Faculty and Staff

Introducing SFU’s newest faculty members

September 16, 2024

First-year students aren’t the only new faces on Simon Fraser University campuses this month.

The start of the fall semester also gives us the chance to welcome a diverse field of faculty who have come to SFU to share their knowledge, excellence and experience in classrooms and research labs.

Help us recognize the new faculty who have just joined the ranks alongside our incredible teachers making a difference though innovative and impactful work.

Faculty of Applied Sciences

Linyi Li
Assistant professor
Computing Science 


Li’s research is at the intersection of machine learning, security and software engineering. Focus on building certifiably trustworthy deep learning systems, achieving certifiable robustness against noise perturbations.

Ignacio Galiano Zurbriggen
Assistant Professor
Sustainable Energy Engineering
 

Zurbriggen’s research focuses on developing sustainable power conversion systems and he aims to improve its efficiency, reliability, and power density while maintaining low implementation requirements.

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Adrian Ivakhiv
Professor
Global Humanities

Ivakhiv’s work is focused at the intersections of environmental philosophy, cultural theory, and visual studies. His books include Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (2001)Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013), and Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (2018). He was recently a Fulbright Scholar and Cinepoetics Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.

Amy Conroy
Lecturer
Criminology

 

Conroy has a broad range of teaching interests, including human rights law and social justice issues that include the criminalization of sex work, reproductive rights, privacy, intimate partner violence, and more. Prior to joining SFU, Amy worked in the healthcare sector as a researcher and privacy specialist and has consulted for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on various privacy-related matters.

Anas Atakora
Lecturer
French

Atakora holds a PhD in French studies and African francophone literatures from Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS. Author of 7 books and numerous collaborations, his research focuses on theories of fantasy, image, postcolonial and extreme contemporary in African literatures written or translated into French. Atakora is a 2015 University of Iowa Honorary Fellow for International Writing Program.

Cynthia Xie
Senior Lecturer
World Languages and Literatures

Xie's research focuses on Chinese language pedagogy and learning dispositions rooted in the Confucian learning tradition. She completed her MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and her PhD in Education at SFU. Since 2005, Xie has been responsible for the Chinese language training in the SFU-ZJU (Zhejiang University) Dual Degree Program in Computing Science. In addition to language instruction, her work encompasses curriculum design, course development, assessment, and coordination with the partner university.

 

Jaskwaan A. Bedard
Instructor
Linguistics - Indigenous Languages Program

Bedard is a Haida language educator and advocate from G̱aw Tlagée – Massett, Haida Gwaii. Her PhD is in Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies spanning Education, Linguistics, and Indigenous Studies. Bedard's research looks to strengthen Indigenous languages, and her dissertation is titled “X̱aad Kíhlga Tl’a Guusuugiigang: A Haida Research Framework Applied to X̱aad Kil Immersion” and aims to provide a pathway for specialized Massett Haida language immersion guided by Haida community, laws, and values. Bedard is a translator of X̱aad Kíl and teaches the Haida language as well as Indigenous languages and histories.

Kamala Todd
Practitioner Associate Professor
Urban Studies

Todd is a Métis-Cree mother, community planner, filmmaker, curator, and educator born and raised in the unceded lands now known as Vancouver. She has a Master’s degree in urban Geography from UBC. Todd was the City of Vancouver’s first Indigenous Arts and Culture Planner and first Aboriginal Social Planner. She was part of the team who created the Vancouver UNDRIP Strategy and works as an advisor on Indigenous relations. She is Director of Indigenous City Media, and her film and TV credits include Indigenous Plant Diva, Cedar and Bamboo, and Coyote Science.

Maral Augilera-Moradipour
Assistant Professor
World Languages and Literatures
Global Asia

Aguilera-Moradipour is an assistant professor in Asian refugee literatures and cultures. After completing her PhD at the University of Western Ontario in English Language and Literature and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in Media Studies, she joined Simon Fraser University in the Department of World Languages and Literatures and the Global Asia Program. She has published in literary and academic journals such as English Studies in Canada (ESC) and Postcolonial Text and is a member of the interdisciplinary Critical Refugee and Migration Studies network of Canada.

Marie Ouellet
Assistant Professor
Criminology

Ouellet's research uses network science to explore how relationships and interactions shape offending patterns, criminal mobility, and group evolution. She is currently leading a longitudinal study on police networks that aims to understand how officers form social relationships, and the impact of these networks on police behavior, particularly in relation to misconduct and weapon use. Her work on these topics has received more than one million dollars in support from the National Science Foundation's Early CAREER Award, the National Collaborative of Gun Violence Research, and the US Department of Homeland Security.

Qiu Lin
Assistant Professor
Philosophy

Lin completed her PhD at Duke under the advising of Katherine Brading in July 2022. Lin's main research areas are early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and Chinese philosophy, especially Chinese Islamic philosophy (yes it exists, and richly so!). Lin's work has received awards from the Philosophy of Science Association Women’s Caucus (now renamed as the DEI Caucus), the British Society for the History of Philosophy, and the Metaphysical Society of America; additionally, she has also won two sub-grants from major John Templeton projects (see “Awards” section on her CV).
 

Sev Hou
Assistant Professor
Economics

Hou obtained his PhD from the Vancouver School of Economics, UBC, in July, 2021. He is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, SFU. Before joining SFU, Lin was an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

Lin's research interest is in Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, and Macro-Development, with specific focus on expectation formation, learning, and information acquisition. He also has a special interest in utilizing Deep Learning tools to solve economic problems.

 

Zara Anwarzai
Assistant Professor
Philosophy

Anwarzai received her PhD from Indiana University in Philosophy and in Cognitive Science in 2024. Her current work focuses on the social dimension of skill and expertise. Specifically, Anwarzai is interested in how to apply traditional inquiry into the cognitive and epistemological mechanisms involved in skill (which mainly focuses on individual skilled performers) to skills acquired and expressed by pairs or groups, like team sports or ensemble performances.

Amanda Watson
Assistant Professor
Sociology and Anthropology

Watson's research interests include care, labour, social reproduction, disability, climate crisis, media representation of maternal labour and identity, and feminist pedagogy. She teaches on politics of family, global problems and the culture of capitalism, and power and conflict in Canadian society. Watson is an Associate Member of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She serves on the editorial board of Gender & Society.

Amy Krauss
Assistant Professor
Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Krauss earned a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2017. Before joining the faculty at SFU, she held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Cruz where she taught courses on critical histories of global health and humanitarianism, illness and embodiment, and feminist theories of justice and care.

Andrea Krüsi
Assistant Professor
Criminology

Krüsi leads a research program at the intersection of criminal law, policing, and public health. Her research focuses on how criminal laws, policing and stigma interact with structural vulnerabilities to shape experiences of gender-based violence, HIV/STI risks, and access to healthcare in criminalized and marginalized populations.
 

Janice Jeong
Assistant Professor
History

Jeong’s research has focused on diasporic and diplomatic networks forged by Chinese Muslim (Hui) actors between the western coasts of Saudi Arabia, mainland China (including Shanghai, Beijing, and Gansu/Qinghai regions), and Taiwan over the twentieth century. Her broad interests include history and anthropology, Muslim societies and their transnational entanglements, and inter-Asian connections. Her works have appeared in journals such as History and Anthropology and Modern Asian Studies. Before joining Simon Fraser University, she earned her PhD degree in History at Duke University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

Jeanne Essame
Assistant Professor
History

Essame was born and raised in Tours, France. She went to the University of Tours for her undergraduate and graduate studies. Before heading to Madison, WI for a MA in Afro-American studies and a PhD in History, Essame taught French as a second language at the University of Pittsburgh and at CU Boulder, worked in banking, and worked at a middle-school in southern France. In Madison, she grew interested in topics related to the Caribbean, black activism, the Black diaspora, and visual culture. Between 2019 and 2023, Essame held positions in American History at Bates college and Africana Studies at WPI.
 

Kevin Laughren
Lecturer
Economics

Laughren returns to SFU from Queen's University, where he spent the last three years as a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow. At Queen's, he developed new courses in principles of economics for business students, and machine learning for MSc students. Laughren received a PhD in economics from SFU in 2021 under the supervision of David Freeman (with whom he recently published a paper on procrastination in Experimental Economics) and the late Jasmina Arifovic (who inspired him to learn, and subsequently teach, machine learning).
 

Margaret Hall
Professor - BC Notaries Chair in Applied Legal Studies
Criminology

Hall BA, LLB, LLM, PhD is a professor in the School of Criminology, and holder of the Society of Notaries Public of British Columbia Endowed Professorship in Applied Legal Studies. Hall’s research brings together doctrinal analysis with qualitative research methods. Her areas of research interest include: tort law; health law; vulnerability theory; mental capacity; law and aging; and medical assistance in dying. Prior to joining SFU, Hall was an Associate Professor in the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law (where she was a founding faculty member) and, prior to that, worked in law reform.
 

Peter Leavitt
Lecturer
Psychology

Since completing his PhD at the University of Arizona in 2016, Leavitt has held teaching positions at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. Leavitt's teaching and research interests include a range of topics in social and cultural psychology, such as the psychology of social class and socioeconomic inequality, intergroup relations, and connecting across differences. His work is motived by a fascination with all the subtle but fundamental ways in which human psychology is shaped by the places and groups we are part of.

 

rupak shrestha
Assistant Professor
International Studies
Global Asia

rupak is a political geographer primarily interested in questions of sovereignty, territory, indigeneity, borders, and placemaking in South Asia and in diasporic spaces globally. His research is centered around the question: How is sovereignty realized in the everyday? His ongoing research is situated among Himalayan Indigenous peoples and Tibetan refugees, who share memories of kinship and intimate partnerships that shape the communal pasts and futures of these two groups. rupak completed a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder. He has previously taught at Eckerd College and Macalester College.

Victor Aguiar
Associate Professor
Economics

Aguiar earned his PhD in Economics from Brown University and began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario (UWO). His research, blending Microeconomic Theory and Econometrics with computational methods, earned him tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, Grimes Fellow, and Professor of the Year at the graduate level at UWO. In 2024, he joined SFU Economics, where he continues exploring decision-making models that account for stochastic human behavior and measurement imperfections. Aguiar has published extensively in top academic journals and taught courses in decision theory, microeconomics, and computational economics.

Robert Bandringa
Assistant Professor of Professional Practice
Indigenous Studies
 

Beedie School of Business

Gherardo Caracciolo
Lecturer
Finance 

Gherardo Caracciolo holds a PhD in Economics from University College London. Prior to joining SFU Beedie as a lecturer in finance he served as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Birmingham in the UK, and as a senior policy analyst at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto, where he was part of the Financial Regulatory Excellence Initiative.

Robert Langan 
Assistant Professor
Management and Organization Studies 

Prior to arriving at SFU Beedie, Robert Langan worked as a vice-president in the corporate governance team at Credit Suisse Group in Zurich. He has an MBA from EDHEC Business School, a Masters in Research and a PhD in Business Studies from IE Business School.

Negar Ganjouhaghighi
Lecturer
Technology, and Operations Management

Negar Ganjouhaghighi holds a BSc from University of Tehran and an MS in Project Management from Sharif University of Technology. She earned her MSc in Economics and Finance from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville before completing a PhD in Operations Management at University of Calgary in 2024. Ganjouhaghighi was previously a term lecturer at SFU Beedie, teaching courses in business statistics, data analytics and data visualization, and operations management.
 

Meysam Fereidouni
Assistant Professor
Management Information Systems 

Fereidouni’s research broadly spans IT regulation, with interests in digital piracy and the economics of digital platforms through analytical modeling. He is also interested in IT productivity using econometric methods.




Yifan Wei
Assistant Professor
Strategy 





Yifan Wei earned a PhD from Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include corporate political, innovation, and sustainability strategy, with a particular focus on the institutional environment.

Andrew Harries
Tom Foord Associate Professor of Practice in Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Andrew Harries is a familiar face to SFU Beedie where he blends the latest in entrepreneurial theory and practice in his courses on innovation and entrepreneurship, resourcing new ventures and product and brand management. Harries has a wealth of experience in business and board leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship that he brings to this continuing role. He holds three U.S. patents and an MBA from SFU. Harries is a former recipient of EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year award and in 2023 was inducted into the BC Innovators Hall of Fame.

Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology

Justine Chambers 
Assistant Professor
Geography 

Justine A. Chambers is an artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances ‘that are already there’ – the social choreographies present in the everyday. 

Erique Zhang
Assistant Professor
 
Communications

Erique Zhang’s (they/she) research examines how images of trans women and femmes of color circulate in the fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries and what these images communicate about race, gender, and trans identity. Their first monograph, in progress, proposes a trans femme of color critique of media that understands trans womanhood as imbricated with social processes of racialization and colonization.

 

Faculty of Education

Emily Cameron
Assistant Professor
Educational Psychology

Cameron is a registered psychologist whose research focuses on child socioemotional development from a biopsychosocial and transgenerational approach. Emily’s research and advocacy efforts are directly informed by her role as a parent and her experience working as a clinician in multiple settings, including with rural Manitoban families. She is inspired to create scalable prevention and intervention programs to promote well-being for all families.

 

Daniel Chang
Lecturer
Online Hub

Chang is a term teaching faculty in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Chang's scholarly expertise brings self-regulated learning, argumentation, teaching multilingual students, and instructional design and technology together. Drawing on his 8 years of teaching experience in higher education, Daniel is interested in developing various online learning technologies to enhance post-secondary students' learning and writing.

Greg Sutherland
Lecturer
Indigenous Education and Pedagogies

Sutherland is a Métis scholar and Term Lecturer with the Faculty of Education at SFU. Over the past 10 years, he has worked in Undergraduate and Professional Programs, while continuing his nearly 20-year career as a K-12 classroom teacher. As a Faculty Associate, PLC Instructor, and Faculty Member in the IPTEM module of PDP, he has been supporting student teachers with learning, unlearning, and re-envisioning ways that education can be done differently. He supports practicing classroom teachers in this work by providing a variety of provincial, district, and school-based professional development opportunities.
 

Cary Campbell
Lecturer
Online Hub

Campbell is an educational theorist and researcher, music educator and community organizer. Cary completed his SSHRC funded PhD in Arts Education at SFU in 2020. He has worked as a music educator in community arts and conservatory settings for over a decade, also holding a Bachelor’s of Music (2013) and active as a performing/recording musician. In the Faculty, Cary teaches courses in reflective practices, education and curriculum theory as well as music education across both in-person and online modalities.

Sharon Hou
Assistant Professor
Education Psychology

Hou (she/her) is a Registered Psychologist and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary. Dr. Hou's research and clinical interests are in advancing diversity and equity in children's health and wellness. Dr. Hou values co-creating with people that bring lived and living experiences personalized interventions that can best reach and serve underrepresented and underserved populations of children and families.

Zuzana Vasko
Lecturer
Online Hub

Vasko is a Term Lecturer with the Faculty of Education. In the past three years she has contributed to establishing the Faculty's Online Learning Hub within Undergraduate Programs, developing expertise in online learning, pedagogy, and design. Her interdisciplinary scholarship inquires into the areas of arts-based ecological learning, place-based relationships, classroom/course dialogical practice, community building in online contexts, relational ethics, and personal and narrative inquiry. Her current research explores ontological curricular questions in a time of ecological precarity, and how classroom/course community-building may extend to the more-than-human.

Faculty of Environment

Leigh Joseph
Assistant Professor
Geography 

Squamish Nation ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph joins SFU as an assistant professor in Indigenous geographies. Joseph studies cultural interrelationships between people, plants & place to advance traditional knowledge renewal. Specifically, Joseph studies the role plants can play in reclaiming conceptualizations of health and wellness to address needs and priorities identified by communities.

Kyle Wilson
Assistant Professor
School of Resource and Environmental Management 

Wilson joins SFU’s School of Resource and Environmental Management as an assistant professor in quantitative fisheries science. His research works to advance understandings of risk and resilience in marine, coastal and freshwater fisheries to inform management and collaborative decision-making. Wilson is focused on understanding the direct and indirect drivers of risk to fish and fisheries, like overfishing and climate change, and how these risks shape how fisheries may respond to future ecosystem changes.

Cara Tremain
Assistant Professor
Archaeology 

Tremain is as an assistant professor in museum practice. Her research explores antiquities and heritage, looting, museum crime and fakes and forgeries to advance our understanding of how artifacts make their way into museums and the impact of these activities.


 

Faculty of Science

Kevin Lunnie
Lecturer
Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology

Lunnie is thrilled to join the BPK department permanently, as a lecturer, after ten years as a sessional instructor and term lecturer. He brings 20 years of clinical expertise as a doctor of chiropractic, working with allied health professionals as part of therapy teams for amateur and professional sports. Many of Kevin’s course lessons relate to case studies managing athlete’s injuries, bringing real-world relevance to the material his students learn. 

 

Gustavo Balbinot
Assistant Professor
Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology 

Balbinot’s research program explores neurorehabilitation strategies, with the goal of discovering new routes for treatment or optimizing existing technologies to help individuals recover from strokes and spinal cord injuries. He leads the Movement Neurorehabilitation and Neurorepair laboratory specialized in experimental investigations using rodent models.

Vijay Singh 
Lecturer
Mathematics

Singh earned his PhD in algebraic geometry from University College Dublin in 2011. He pursued postdoctoral research at SFU, UBC, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). Since 2011 he has held several limited-term teaching positions at SFU. He is passionate about engaging with diverse audiences in mathematical discussions and is actively involved in outreach initiatives. His interests include exploring zero-knowledge proofs.

Alex Wiesman 
Assistant Professor
Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology

Wiesman’s research uses neuroimaging to study the structural, functional, and molecular organization of the human brain during healthy and pathological aging. His recent work has focused on how different neurochemical messengers like dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine impact brain signaling in patients with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, with the goal of developing better prognostic markers and targets for clinical intervention. He is also the Scientific Director of SFU’s human brain imaging Core Facility: ImageTech Lab.

Justin Chan  
Lecturer
Mathematics

Chan completed a PhD in combinatorics at SFU in 2016 and has held a number of TA and term teaching positions in mathematics. Courses taught include MATH 100 (Precalculus), MATH 150 (Calculus I), MATH 232 (Linear Algebra) and MATH 251 (Calculus III). Current interests include development of mathematics courses and opportunities for outreach activities such as SFU Math Camps.

*There are no new faculty appointments this fall from Faculty of Health Sciences

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