New Faculty Hire Conversations Series 2024

Yu-Hua Yeh is an assistant professor of psychology at Illinois College, a private liberal arts college of approximately 1,000 undergraduate students. He currently serves as director of the neuroscience program at Illinois College and is a member of the Society for Neuroscience. His research interests focus on human decision-making and identifying behavioral therapeutics for addiction interventions.

Before transitioning to a faculty position, he works as a postdoctoral associate in Warren Bickel's lab at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech.

Katherine Corn is an incoming assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the Conner Museum of Vertebrates at Washington State University.

Corn is a functional morphologist, macroevoluntionary biologist, and fish enthusiast. She was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech with Josef Uyeda from 2022 to 2024.

Before her position at Virginia Tech, Corn completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis and was a researcher at Cornell University and Friday Harbor Marine Labs. Her work explores how we can use biomechanical information about how organisms interact with their environment to understand the multimillion year evoluntionary processes that produced the diversity of fishes we have today.

Find out more about her research on her website.

Scott Evans is an Assistant Professor of Earth-Life Interactions at Florida State University.

Evans is a paleontologist studying the ecology and biology of Earth's oldest fossil animals. He began in his role at Florida State in January 2023, has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, and his lab now consists of 2 Master's students and 1 prospective Ph.D. student. Evans grew up in upstate New York and attended SUNY Geneseo where he received bachelor degrees in math and geology. He completed his graduate work at the University of California, Riverside, followed by postdoc positions at the Smithsonian Institution and Virginia Tech. When not flipping over rocks, he loves hiking, golfing, and hanging with his dog Winston.

Chaz Briscoe is an assistant professor at Hunter College in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies after completing a year as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. He graduated with his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, in 2022.

His research focuses on racial politics, democratic institutions, and Black political movements. He is working on turning his dissertation entitled “Exhibiting a Black Ecology of Environmental Degradation: Anti-Blackness Coalescing Around Multiple Sites of Power” into a broader book project. Previously, Chaz has published articles on group responses to Black mobilization, critiques of racial progress, and the connections between environmental degradation and Black disposability.
 
Chaz’s current work focuses on the intersection of race, power, and climate justice discourse. As a Climate Justice Fellow for the nonprofit organization Second Nature, Chaz researched how higher education institutions can lead climate justice by utilizing Black and Indigenous thought to create more resilient campus communities. In the future, this research direction will lead to further investigations into how race and environmentalism operate as technologies of racial capitalism and how this issue of environmentalism travels globally within Black Studies.

In Fall 2024, Dr. Muñoz-Ballester began her role as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), as part of the first cohort of the NIH-funded FIRST-UM program.

Carmen Muñoz-Ballester earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Master’s degree in Molecular Approaches to Health Sciences from the University of Valencia in Spain, her home country. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia (Spanish National Research Council) under the guidance of Dr. Pascual Sanz. Her doctoral research focused on Lafora disease, a rare neurodegenerative disorder, and sparked her interest in the role of astrocytes in brain injury responses.

To further her expertise, Dr. Muñoz-Ballester undertook a postdoctoral position in Dr. Stefanie Robel’s lab at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech, and continued her research when the lab relocated to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Her postdoctoral work centered on how astrocytes influence the early stages of traumatic brain injury.

Throughout her career, Dr. Muñoz-Ballester has taken on various leadership roles, including serving as secretary of the regional Spanish Society for Women in Science and Technology (AMIT), vice-president of the Virginia Tech Postdoctoral Association, and as a member of the scientific outreach committee at UAB’s Comprehensive Neuroscience Center, among other positions. She has been actively involved in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, contributing to the DEI committee at the Neuroscience Postdoc and Graduate Student Association at Virginia Tech and organizing events like “Collaborative Conversations: Empowering a Culture of Respect” at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute.