Faculty members who are new to the college join a small cohort under the leadership of a pair of faculty mentors. These mentors coordinate group and individual meetings, class observations, and programming for faculty members who are new to our community.
Anamika Datta joins Rhodes as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Business. She received her PhD in Management from the University of Memphis. Dr. Datta's research interests include strategic leadership, corporate governance, and international management. Her research has been published in several management journals, including the Journal of International Management, and the Journal of Change Management. She has taught business courses titled International Management, Microeconomics, and Principles of Management prior to joining Rhodes College.
Hong Xu joins the Computer Science and Data Analytics Departments as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Xu received his bachelor's in computer science from Rhodes College and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah in 2024. He returns to Rhodes after working at Astera Institute as a research engineer. Dr. Xu's research interests are in image processing, deep learning, statistical shape modeling, mathematical optimization, and medical image analysis. At Rhodes, he will teach courses in the introductory computer science and image processing, emphasizing the connection between theory and real-world applications.
Jennifer (Jen) Park joins the Department of Chemistry at Rhodes College as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Park earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Pennsylvania State University in 2023, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis. Her current research explores the fascinating intersection of food science and inorganic chemistry, specifically focusing on how essential trace metals behave within the digestive system. This semester, she is excited to teach Biochemistry and Foundations of Chemistry Laboratory and looks forward to interacting with students in both courses.
João Tampellini's research is on economic history, labor economics, and development economics. He is also a Rhodes alum (class of ’21) and just received a PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University. At Rhodes, he will be teaching core courses in Economics and in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program, such as Classical and Marxian Political Economy.
Karyn Bondi joins the Physics Department as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Karyn has contributed to Rhodes for over a decade as an adjunct, but this year marks her first fulltime role on campus since she was a student ('03). She teaches the Introductory Physics Laboratory, and she focuses on making introductory physics approachable for students who habitually eschew it.
Kyla Gibney joins the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Program as a St, Jude CAP Fellow. Dr. Gibney’s research leverages neuroimaging to ascertain the brain mechanisms that regulate cognitive and affective processing, with a focus on the interaction between these “top-down” control and “bottom-up” salience networks and their impact on behavioral and health outcomes. She is especially interested in the cyclical relationship between sleep, glymphatic clearance, neuroinflammation, and neurometabolism; how these cycles can become dysregulated; and how this runaway dysregulation can hijack our brain’s cognitive and affective networks, leading to maladaptive behaviors and neurocognitive dysfunction.
Michelle Bostic joins the Africana Studies and Religious Studies as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Bostic received their PhD in Religious Ethics from the University of Virginia along with a Master’s in Public Health, Law, and Ethics. They also hold a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Bostic’s research interests are at the intersection of womanist thought, trans studies, and black studies. Dr. Bostic will be teaching Bible and Black Activism, Womanist Thought and Practice, and Blackness and Gender.
Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz joins the Department of Art and Art History as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Khaymaz received their Ph.D. in Art History with a graduate certificate in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2026, where they taught introductory classes in art history. Their research interests span global modernisms, Indigenous critical theory, calligraphic abstraction, environmental history, and photography theory. Their current project examines the ways artists across North Africa have drawn, since the 1950s, on the symbolic repertoire of ancestral sign-making practices, notably tattooing, as strategies for cultural sovereignty and decolonization.
Soheil Hashtarkhani joins the Department of Urban Studies as Visiting Assistant Professor of Health Equity. Dr. Hashtarkhani received his Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Iran, and completed postdoctoral training at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. His research focuses on understanding and reducing health inequities, with particular attention to cancer outcomes, chronic disease, healthcare access in underserved communities, and the role of neighborhood and social conditions in shaping population health. He has taught courses in data analytics, Geographical Information Systems, epidemiology, and health informatics.
Weizhe Liu joins the Physics Department as a post-doctoral scientist. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland in 2022. He comes to Rhodes after serving as a JASPER postdoc scholar at the University of Arizona. His research interests center on the supermassive black holes and their interactions with the galaxies they live in across cosmic time.