PPFP Faculty Members

Leslie Barlow (she/her) received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Barlow’s work has gone on to receive a number of awards including the 2021 Jerome Hill Fellowship, 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, the 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, and four MN State Arts Board grants between 2016 and 2021. Her work can be viewed in art collections around Minnesota including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Historical Society, Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and US Bank Stadium. In addition to her studio research and teaching, Barlow also supports emerging artists at Public Functionary as Director of PF Studios, is a part of the Creatives After Curfew mural collective, and is a 7-year volunteer for the organization MidWest Mixed. Leslie Barlow is represented by Bockley Gallery.

Beatriz (Bea) Baselga Cervera received her Degree in Veterinary Medicine from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in Spain (2012). She completed her Ph.D. in Microbiology at the same university under the mentorship of Dr. Eduardo Costas (2017). She is a recipient of the Spanish National Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FPI program) fellowship, which funded her graduate studies. Prior to joining the PPFP, Bea worked as Alfonso Martin Escudero's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota, working in experimental evolution with microbes and broadly interested in the phenotypic evolution of multicellularity. She is also a fellow of the Philosophy of Science Department at UMN. She will continue her postdoctoral position under the supervision of Dr. Michael Travisano. Her research focuses on the integration of experimental evolution and bioprospection, in the intersection of basic and applied water microbiology addressing ecological and evolutionary questions. She is an advocate for bringing science closer to society through several outreach projects, and volunteering initiatives (e. g., contributing to bridging science to non-English speakers or teaching science to high schoolers). As a scientist, she is fully committed to serving and supporting the postdoc community.

HyeJin Hwang's research interests revolve around reading comprehension and content learning (science, social studies) in K-12 settings, especially for multilingual students.

My research interests are focused on improving secondary biology education and graduate student training. Specifically, I am investigating how life sciences graduate programs train their students for the variety of career paths both within and beyond academia. In addition, my work considers how we can train faculty and teaching assistants to be more inclusive and aware of the experiences of the students in their classes. 

Magdala Lissa Jeudy earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University in Romance Studies in 2021. Her research focuses on the ways that French Naturalist narratives complicate our notions of normal, which define modern medical practices and philosophies from the nineteenth century to the present day. Her work is built on philological, historical, and intersectional approaches that aim to disrupt medical constructs of disability, gender, and race, to advance conversations about healthcare disparities and equity. As an educator, she is committed to a pedagogy that is a process of inquiry, which allows students to question their deeply entrenched assumptions, reconfigure concepts of normalcy, and accept the unique circumstances of others leading to recognition and celebration of diversity.

Meixi is a Hokkien/Hokchiu teacher-scholar-sister-daughter-auntie-learning scientist who grew up across the lands and waters of Singapore and northern Thailand. In her Ph.D. with Dr. Megan Bang at the University of Washington, Meixi explores the intersections and connections within home and school and how through community and participatory design research, schools can be partners in community resurgence of Indigenous knowledges, educational justice, and the living of socioecological flourishing futures in Thailand and Mexico. At the U of M, she will be the American Indian Studies department with Dr. Vince Diaz, and is excited to continue working within global & trans-Indigenous research, and felt desires for educational designs that restore our relations and our responsibilities in ways that perpetuate all life.

Roberto C. Orozco received his PhD in the Higher Education Program at Rutgers University–New Brunswick along with a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research explores questions around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality with relation to college student activism and student development, and queer resistance and queer worldmaking in and outside of higher education contexts. He grounds his work at the intersection of Jotería Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Chicana Latina Feminism to examine the identity and socio-political consciousness of queer Latinx/a/o student activists in higher education. He is particularly interested in how queer Latinx/a/o college students engage in forms of resistance that allow for self-development and consciousness raising while building queer kinships and material possibilities rooted in community.

Charisse Pickron is originally from Amherst, MA. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a major in Psychology and a minor in Race and Racial Identity Development in 2008. Following graduation, she worked at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL for two years. She completed a 12-month internship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she further explored her interest in a career in developmental psychology. At the University of Massachusetts, Charisse completed her Master's in 2015 under the advisement of Dr. Lisa Scott and her Ph.D. in 2018 with Dr. Erik Cheries. Her work focuses on socio-cognitive development focusing on infants' perception and representation of social groups along gender and race.

Jesús is an evolutionary and quantitative ecologist whose work focuses on developing a deeper understanding of species coexistence and patterns of diversity across spatial and temporal scales and the underlying processes that drive, maintain, and alter these patterns. He has a passion for science and for diversity, inclusion, and equity in education and research. He earned his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution at the Federal University of Goiás (Brazil) and holds an M.S. in Wildlife Management from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). Born and raised in the hyperdiverse tropical lowlands of Bolivia, he remembers that a deep fascination for its nature and people’s well-being was part of his life. This fascination led him to pursue a biology major at the Universidad Gabriel René Moreno in Bolivia. Jesús previously worked as Research Scientist in the EEB department at the University of Minnesota and as a Grand Challenges in Biology Postdoctoral Fellow in the same department. 

My research explores how leadership shifts policies and practices towards more racially just schools and systems. I employ community-engaged and participatory design research methods to build more authentic and equitable collaborations between universities, schools, and communities. I draw on critical and Indigenous theories to center the knowledges, histories, experiences, and agency of communities of color leading equity-focused organizational change.

Cat Saint-Croix earned her Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2018. Her work focuses on epistemology, which concerns knowledge, belief, and evidence, along with philosophy of language, logic, and feminist philosophy. She is especially interested in the ways that the insights of feminist philosophy can be applied to and developed within these areas.

Shahrin Upoma, PhD, is an assistant professor in the leadership and management area at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Her research interest lies at the intersection of diversity, equity, and social justice in public and nonprofit management.

Her agenda is to produce work that can be used by professionals, industry experts, and others trusted with the decision-making process.

Dr. Upoma’s commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion through her teaching and research is grounded in her personal experience as a woman of color, first-generation student, and immigrant. 

She holds a PhD in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she also served as a teaching assistant. She earned a master's degree in economics from the University of North Texas, and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Jessica Horvath Williams teaches and researches at the crossroads of 19^th century U.S. Literature and feminist disability studies, with emphases on questions of women’s writing, domestic labor, and literary form. She is a black, queer, femme, first-generation, autistic activist and educator in the Twin Cities, who works with healthcare professionals on disability issues, and their intersections of these issues with race, gender/sexuality, and citizenship. Her work has appeared in Studies in American Fiction.

Mingzi Xu received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Oklahoma in 2014. She has been a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University since 2015. Her research focuses on the evolution and genetic basis of mating recognition and preference traits. During her Ph.D., she studied the selective forces driving the evolution of mate recognition from a behavioral ecological perspective. During her previous postdoctoral studies, she extended her research to evolutionary genetics and genomics of sexual signals and mating preferences. At the University of Minnesota, she will combine behavioral ecology and evolutionary genetics approaches to understand the evolution of choosiness in female mate choice.

Deborah (Deb) Yoon identifies best as an interpersonal, family, and health scholar. As a researcher, she is interested in bridging the gap between theory and practice because she believes that the role of research is to make it applicable for individuals who are not only in academia but those who can utilize research findings in practice. Mainly, her research focuses on identity formation and negotiation as it intersects with uncertainty management practices that arise within nontraditional and/or challenging family systems. She works to explicate identity uncertainty as an experience that is applicable to different circumstances while working to contextualize it within other theories of identity, and further explores the communication processes that shape or reflect these specific experiences. Her work seeks to better understand how nontraditional life experiences can be disruptive and raise questions to an individual’s concept of self, the effects if has on an individual’s communication behavior to mitigate the identity uncertainty, and how communication patterns within these nontraditional systems help shape an individual’s identity as well as how an individual’s identity shapes those relationships. Further, she seeks to examine the associations between identity, identity uncertainty, and information management strategies between nontraditional family members and the individual.