29 OSU Faculty are Promoted to Professor
As Oregon's land grant university, Oregon State University is committed to educating, both on and off-campus, the citizens of Oregon, the nation, and the international community, and in expanding and applying knowledge. Candidates for promotion are evaluated objectively for evidence of distinction in their performance of assigned duties and in their scholarship or creative activity. The excellence of our faculty is paramount and we are very proud of the faculty recently promoted to the rank of professor.
Nicole Anderson Professor | Crop and Soil Science
Dr. Nicole Anderson is an Associate Professor and Extension Seed Production Specialist in the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University. She obtained her PhD in Crop Science from OSU specializing in grass seed research and prior to becoming a Specialist, spent 14 years as a county Extension field crops agent in the North Willamette Valley. Her state-wide Extension program address applied questions to improve cool-season grass and legume seed production. Her research is focused on limiting yield barriers and achieving improved crop efficiency. The majority of her projects are collaborative efforts involving farmers, seed companies, and crop advisors. Nicole holds the George R. Hyslop Professorship in Grass Seed Research and serves on the board of directors for the Crop Science Society of America and International Herbage Seed Group.
Nick Andrews joined the OSU Horticulture Department in 2005 as the Metro-Area Small Farms Extension instructor. In 2011 he was promoted to senior instructor and then converted to Associate Professor of Practice. In 2016 he took on some Organic Vegetable Extension responsibilities that become full time in 2020. His work includes organic vegetable production, cover crops, nutrient management and pest management. He co-developed the OSU Organic Fertilizer and Cover Crop Calculator and Croptime decision tools, has been lead or co-author of multiple Extension publications and peer-reviewed online workshops, and is a founding member of the new Western Cover Crops Council.
Luisa Santamaria is an Associate Professor – Extension Plant Pathologist, located at the North Willamette Research & Extension Center in Aurora. She received a BS in Biological Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University in Ecuador, a MS in Horticulture, and a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology, both at the University of Delaware. In her current position, Luisa has implemented a unique bilingual education program that supports the nursery industry and other agriculture commodities to promote the production of healthy plants, food safety, and good agricultural practices. She offers both on-site consulting and bilingual education aimed at preventing the introduction and spread of threatening plant diseases. Her applied research focuses on disease management in ornamental and nursery crops, especially those caused by soilborne pathogens. She has established collaborations across the country and is currently involved with a grant researching nationwide boxwood blight management. Luisa is a member of the Oregon Board of Agriculture, currently serving as the Chair of the Board in her second term.
Dr. Juranek is a marine biogeochemist with expertise in understanding changing patterns of nutrient and carbon cycling in the global oceans, with particular emphasis on high latitude environments. She is an active sea-going scientist who has participated in 11 field missions in the Arctic since 2011, including a survey to the North Pole in 2022. Her work contributes to an understanding of how Arctic ecosystems are responding to changing ice conditions as the Arctic warms. Dr. Juranek is also involved in efforts to understand changing ocean conditions in the coastal waters of Oregon, and is Co-Chair of the Oregon Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Coordinating Council.
Deborah Rubel is an associate professor of Counselor Education in the College of Education at Oregon State University. Her bachelor’s degree in food science is from Utah State University, and her Master's and Doctorate of Philosophy in Counseling are from Idaho State University. Her research and scholarship have largely focused on group work, group work supervision, and their cultural and social justice implications. Her main roles are as a qualitative methodologist and advisor for doctoral student research. She is the recent past chairperson of the Association for Counselor Educators and Supervisors Social Justice and Human Rights Committee and the incoming Associate Editor of the Journal for Specialists in Group Work.
Liney Árnadóttir Professor | Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Árnadóttir research combines experimental and computational approaches to study the mechanisms of chemical reactions on surfaces at the atomic scale with applications for new materials designs for renewable energy applications, catalysis, and corrosion prevention. Her research group welcomes a diverse group of researchers, at all stages in their careers, and frequently collaborates with colleagues cross different colleges at OSU and other universities, as well as with industry and national laboratories. Dr. Árnadóttir is active in conference organizations and on editorial boards. Dr. Árnadóttir teaches both core and elective courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels including ENGR+.
Meghna Babbar-Sebens Professor | Civil and Construction Engineering
Dr. Meghna Babbar-Sebens expertise lies in the field of Hydroinformatics. Her research advances innovation in human-computer collaboration, heuristic optimization, data assimilation, and Artificial Intelligence for adaptive and participatory planning and management of water systems. She and her students conduct interdisciplinary research aimed at creating digital solutions for sustainable management of water systems, including human-computer collaboration in design of water management alternatives, and improving design, monitoring, control, and modeling of nature-based solutions for regulation of flow and contaminants. She is co-director of the OSU-Benton County Green Stormwater Infrastructure Research Facility, and Chief Editor of ASCE’s Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.
Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez Professor | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez (he/him/él) is a professor of electrical and computer engineering. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Vermont. Dr. Cotilla-Sanchez has over 14 years of experience in power system protection and reliability, with a focus on energy access. He has led several federally funded projects, and his grid integration work spans from rural distributed energy resources to transmission level resilience. Cotilla-Sanchez is the Vice-Chair of the IEEE Cascading Failures Working Group and also serves as Associate School Head for Graduate Programs in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Karl Haapala Professor | Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering
Karl R. Haapala is an Associate Professor and Tom & Carmen West Faculty Scholar in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University, where he directs the Industrial Sustainability Lab. His research addresses sustainable manufacturing challenges, including life cycle engineering methods, manufacturing process performance modeling, and engineering education. His work has appeared in more than 100 peer-reviewed chapters, proceedings, and journal articles. He has participated in over $10M in research from the Army, DOE, NIST, NSF, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Oregon BEST, the Oregon Metals Initiative, and industry, including Boeing, Benchmade, Blount, Caterpillar, HP Inc., Master Chemical, PGE, and Sheldon Manufacturing. He serves as Assistant Director of OSU's DOE Industrial Assessment Center and leads northwestern activities of the CESMII Western Regional Manufacturing Center. He has served in volunteer leader positions within ASME (including 2020 MSEC Technical Program Co-chair) and SME (including 2020 Student Relations Committee Chair), and has been inducted into the honor societies of Pi Tau Sigma, Phi Kappa Phi, and Sigma Xi. He has been recognized by the NAE (2015 Frontiers of Engineering) and SME (2014 Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award and 2012 & 2015 Distinguished Faculty Advisor Awards) and received Best Paper Awards from ASME (2015 & 2016 DFMLC), CIRP (2012 LCE), and ISSS (2017). He received a Fulbright-Tampere University Faculty Scholar Award for the 2019-2020 academic year to conduct research and teaching at the intersection of smart and sustainable manufacturing as applied to additive manufacturing processes. He completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, as an NSF IGERT trainee (2004-2008), from Michigan Technological University.
Adam Higgins joined OSU as a faculty member in Bioengineering in 2008. His research focuses on technologies for cell, tissue and organ preservation, as well as high flow rate microfluidic devices for medical treatment, with a particular emphasis on blood processing. His work has been published in 38 peer reviewed journal articles, including an article that was highlighted on the cover of Biophysical Journal and an article that was selected as the 2018 best paper in the Cryobiology Journal. He has held various leadership positions, including serving as President of the Society for Cryobiology, and Director of the OSU Bioengineering Graduate Program.
Liang Huang (PhD, 2008, Univ. of Pennsylvania) is a professor of computer science who specializes in two seemingly distant fields, computational linguistics and computational biology, by treating biological sequences as “languages” just like English and Chinese. He adapts algorithms from natural language parsing to predict RNA structures and design drugs. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, he has shifted his focus to SARS-CoV-2 structural analysis and optimized mRNA vaccine design, leading to high-profile publications that help the fight against COVID. He received numerous recognitions, including ACL 2008 Best Paper Award and ACL 2019 Keynote.
Raviv Raich’s research is in the area of signal processing and machine learning focusing on modeling and optimization for algorithms in signal processing and machine learning. In Fall of 2007, he joined OSU as an Assistant Professor. He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and served as the chair of the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Dr. Raich is a recipient of the NSF Career Award. He has co-authored over 140 journal and conference papers and received four best paper awards.
Dr. Tucker earned her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Missouri – Rolla. She attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – Madison as a Naval Nuclear Propulsion Fellow, where she received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering with a minor in Materials Science in 2008. After graduation, Dr. Tucker spent five years as a Principal Scientist at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, NY studying the thermal stability of structural alloys for nuclear power systems. She joined the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University as an Assistant Professor in 2013 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. In 2019 she was also appointed as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Materials Science Program at Oregon State. Dr. Tucker has an active research group focused on degradation of materials in extreme environments and alloy development. Her research efforts leverage both modeling and experimental approaches to gain fundamental understanding of materials performance.
Dr. Haizhong Wang is an Associate Professor from School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University. Dr. Wang received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Applied Mathematics and Civil Engineering (Transportation), and B.S. and M.S. degrees from Hebei University of Technology and Beijing University of Technology, China. Dr. Wang’s research interests include (1) Human-centered Community and Disaster Resilience: use an Agent-based Modeling (ABM) framework to assess the impacts of heterogeneous decision-making behavior on life safety under unplanned infrastructure network disruptions; (2) Infrastructure Risk and Resilience: critical resilient interdependent lifeline and infrastructure networks: system resilience characteristics and dependency/interdependency modeling; (3) Traffic System and Mobility: heterogeneous traffic flow modeling and simulation: deterministic and stochastic fundamental diagram of traffic flow, hysteresis, and stochastic capacity analysis; and (4) Connected Automated Vehicle (CAV): mobility and safety analysis in a mixed traffic flow environment under varying levels of market penetrations. He conducts interdisciplinary research at the joint borders of civil engineering, social science, and natural hazards/disasters through an agent-based modeling and simulation framework. He works closely with real communities to co-produce research priorities and questions and uses physical drills, virtual reality experiments, and surveys to collect empirical data to validate the agent-based models and use data-driven methods to approach human mobility and infrastructure network resilience problems. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate level courses including: Intro to Transportation Engineering, Traffic Flow Theory, Agent-based Modeling and Simulation, and Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Dr. Leshchinsky is a Professor in the Department of Forest Engineering, Resources and Management in the College of Forestry. His research interests include landslides; use of soil reinforcement in earth retention, unpaved road improvement, slope stability and the mechanics of heavy equipment operating on soil. Ben’s research is based in a variety of disciplines, broadly encompassing geotechnical engineering, water resources, and forestry. He earned his PhD in Geotechnical Engineering from Columbia.
Peter Betjemann Professor | Writing, Literature, and Film
Peter Betjemann researches the relationship between literature, visual art, craft, and other forms of creative expression. His recent scholarship explores how painters in the nineteenth century used literary subjects to engage abolitionism and to ask pressing questions about colonialism, violence, and U.S. expansionism. Betjemann also writes about and (in his current administrative role developing the Reser Center for the Creative Arts) promotes the ways in which art and science co-create knowledge. Academically and administratively, his passion lies at the intersection of disciplines, practices, and forms of expertise
Patti Duncan Professor | Language, Culture, and Society
Patti Duncan is an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University, specializing in women of color feminisms, transnational feminist theories and movements, queer studies, and Asian Pacific American feminist writings. She is the editor-in-chief of Feminist Formations, a flagship journal in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Patti is also author of Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech, co-editor of Mothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices, co-editor of the four-volume reference collection, Women’s Lives Around the World, and co-editor of Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives, 2nd edition.
Sebastian Heiduschke Professor | Language, Culture, and Society
Sebastian Heiduschke teaches German language, culture, film, and translation in the School of Language, Culture and Society (College of Liberal Arts) and the School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering (College of Engineering). He has published and edited more than two dozen articles and books about (East) German Cinema, about animation, cartooning and visual culture, and about online language pedagogy, curriculum development and testing. He serves on the board of directors of the Oregon Cartoon Project and is the current editor-in-chief of the Oregon Zine Machine.
Hung-yok Ip is an Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion. She received her PhD from UC Davis with an emphasis on East Asian studies. For over 25 years, she has taught courses on world history, History of China and Japan, and East Asia. As an intellectual and cultural historian, she has studied a variety of topics, ranging from the Chinese Communism to modern Chinese democratic thought. In recent years, Ip has ventured into new areas, such as Buddhism and ancient China. Her most recent book is Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence.
Alison Johnston is a political economist, whose research lies at the intersection of comparative and international political economy. Her current work examines how market actors “price” politics and policy within sovereign risk assessment, how European countries’ domestic institutions have helped them adapt to deepened European (Union) integration, and how politics and institutions drive household debt accumulation and housing prices in developed economies. Her forthcoming book Rating Politics (with Oxford University Press) demonstrates that credit rating agencies incorporate anti-left and anti-entitlements biases into sovereign credit ratings. In Winter, 2022, she was invited to be a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. She is the lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy, and is the co-chair of the European Integration and Global Political Economy research network at the Council of European Studies.
Todd Pugatch is an Associate Professor of Economics at Oregon State University. His research focuses on understanding the drivers of disparate outcomes in education and rigorously evaluating approaches to improve them. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan. He has conducted experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations of teacher salary increases, elimination of school fees, and the expansion of early childhood education in The Gambia; entrepreneurship education for secondary school students in Rwanda; and interventions designed to increase diversity and promote student success in US higher education. His work has been published in Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Human Resources, World Bank Economic Review, Economics of Education Review, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and elsewhere.
Gaurav Sahay Professor | Pharmaceutical Sciences
Gaurav Sahay is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Director for the Center for Innovative Drug Delivery and Imaging at College of Pharmacy at Oregon State University. Dr. Sahay’s lab is developing lipid-based nanoparticles for effective delivery of messenger RNA for treatment of cystic fibrosis, retinal degeneration and against SARS-CoV2. He has over 60-peer-reviewed publications in journals including Science Advances, Nature Communications, Nature Biotechnology etc. He is the winner of many awards including 2020 OSU Emerging Scholar Award and his lab is funded through NIH, foundations and biotech firms and serves on NIH standing study section (NANO).
Dr. Aleksandra E. Sikora is a microbiologist with experience in bacterial pathogenesis, proteomics, vaccine design and identification of antibiotics. Her current research focuses on development of gonorrhea vaccines, understanding mechanisms of bacteria-host interactions and membrane biogenesis. Dr. Sikora serves as the Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Pharmacy. She has nearly fifty publications, several patents, and was recognized with prestigious awards including the Phi Kappa Phi Emerging Scholar Award, the OSU Faculty Senate Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Leadership, and the OHSU Women in Academic Health and Medicine Discovery Award for Women in Science.
Samuel Johnson Professor, Clinical | Biological and Population Health Sciences
Dr. Johnson began working at Oregon State University in 2003 as a graduate teaching assistant. He has served as an athletic trainer in the Department of Athletics at the University of Portland, a lecturer and assistant program director of undergraduate and graduate athletic training education programs at San Jose State University, and an assistant athletic trainer in the Department of Athletics at Stanford University. Dr. Johnson earned a master’s degree in Kinesiology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a PhD in Exercise and Sport Science at Oregon State University.
Dr. Kincl received her MS in Industrial Hygiene and PhD in Occupational Safety and Ergonomics from the University of Cincinnati. Before joining OSU in 2011, Dr. Kincl was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona, Spain from 2009-2011, and a Research Associate at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon from 2003-2009. Dr. Kincl’s research focuses on quantifying, communicating, and controlling occupational and environmental exposure to health and safety hazards. She has a particular interest in reducing adverse health outcomes with targeted interventions.
Dr. Norcross completed his doctoral training in Human Movement Science with a concentration in biomechanics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences in 2011. Dr. Norcross’ laboratory-based research focuses on identifying factors linked to physical activity-related lower extremity injuries such as ACL injuries. He also engages in complementary, community-based research projects that seek to improve sports injury surveillance and the translation of evidence-based best practices to impact population-level health. When not working, he enjoys exploring Oregon with his wife, Emily, and their two children.
Mary Beisiegel Professor | Mathematics
Mary Beisiegel is a mathematics education researcher in the Department of Mathematics. Her research is focused on understanding qualities of mathematics teaching that meaningfully engage learners in mathematics, with a specific focus on equitable and inclusive teaching practices. Through the study of mathematics teaching and the practices that are best for a diversity of learners, Beisiegel is informing professional development programs for both mathematics graduate teaching assistants as well as STEM faculty. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Inclusive Excellence program. She has been honored with teaching awards locally at OSU and nationally through the Mathematical Association of America.
Elise Lockwood is Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department at OSU. She is currently serving as a rotating program officer in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the NSF. She received her PhD from Portland State University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research focuses on undergraduate students’ reasoning about combinatorics. She was awarded the 2018 John and Annie Selden Award and the 2019 Promising Scholar Award at OSU. She was a 2019 Fulbright Scholar to Oslo, Norway, where she worked at the Center for Computing in Science Education at the University of Oslo.
Clayton Petsche is a mathematician specializing in number theory and dynamical systems. Having advised three PhD students (with three more in progress), Dr. Petsche has also advised seven master's students as well as nine undergraduate research students. After attending Virginia Tech and the University of Texas, Dr. Petsche held postdoctoral positions at the University of Georgia and the City University of New York, before joining Oregon State University in 2011. Dr. Petsche's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.