Please join us in welcoming a new cohort of faculty members this academic year. They bring expertise across a range of disciplines and will add different perspectives and experiences, which will help us expand opportunities for our students and community partners.
School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
Dr. Nagham Abouzeid
Assistant Professor
Abouzeid comes to UW Bothell from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she received her doctorate in Human Development and Family Science. She came to the United States from Lebanon as a Fulbright Scholar and has training spanning developmental psychology, family science and quantitative methods.
Abouzeid’s teaching centers on inclusive, engaging learning environments that connect psychological science to students’ lives and broader social issues. Her research examines how social and environmental contexts shape the well-being of children, adolescents and families, particularly among populations experiencing adversity. Her work focuses on risk and resilience, neighborhood and community contexts, juvenile delinquency and family processes, using longitudinal data and quantitative methods to identify factors that may support positive development and inform prevention and policy.
Dr. Mert Can Bayar
Assistant Teaching Professor
Bayar is a political scientist whose teaching focuses on data visualization, social media analysis and computational approaches to understanding political and social phenomena. His research sits at the intersection of comparative politics, political behavior and information science, with a particular focus on misinformation, conspiracy theories, political communication and democratic politics.
He received his doctorate in Political Science from Binghamton University in New York, where his dissertation examined the relationship between conspiracy theories and democratic erosion. Most recently, as a postdoctoral scholar at the UW’s Center for an Informed Public, he studied election rumors, misinformation and online political discourse, with a focus on how narratives about elections emerge and evolve in the U.S. context.
Dr. Regina Lisinker
Assistant Teaching Professor
Lisinker comes to UW Bothell from the University of Minnesota, where she received her doctorate in Educational Psychology. Her research in statistics and data science education focuses on how students communicate with and about data. Her dissertation work looks at the pedagogical practices, theory and curriculum in data visualization education.
Her teaching incorporates interactive cooperative learning. She prioritizes active learning in the classroom and is committed to building relationships with each new group of students. Lisinker highlights real-world contexts and the application of statistical methods, and is excited to bring this approach to teaching data visualization and data analytics to UW Bothell.
School of Nursing & Health Studies
Dr. Jesse Bia
Assistant Teaching Professor
Bia comes to UW Bothell from Bowdoin College, where he was a visiting assistant professor of Anthropology the past two years. Prior to Bowdoin, he taught for multiple years at numerous SUNY (State University of New York) colleges. Bia received his doctorate in Anthropology from University College London.
He is an applied medical anthropologist specializing in public health, emergent biotechnology and East Asian Studies. His long-term research focuses on the lived experiences of individuals with degenerative diseases in Japan — including extensive work with families and healthcare providers — as well as analyzing societal impacts of regenerative medicine and stem cell-based therapies. He also has a research project assessing healthcare access and infrastructure in coastal communities affected by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.
Dr. Janelle Martelino
Assistant Teaching Professor
Martelino is a nurse leader, educator and researcher whose work focuses on strengthening the health workforce through collaborative leadership, organizational climate and worker well-being.
She earned her doctorate in Nursing Science from the UW’s School of Nursing, where she studied population health through a socioecological lens, with particular attention to worker populations. Her dissertation examined public health and primary care leadership, workplace climate, and leader well-being. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience in health systems leadership and education, she integrates research and practice to inform her teaching and scholarship in systems leadership, interprofessional collaboration and workforce development.
School of STEM
Morteza Chini
Assistant Teaching Professor
Chini has been a lecturer in the School of STEM’s Department of Computing & Software Systems since 2016. He received his Master of Science in IT & Cybersecurity Management from Central Washington University.
His teaching style emphasizes building professional relationships with learners, fostering a collaborative and supportive environment grounded in cooperation, mentorship and active learning. He connects foundational computing concepts with practical, real-world applications to help students develop technical confidence and problem-solving skills.
Chini’s research began in data lifecycle management and mobile application development, with a focus on human-centered design. His current interests extend to agentic AI, exploring how these evolving AI capabilities can be thoughtfully integrated into software systems and human workflows, while maintaining a focus on usability, human-AI collaboration and responsible design.
Dr. Vishesh Khemani
Assistant Teaching Professor
Khemani comes to UW Bothell from Lake Washington Institute of Technology, where he was an adjunct professor of Computer Science. He received his doctorate in Theoretical Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As a student and postdoctoral scholar, Khemani researched computational physics, quantum field theory and particle physics. He transitioned into software engineering and worked on the frontiers of large-scale distributed systems at Amazon and Google for two decades. His portfolio includes AWS S3 and Google Maps, Cloud and Caching. He has now found his calling in teaching computer science. He draws on his industry experience to connect theory to practice and on his interdisciplinary experience to position computer science as a core competency. He blogs at medium.com.
Dr. Anita Li
Assistant Professor
Li graduated with a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. She then joined General Motors as a materials engineer, working on electric vehicle technologies. While at GM, she earned her doctorate in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, fully supported by the company.
In her current research, Li seeks ways to leverage ionic interactions within biological systems in the design and development of advanced biomedical implants and therapeutics, with an eye toward addressing unmet clinical needs and improving human health.
Dr. Zhengquan Li
Assistant Professor
Li’s research lies in systems and networking, with interests in edge and distributed computing. His work focuses on enabling computation across heterogeneous and resource-constrained environments, where devices differ in processing capability, energy and hardware architecture. He develops system optimizations that adapt workloads to available computing resources, including techniques for accelerating emerging AI applications. His broader goal is to make computing systems more responsive, reliable and privacy-preserving.
Li received his doctorate in Computer and Information Science from the University of Michigan-Dearborn, in a program administered by the UM’s Rackham Graduate School. His dissertation research explored how computation and storage can be moved closer to end users to enable more efficient and personalized computing experiences.
Dr. Yangqing Liu
Assistant Teaching Professor
Liu joins UW Bothell from Apple, where she worked as an electromagnetic compatibility design engineer in wireless hardware for the past four years.
Her research focuses on inverse electromagnetic scattering problems, which arise in engineering applications such as radar, nondestructive testing and medical imaging. Her interests include numerical methods and optimization algorithms, and their applications to solve electric field integral equations.
Liu received her doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Chicago. Her academic background in computational and applied electromagnetics was complemented by industry and research experience through internships at Tesla, Ansys and Argonne National Laboratory.
Dr. Rick McLaughlin
Assistant Professor
McLaughlin studies genome evolution and the interactions between mobile genetic elements and the immune system. His research focuses on transposable elements (DNA sequences that copy themselves within genomes) and the evolutionary conflicts that have shaped them and our cellular defenses.
He previously led a research group at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He received his doctorate from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
McLaughlin works to create opportunities for undergraduates to participate directly in scientific discovery. His teaching emphasizes active learning, scientific communication and helping students develop the confidence and skills to think and work as scientists, regardless of their prior experience.
Dr. Joanna Wang
Assistant Teaching Professor
For the past year, Wang has taught in the School of STEM’s Department of Computing & Software Systems as a lecturer, where she has taught Java and C++ programming, data structures and software engineering. Before joining UW Bothell, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine.
Her teaching emphasizes conceptual understanding, applied learning and real-world applications. Drawing on her interdisciplinary background in computer science and computational biology, she is interested in helping students apply computational methods to solve practical problems across disciplines.
Wang earned her doctorate in Marine Science from Duke University, where her dissertation examined how marine microbial communities respond to environmental change using computational and statistical modeling.
