New Faculty 2024
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Cori K. Cahoon
Assistant Professor
Cori K. Cahoon joins CSU from the University of Oregon. Cahoon specializes in fertility studies, specifically how environmental factors such as temperature and genetics influence egg and sperm development. Her current research uses worms and zebrafish to understand why sperm is less heat tolerant than eggs, an issue that may arise as a result of climate change.
Marcelo C. R. Melo
Assistant Professor
Marcelo C.R. Melo joins CSU from Auburn University, where he completed his postdoctoral fellowship. Melo’s research focuses on understanding the behavior of cells by exploring their components, how they interact to regulate a cell’s physiology, and how it reacts to its environment. His research group aims to further our understanding of biological systems by combining High-Performance-Computing (HPC) and Machine Learning (AI/ML) to create computational models of bimolecular complexes and systems in multiple scales.
Department of Biology
Jennifer Ackerfield
Director of the Charles Maurer Herbarium, Assistant Professor
Jennifer Ackerfield, a three-time CSU alumna, joins the university from Denver Botanic Gardens where she was the head curator of natural history collections and the associate director of biodiversity research. Ackerfield has 30 years of experience curating herbarium specimens and studying the plant diversity of the Southern Rocky Mountains. She is passionate about connecting people with plants and authored the book Flora of Colorado, giving people the tools to identify plants with ease and confidence.
Devin O’Connor
Assistant Professor
Devin O’Connor returns to academia after spending time working in industry. O’Connor’s research interests lie in plant genetics, specifically using CRISPR technology to improve plant and crop resilience in the face of climate change. His latest project involved understanding how to edit plant genes that control stem cells to increase crop yield.
Michael Shavlik
Assistant Professor
Michael Shavlik joins CSU from the University of Oregon, where he earned his Ph.D. He is a passionate educator with a background in teaching protein evolution, plant biology and function, and Python programming. Shavlik integrates context into his teaching, helping students grasp the significance of the material and its broader relevance to the world around them. He hopes to create an undergraduate research course focused on protein evolution, where students can explore principles and experiment with evolving their own proteins.
Department of Chemistry
Romana Jarosova
Assistant Professor
Romana Jarosova joins CSU from the University of Kansas. Her expertise lies in electrochemistry, materials science, neuroscience, and behavioral science. She has a strong interest in neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease and related cognitive decline. Through modern bioanalytical methods, she aims to explore how zebrafish can serve as a valuable animal model for dementia, leveraging them as a platform to improve the quality of life for individuals affected by this devastating condition.
Department of Computer Science
Ravi Mangal
Assistant Professor
Ravi Mangal joins CSU from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, formal methods, and program verification. His most recent research has involved improving the local robustness of neural networks as part of the DARPA Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception (GARD) program, analyzing the internal representations learned by neural networks, and developing methods for formal safety analysis of learning-enabled autonomous systems.
Fabio De Abreu Santos
Assistant Professor
Fabio De Abreu Santos has over 20 years of industry experience, including working in the Brazilian Navy, where he started as a software engineer and worked his way up to Captain and CIO. His research is at the intersection of software engineering, human aspects of computing, and artificial intelligence. Santos creates tools to recommend tasks in software projects, optimizing the user’s time and reducing costs and solution time.
Bianca Trinkenreich
Assistant Professor
Bianca Trinkenreich comes to CSU from Oregon State University. Trinkenreich’s research interests include software engineering, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work, focusing on developer experience and productivity, technostress, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Her most recent research explores women’s participation in the development of open-source software, and what factors influence women to join, remain, or disengage from these projects.
Department of Physics
William Jay
Assistant Professor
Willam Jay joins CSU from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in the Center for Theoretical Physics as a postdoctoral research associate. His research focuses on theoretical particle physics, approached from a computational perspective. He uses supercomputers to calculate theoretical predictions, for example, answering fundamental questions about nature’s most elusive particles, neutrinos. Jay’s research uses tools from data science to blend new ideas from physics, computer science, mathematics, and statistics to make new discoveries.
Sarah Stephens
Assistant Professor
Sarah Stephens comes to CSU from Metropolitan State University of Denver. She has also taught introductory physics courses at the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Stephens believes that introductory-level physics courses are fascinating, useful, challenging, and manageable. Her goal is to engage students through interactive and hands-on learning so that students come out of the class with a bigger appreciation for the physics phenomena they encounter in their everyday lives.
Department of Psychology
Vanessa Loaiza
Assistant Professor
Vanessa M. Loaiza, a CSU alumna, joins from the University of Sheffield (UK). Loaiza’s primary research interest involves human memory across the adult lifespan. She is especially interested in how working memory is developed, how we retrieve information from our long-term memory, and how factors – such as attention, prior knowledge, and age – impact memory.