Department of Engineering, launched in 2020. She also created and has been directing the Architectural Engineering minor program within the Department of Art + Architecture. She has also taught international immersion courses and project courses in which students work with community partners.

Hana has been a teacher for 20+ years. In her...

Daniel is the director of the Bachelors of Science in Data Science program. Daniel's research interests are in large-scale optimization modeling and algorithms. His postdoctoral research in the UCLA Department of Radiation Oncology focused on applications of optimization in radiation therapy, medical imaging, and machine learning.

Sean has an MFA in visual arts from Mills College, and a BA and BFA in art history and ceramics from Eastern Washington University.

Sean recently managed the studios in the USF Department of Art + Architecture, where he taught Fabrication Lab and Ceramics. Previously, as the research and experience developer at the Oakland Museum of California, he curated exhibitions while developing visitor research to better understand how people engage with informal education. Sean continues to investigate...

Akshay joined as an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering during fall 2022. He is passionate about teaching complex engineering concepts in a manner that strengthens foundations, builds intuition, and is easily accessible to all students, without compromising on rigor or depth. At USF, Akshay will work on teaching and developing courses in physics and mathematics aimed at all engineering students, and courses in the electrical engineering concentration.

Prior to joining USF...

William (Billy) Riggs, PhD, AICP, LEED AP is a global expert and thought leader in the areas of autonomy and smart transportation, housing, economics and urban development. He has over 100 publications in these areas and has had his work featured in multiple national media outlets — including the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Atlantic.  He is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Management, director of strategy and research at Sustinere...

David Ryan serves as the Academic Director and Faculty Chair for the Professional Communication and Certificate in Professional Communication programs. He teaches undergraduate courses in rhetoric, focusing on orality and literacy studies, and graduate courses in strategic and technical communication, specializing in strategic planning and usability/UX studies. His research interests relate the intellectual history of technical communication with classicism, human enhancement technologies, and...

Gennifer (Genna) Smith received her BS in electrical engineering with a double major in biology from the University of New Mexico. While pursuing her BS, Gennifer conducted research at Sandia National Laboratories where she worked on a point-of-care device for tuberculosis detection. She then continued to research low-cost medical devices as part of her PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University. In particular, she developed a portable urinalysis device capable of analyzing the...

Henriette Cornet is an expert in sustainable urban mobility and autonomous vehicles. From 2020 to 2023, she led the thematic area of automated mobility at the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) and supervised the European project SHOW, with a budget of 30 million euros. For three years, she also led a team of designers specializing in autonomous mobility at the TUMCREATE research institute in Singapore. After obtaining her PhD from the Technical University of Munich in 2012...

Nick Leonard is interested in epistemology, cognitive psychology, and certain topics at the intersection of the two. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University and his BA in Philosophy from the University of Hawaii. In 2015-2016 he was a visiting scholar at Brown University.

Luigi (Lou) Lucaccini has a PhD in engineering psychology from UCLA and an MBA from USF. He is an adjunct professor both in the entrepreneurship, innovation, strategy and international business department in the School of Management and in the engineering department in the College of Arts and Sciences. He was part of the curriculum development group that helped to plan for USF’s engineering program. Among other assignments, he has enjoyed teaching courses for new students in the first-year...

Although Professor Elizabeth Mickaily-Huber's degrees are in chemical engineering, her specialty is in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Over the years, besides using CFD to solve real-world problems, she has taught engineering, environmental science, and mathematics at the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (Switzerland), and CSU Los Angeles.

Dr. Julia Thompson has a passion for integrating the soul’s work into the engineering design process and technology. She is driven to help students, and people in general, look at technology as a pathway toward healing of earth and unjust social structure. Julia did her undergrad in chemical engineering at UC Berkeley and her PhD in engineering education at Purdue. Her research interests focus on how engineering design practices impact the relationships that engineering programs create with the...

Moses is a spring 2024 term instructor in the department of engineering. They are committed to adaptive and inclusive education, and their instructional practices are informed by five semesters of teaching and facilitating discussion sections and contributing to course content for hundreds of UC Berkeley undergraduates in linear algebra, circuits, and introductory machine learning concepts in the lower-division EECS16AB courses.