Fellows

Faculty fellows are Northwestern faculty members who are associated with the residential college and are invited to biweekly fellows lunches and various residential college events so that they can interact with the students outside the classroom. Fellows come from a very diverse range of disciplines, including psychology, biology, political science, education, physics, and Spanish.

Andy Rivers
Andrew Rivers is a Weinberg College Adviser and a Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy. Andrew’s Ph.D. research included a large-scale radio astronomy survey of the so-called “Zone of Avoidance”: a large region of the sky containing few visible external galaxies due to obscuration by dust near the disk of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Looking for hidden galaxies using long wavelength radio waves, which pass through the dust unobscured, Andrew discovered approximately 20 previously unknown nearby galaxies. In his free time, Andrew enjoys spending time with his wife Carolyn, his daughter Cassie and son Gareth, and his Pekinese puppy “Boo”. Leisure activities include tinkering with Linux, attending obscure art films, and reading nonfiction from diverse fields.
Jaime Dominguez
Jaime Dominguez is a College Adviser and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science. He is one of the principal architects of the Chicago Democracy Project (CDP), a thirty-year online political database that provides citizens, community groups, and religious organizations with information on campaign finance, electoral outcomes, government contracts, minority appointments, and levels of public employment for the City of Chicago. He is currently working on a second grant to expand the CDP to twenty-five major cities as well as a pilot project that examines the state of Latino politics in Chicago. Jaime is particularly interested in how Latino heterogeneity and population growth is redefining traditional political and race relations between black people and white people.
Reyes Morán
Maria Reyes Morán Fuertes
Reyes Morán Fuertes is a Lecturer in Northwestern’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Outside the classroom, Reyes plans to pursue research in the area of Spanish language and grammar. Her goal is to research complex linguistic and grammatical phenomena, and distill them into simpler forms which can be easily taught to non-native students of Spanish.

 

 

SonBinh Nguyen
SonBinh Nguyen’s research encompasses three divisions in chemical science: inorganic/organometallic chemistry, organic synthesis, and polymer science. He is also interested in environmentally friendly catalysis and biomaterials.
Paul Ramírez

Paul Ramírez is Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies (by courtesy) at Northwestern. A historian of Mexico by training, his research interests lie in the adoption of modern medical technologies, the religious dimensions of human labor, and the role of salt in peasant communities. At Northwestern, he directs Science in Human Culture, an interdisciplinary program in science studies with an adjunct major and minor. He also mentors undergraduate research through the Posner Research Program, the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP), and the Leopold Fellows Program with the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. In his spare time, he enjoys piano and hikes with his dog, a Catahoula Leopard named Lila.

Jingjing Ji

Ji is a Ph.D. candidate in Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). At Northwestern University, she has taught various Chinese language courses at different levels, from novice to advanced, for heritage and non-heritage tracks. Each year, Northwestern students nominate professors to be on Associated Student Government (ASG) Faculty Honor Roll for their outstanding and dedicated work. Ji was selected to be honored twice in 2016-2017 and 2019-2020. She was also the first prize recipient for Innovative Excellence in the Teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language awarded by the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA), USA, in 2021-2022. The relevant project was reported by the newspaper The Daily Northwestern.

Before coming to Northwestern, she taught Chinese at Washington and Lee University and the University of Virginia (UVA). Ji also has extensive teaching experience in intensive and high-quality summer programs. She taught at UVA in Shanghai summer program for two summers and Middlebury College (Summer Chinese School) for three summers. She is an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) tester certified by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

Ji’s research interests are in second language acquisition, Chinese pedagogy and heritage language education. She is particularly interested in Chinese heritage language learners’ identity construction and development, learning strategies, and heritage language program development.

Her publications have appeared as a column article in the journal Language Teaching and Linguistic Studies, and in the magazine Times Higher Education. Her research articles have been published as conference proceedings, and in peer-reviewed journals such as Foreign Language Annals, Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching, Studies in Chinese Learning and Teaching, and Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. She recently co-authored and published a textbook for Chinese heritage language learners titled 传承中文 Modern Chinese for Heritage Beginners—Stories about Us (Routledge, 2023). https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Chinese-for-Heritage-Beginners-Stories-about-Us/Liu-Ji-Wu-Liang/p/book/9781032399782

Marcelo Vinces (Returning in 2026-27!)
Marcelo Vinces is a Weinberg College Academic Adviser and an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Molecular Biosciences. He earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from Cornell University and his doctorate in molecular microbiology from Tufts University. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University and KU Leuven in Belgium, followed by a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship at the National Science Foundation. Previous to Northwestern, Marcelo worked at Oberlin College as the director of their Center for Learning, Education and Research in the Sciences. He currently serves in the leadership team for Northwestern’s HHMI-funded Inclusive Teaching project and is a faculty adviser for several undergraduate and graduate student orgs, including NU-SACNAS, GoSTEM and Advancing the Undocumented Community (AUC). An immigrant from Ecuador who grew up in New York City, Marcelo is a lifelong bilingual speaker of both Spanish and English. He also enjoys conversing in French, Dutch, and German, has taken courses in Portuguese and Quechua, and is currently in the process of learning some Ukrainian.