Please join us in welcoming seven new professors to the University of Washington Bothell this academic year.
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Dr. Solmaz Batebi, assistant teaching professor
Batebi comes to UW Bothell from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she received her doctorate in Finance.
Her teaching philosophy centers on creating a student-focused, dynamic learning environment that emphasizes practical application and real-world relevance. She brings a decade of experience from the Tehran Stock Exchange. She worked there in market surveillance, research and development, and investor education — experience that informs both her teaching and scholarship.
Batebi’s research applies machine learning and causal inference methods to investigate unresolved questions in behavioral finance and risk management. Her work also explores green finance, with a particular focus on the role of corporate social responsibility in mitigating risk during dividend reduction and omission announcements.
Dr. Kivalina Grove, assistant teaching professor
Grove comes to UW Bothell from the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Her teaching focuses on applied learning opportunities and mentorship. Partnering with business and government, she develops opportunities for her students to address meaningful and impactful problems that face consumers, businesses and society.
Her research seeks to address how consumers engage in, and return to, impactful practices with far-reaching consequences for themselves and their communities. Her current work is situated in the consumer culture theory literature and serves to uncover and elaborate practice recovery, a new theoretical process that speaks to how consumers return to previously abandoned practices under changed conditions.
Grove received her doctorate in Marketing from the University of Oregon.
SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS & SCIENCES
Dr. Nicole Cote, Assistant Professor
Cote comes to UW Bothell from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she received her doctorate in English.
She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers on media, science and technology studies, data and visual culture. Her current research examines historical and contemporary media, technology and cultural projects that shape how environmental hazards and concepts such as risk and time are perceived, engaged and made actionable by wider publics. She explores how these efforts impact what is deemed possible and how they have been and might be refigured, often drawing from history as a way to situate and complicate the present and imagined futures.
SCHOOL OF STEM
Dr. Murat Seçkin Ayhan, Assistant Professor
Ayhan was a senior research fellow with the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London prior to joining UW Bothell. He has also served as an assistant professor at Işık University in Istanbul and as a researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
He is focused on developing new instances of AI, studying their clinical relevance and facilitating the interaction between them and clinicians to improve health outcomes and well-being, with an eye on reliable automation and advanced human-AI collaboration in ophthalmology and beyond.
Ayhan received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. During his doctoral program, he studied machine learning for computerized diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Kaylea Champion, Assistant Professor
Champion is an interdisciplinary computer scientist, working at the intersection of human-computer interaction, empirical software engineering, cybersecurity, privacy and organizational communication. Her teaching and community engagement reflect a strong commitment to translating research findings into insights for everyday life.
Her research investigates how people cooperate to build and maintain public goods such as software and knowledge, including what gets neglected, who is excluded, and how we can measure and mitigate the risks we face.
Champion received her doctorate in Communication from the University of Washington with a dissertation focusing on software engineering practices. Her lab, the Community Data Science Collective, is a multi-institution collaboration of social computing scholars.
Dr. Mia Champion, Assistant Teaching Professor
For the past two years, Champion has taught for the School of STEM’s Department of Computing & Software Systems in the areas of software management, machine learning and AI, and cloud computing as an affiliate professor.
She has more than 20 years of experience in technology, health care and life sciences, specializing in genomics research, cloud computing architectures and advanced analytics. She has prior teaching and research experience at Arizona State University, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the Mayo Clinic. At Amazon Web Services, she served in leadership roles overseeing Health AI products and as a data scientist in the AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab.
Champion received her doctorate in Genomics/Bioinformatics from the University of California, Davis.
Dr. Zak Rubin, Assistant Teaching Professor
Rubin comes to UW Bothell from Renton Technical College in Renton, Washington, where they were the director of network engineering programs.
Their research interests include natural language processing, human-computer interaction, computer networks and accessibility. They were a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant with the UW that explored the role of data and data-driven decisions within technical education at community colleges. Outside of academia, they have nearly 20 years of experience in the games and entertainment industry. They have worked with major musicians, including Beyoncé and Gogol Bordello, and on video games such as World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo.
Rubin received their doctorate in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
