Jason Munshi-South, PhD, joins the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science as a professor and Betz Endowed Chair of Ecology. He was previously an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Fordham University. Munshi-South received his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Current students may have met Munshi-South when he presented the BEES Research Day lecture last spring, where he discussed his research focused on understanding the evolutionary implications of urbanization for wildlife such as mouse and rat populations in the New York City metropolitan area.
Usha Sankar, PhD, joins the Department of Biology as an associate teaching professor. She holds a PhD in cell and molecular biology from Weil-Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. Sankar previously taught human physiology at Fordham University, where she was also a co-founder of Project FRESH Air, a citizen science research project into air quality in the Bronx.
Sankar’s two focuses are researching how students learn and teaching about the correlation between air quality and health outcomes. She plans to continue to teach, do research, and mentor students on air quality and health outcomes while at Drexel, and she recently joined the Philadelphia Regional Center for Children’s Environmental Health.
Alexandra Brumberg, PhD, joins the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor. Brumberg earned her PhD at Northwestern University, where she used ultrafast optical spectroscopy to understand the photophysics of two-dimensional semiconductor nanoparticles. She then completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara, where she developed her knowledge of materials synthesis and processing.
Brumberg’s research at Drexel will focus on unifying structural changes in materials (like those that occur during crystallization, self-assembly, and phase transitions) with their electronic dynamics and optoelectronic properties through in situ methods and ultrafast characterization techniques.
Nakho Kim, PhD, joins the Department of Communication. He earned his PhD in mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and previously taught at Penn State Harrisburg. Kim’s teaching and research focuses on media phenomena, including news ecologies and social impacts and online culture.
Molly Malone joins the Department of Communication as an instructor. She holds an MA from Temple University and has nearly 15 years in the communications industry, working across the corporate communications world with significant professional expertise in strategic and digital communications, public relations, internal and executive communications, and social media. Malone studies the evolution of strategic communications in the digital age — including the impact of generative AI on the field — among other topics like content creation, influencers and influencer marketing.
Ania Feliksik, PhD, joins the Drexel University English Language Center as an assistant teaching professor. She has 25 years of experience of teaching English as a second and foreign language in a variety of classroom settings, from small language schools and programs in Poland and Japan to university preparation classes at Harvard University, Harcum College and the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Jagiellonian University and is interested in incorporating literature into English language teaching.
Welcome all new faculty members to the Drexel community!