Meet Some of Our Volunteer Professors
Simona Aimar
Simona Aimar is Vice Dean EDI and Assistant Professor of philosophy at University College London. She works on ancient and contemporary theoretical philosophy, focusing especially on Aristotle, modality (notions such as necessity and possibility), and causation.
Gul Nosh Attai
Gul Nosh Attai is the founder of Speakease Online Academy, Vice President of Pashtun Zarghon Saffron Kar Women Ltd, Alumna of the Aspire Leaders Program in Kabul Afghanistan
Naomi Altman
Professor Altman is professor emerita of Statistics and Bioinformatics at The Pennsylvania State University. Her interest in statistics stems from her broad interests in the application of the mathematical sciences to problems in other disciplines in particular, medical and biological sciences, earth and environmental sciences, and social sciences. Her statistical interests include bioinformatics, high dimensional data, nonparametric smoothing, model selection and analysis of functional and longitudinal data. She is a member of the Huck Institutes of Life Sciences, specializing in bioinformatics and genomics.
Shabnam Akhtari
Shabnam Akhtari is a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. Her research is in Number Theory. She went to Sharif University of Technology in Tehran for her undergraduate studies, and earned her Ph.D. degree from University of British Columbia in Canada. She loves to share the joy of doing mathematics with anyone.
Ellen Anderson
Professor Anderson is Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut. She specializes in biochemistry and teaching chemistry to student in the medical field.
Kathryn Batchelor
Kathryn Batchelor is Professor of Translation Studies at UCL (University College London), UK. She teaches MA modules on translation theory, history, literature, and heritage, and also contributes to the BA and MA Comparative Literature programmes. Her main working languages are English, French and German. Kathryn is the author of Decolonizing Translation (2009) and Translation and Paratexts (2018), and has co-edited six volumes of essays, including Intimate Enemies: Translation in Francophone Contexts (2013), Translating Frantz Fanon Across Continents and Languages (2017), China-Africa Relations: Building Images through Cultural Cooperation, Media Representation and Communication (2017) and Translation Trouvailles (2023).
Elena Beretta
Elena Beretta is Clinical Professor of Mathematics at New York University - Abu Dhabi and editor of the journal Inverse Problems. Her research specialties include mathematical modelling, partial differential equations, inverse problems, machine learning, medical imaging, and seismology. She has conducted in research center and universities around the world and served as plenary speaker and numberous international conferences.
Elisa T. Bertuzzo
Elisa is an ethnographer, urban sociologist, and educationist with two decades of experience in South Asia, focusing on care, community economies, and decolonial epistemologies. Her work combines participatory mapping, filming, publishing, and exhibiting to explore everyday practices, self-organization, and innovation in marginalized urban neighborhoods. With graduate studies in Comparative Literature, Communication Studies, and Sociology, She earned a PhD in Urban Studies from TU Berlin, focusing on spatial production in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She held research and teaching roles at institutions including Free University Berlin, Humboldt University, TU Berlin, Singapore-ETH Centre, weißensee art academy berlin, and IIT Madras.
Colin Chamberlain
Colin Chamberlain is an associate professor of philosophy at University College London. He works on 17th and 18th century European philosophy, focusing specifically on René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Astell."
Captain (Retired) Cheng Xu
Captain (Retired) Cheng Xu is an Assistant Professor of Government specializing in qualitative research methods, international relations, comparative politics, conflict studies, and Southeast Asian politics. A graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto, his research focuses on insurgency, civil war, genocide, and mass political violence, particularly in Southeast Asia. Using the Philippines as a case study, he explores how civilian communities navigate and negotiate with armed groups.
Previously, Xu served as a research fellow and senior policy analyst with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, contributing to Canada's Feminist Foreign Policy. A veteran of the Canadian Army, he spent nearly a decade as an infantry officer and paratrooper, including an overseas deployment in 2014.
Angus Fake
Angus Fake, originally from Newcastle, studied Industrial Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, graduating during the pandemic. He returned to Maine to build a small home before transitioning to education. As a Public Allies Teaching Fellow at Eagle Rock School in Colorado, he taught art, design, and psychology. Back in Maine, he taught courses like World Geography, History of Hate, and Hollywood vs. History in Belfast. In 2023, he joined Lincoln Academy's social studies department, where he now teaches Economics, Government, and Psychology. In his free time, Angus enjoys Maine's outdoor activities.
Sarah Feili
Originally from Iran, Professor Feili is earning her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in the United States.
Gary Felder
Professor of Physics, Smith College, Massachusetts, US; BA in Physics from Oberlin College, PhD in Physics from Stanford University.
Professor Felder's research has mostly focused on the production of matter in the early universe, and more recently on the intersections of chaos theory and quantum mechanics. Professor Felder has also published two college-level textbooks: "Mathematical Methods in Engineering and Physics" and "Modern Physics," as well as a video course for "The Great Courses" entitled "The Big Bang and Beyond: Exploring the Early Universe."
Carmel Finnan
Professor Finnan is professor emerita at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She specializes in teaching communications, writing, and English as a Foreign Language. She is based in Berlin, Germany.
Elisa Francini
Associate Professor in Mathematical Analysis at the University of Florence, Italy. Professor Francini holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Florence and has previously worked as a researcher at the Italian National Research Council. Her research interests primarily focus on inverse problems for partial differential equations.
Erin Leigh Frymire
Erin Leigh Frymire is a lecturer at Trinity College and has been a faculty member since 2017. She holds a Ph.D. from Northeastern University and a B.A. from Skidmore College. Professor Frymire's research interests include rhetorics of the body, law, space, and human rights. She specializes in systemic violence and its impact on human bodies. Her teaching emphasizes critical thinking and rhetorical literacy, helping students develop effective communication skills. She fosters a student-centered classroom environment that respects diversity and encourages independent thinking and writing.
Emily Haynes
Emily Haynes has enjoyed inspiring students through teaching astronomy, chemistry and physics at the high school and University level throughout her career, most recently at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in Biophysics, has worked as an analytical chemist in the pharmaceutical industry and research in biotechnology. Prof. Haynes has also mentored students as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover and Phoenix lander programs. Her former students are now working
in aerospace, medicine and many other scientific careers.
Barbara Kaltenbacher
Professor Kaltenbacher teches Applied Analysis at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria and is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Mathematical Society. Her research concerns inverse problems, regularization, and PDE-constrained optimization. She earned her doctorate at Johannes Kepler University, Linz.
Ellen W. Kaplan
Professor Ellen W. Kaplan, Professor Emerita of Acting and Directing at Smith, is a Fulbright Scholar, actress, director, and playwright with international experience. She has taught and performed globally, including in Pakistan, China, Israel, Costa Rica, and Romania, and served as a guest professor at institutions such as Tel Aviv University, Hong Kong University, and the University of Kurdistan. During the pandemic, she taught virtually at Rojava University in Syria. She has also delivered guest lectures and workshops at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and the National Academy of Performing Arts in Pakistan.
Christoph König
Christoph König is a Doctoral Candidate and Researcher at Humboldt-Universität Berlin and teaches private and corporate law at the University of Erfurt. He undertook his undergraduate legal studies at Humboldt-Universität Berlin and the University of Zurich and is a former chairman of the Refugee Law Clinic Berlin and the Refugee Law Clinics Germany. He has a keen interest in legal theory, comparative law, legal history, and the law of civil liberties.
Anne Lavergne
Anne Lavergne is a Senior Lecturer with the School of Computing Science (CS) at Simon Fraser University (SFU), BC, Canada. She enjoys introducing aspiring CS students to the wonders of Computing Science and software development at SFU as well as at other institutions around the world: China, Uruguay, Malawi, amongst other places. When she is not teaching, Anne travels and enjoys trekking around the world.
Ina Malloy
Ina Malloy is a seasoned educator with 40 years of experience teaching art, specializing in photography and digital art for 25 of those years. She has taught over 2,500 students, many of whom have pursued careers in photography, design, or media. From 1998–2013, she led the Amity Teen Teaching Program, placing over 500 students in local elementary schools and facilitating the donation of 18,000 books to young learners. Passionate about mentorship, many of her former students have become educators and stay in touch. Ina splits her time between Connecticut and Maryland, enjoys golf, tennis, and cycling, and is a proud co-parent of six children and grandparent to nine.
Janet F Morrison
Professor Morrison has been a member of the Chemistry Department faculty at Trinity College since 1997, where she has taught both lecture and laboratory courses in Analytical Chemistry, Instrumental Methods of Chemical Analysis, Introduction to Forensic Science, and Introductory Chemistry. Her research is focused on the development and optimization of analytical methods for detecting trace analytes in biological specimens, including drugs in alternative biological specimens, biomarkers of Parkinson's Disease, and ethanol biomarkers. Professor Morrison holds degrees from The American University, Northeastern University, and Hartwick College.
Reut Paz
Professor Paz specializes in public international law, European Law, international relations, and international legal history. She holds degrees in law and political science from the University of Helsinki, Finland and a Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Currently she holds a senior research position at the law faculty of the Franz von Liszt Institut für Internationales Recht und Rechtsvergleichung at the Justus Liebig Universität Gießen, Germany. Dr. Paz is the author of A Gateway Between a Distant God & a Cruel World: The Contribution of Jewish German Scholars to International Law (2012) and of articles in several journals, including the European Journal of International Law and the German Law Journal, as well as in the Oxford Handbook of International Legal Theory.
Xavier Prudent
Xavier Prudent is an accomplished physicist and engineer with an engineering degree in Physics from Grenoble Engineering School, a master's in particle physics from Joseph Fourier University, and a PhD in experimental particle physics from Stanford University, where he contributed to the BaBar experiment. He pursued postdoctoral research at universities in Dresden and Bonn, focusing on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and later specialized in bio-statistics as a scientific guest at the Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology and Genetics. He is the Director of Technology at Civilia, a Canadian company improving public transportation infrastructure.
Sue Quinlan
Sue Wallington Quinlan, with a B.A. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from Yale, is a retired clinical psychologist who practiced in Connecticut for 50 years, specializing in child and adolescent diagnostic assessment and school consultations. Her teaching focuses on developmental psychology and fostering writing skills through critical thinking and idea exploration. Recently, she relocated to Cambridge, MA, embracing her own developmental transition.
Sarah Rajtmajer
Professor Rajtmajer is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology and research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. Her research integrates machine learning, AI and hybrid human-AI systems to understand how information encodes values like accuracy, objectivity, and privacy, and the trade-offs involved in managing healthy information ecosystems. Dr. Rajtmajer has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a BA in Mathematics from Columbia University.
Carolina Santos
Carolina is an M.D. who specializes in infectious diseases and graduated from Federal University Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. She holds a master's in Health Professional Education and a PhD in Child and Adolescent Health. Carolina's research areas include maternal and child health, infectious diseases, cultural competency, traditional communities in Brazil, and environmental health. She is the founder of "A Arte de Nascer," a nonprofit to improve the health and well-being of pregnant women and young children in an impoverished region of northeastern Brazil.
Dianna Taylor
Dianna Taylor is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. She is author of Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective (Routledge, 2020) editor of Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010), and co-editor of Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, Agency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and Feminism and the Final Foucault (University of Illinois, 2004). Her current research identifies and analyzes feminist resources for preventing and resisting sexual violence and the sexual humiliation it produces.
Temenuga Trifonova
Professor Temenuga Trifonova is an Associate Professor of Creative Arts and Humanities: Moving Image at UCL. She is a prolific author, with works including Precarity in Western European Cinema (2025), Screening the Art World (2022), The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema (2020), and Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (2014). Her research spans European cinema, visual culture, film theory, and the intersection of cinema with philosophy and psychopathology. She has also written two novels, Tourist (2018) and Rewrite (2014).
Persheng Vaziri
Professor Vaziri is Special Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Hofstra University in New York. She specializes in film history and world cinema. Her book Non-fiction in Iran: Filming Social Change is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press.