Candidates for Faculty Senate 2026 - 2027

Alejandro Aptilon, Teaching Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture & Design 

Alejandro Aptilon is a Teaching Professor of Architecture at the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design, where he has taught since 2014. His award-winning architecture firm has been commissioned for international projects and was selected by the AIA Gallery in New York as a representative of emerging trends in Mexican architecture. Aptilon’s research and publications delve into the intersections of history, context, and urban development. He is the co-author of the seminal book Las Casas del Pedregal 1947-1968 and produced a documentary series on Mexico City architecture for Mexico’s public television network. His work has been internationally exhibited and is published in major compendia such as 1000X Architecture of the Americas. He is a founding professor of CENTRO, a premier design school in Mexico, where he was awarded for his service to the institution. Currently, his work focuses on sustainability in permanent supportive housing for under-served communities in the U.S. and a forthcoming book exploring mutual architectural influences between the U.S. and Mexico.

Kodjo Atiso, Librarian for Africana and International Studies, KU Libraries

Kodjo Atiso is currently the librarian for Africana, Global, and International Studies at the University of Kansas (KU). He has extensive experience in research and academic libraries, as well as in teaching. He moved to Lawrence from Ghana, where he served as the university librarian (Dean of Libraries) at Cape Coast Technical University. He earned his BA and MA from the University of Ghana, his LLB from the University of London (UK), and his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. 

He began working at KU Libraries in mid-October 2023 and has been collaborating with partners to support research and teaching, develop collections for Africana, Global, and international studies, lead workshops on library and information resources, and work on projects and events that promote Africa and the African diaspora. He is involved in many projects at KU Libraries, including the Institute of Globally Engaged Librarianship (IGEL) and the Emerging Librarians Forum (ELF). His research centers on international librarianship, developing inclusive collections, and enhancing librarians' skills, especially in the Global South. He is currently working on a diasporic project to fill an information gap for African Americans during their pilgrimage or tour of Africa, which the study refers to as “the motherland.” 

Kodjo has experience in university governance, having held senior management roles in Ghana and contributed to the development of policies for the university, including those related to education, faculty rights, and evaluation procedures overseen by the University Council. When given the opportunity to serve on the Faculty Senate, he will apply his experience to discussions, listen, learn about the KU system, and complete assigned tasks. As a hobby, he enjoys playing tennis.

Rachel Bechtold, Multi-term Lecturer, Biology, CLAS

Dr. Rachel Bechtold is an educator in the Department of Undergraduate Biology who teaches introductory courses in molecular and cellular biology and human physiology. She manages undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants and lectures to over 600 students per semester in these courses. Prior to joining KU, she was an Assistant Professor of Biology at Missouri Southern State University in the Environmental Health and Biology Department and has been published both for her research and for her photography. A former Cameroonian Peace Corps volunteer, a Rotary Ambassador to Japan, and an AmeriCorps alum, she is world-traveled with an interest in bringing some of the rest of the world to the biology classroom. She co-created, taught, and traveled abroad with a biohistory student trip to Costa Rica in 2024.

With a goal of knowledge scaffolding and concept mastery for student’s long-term retention she has been active in, and funded for, course transformation projects in large lecture hall classrooms. Rachel went to Knox college for her BA in biology, has MS degrees in microbiology, RPTA parks and recreation, and a PhD from the University of Arkansas in Environmental Biology and Dynamic Systems. Away from campus, she spends her time as a bibliophile and has a passion for herpetology and trail running.

Phil Cunningham, Curator and Assistant Librarian, Kansas Collection, Spencer Research Library

Phil Cunningham is an Assistant Librarian with KU Libraries. His work as curator of the Kansas Collection expands the physical library and archives collections documenting Kansas history and its peoples. He promotes the collection across the University and state community through interdisciplinary classroom instruction teaching primary source literacy and through public history outreach programs. He seeks to serve on Faculty Senate to encourage positive policy development and open communication between University governance and the wider faculty community.

Bartholomew Dean, Professor, Anthropology, CLAS

Bartholomew C. Dean is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, where he also serves as Director of the Neotropical Anthropology Laboratory and Director of the Public Anthropology Working Group within the Institute for Policy & Social Research. A Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Dean is an internationally recognized scholar of Amazonian societies whose work bridges ethnography, human rights, public health, and digital infrastructure. His research is grounded in more than three decades of fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, particularly in the Alto Amazonas and Huallaga Valley regions, where he has worked closely with Indigenous communities.

Dean’s scholarship interrogates the moral and social aftermath of political violence, with particular attention to memory, reconciliation, and what he has termed “moral topographies” of post-conflict life. His most recent ethnography, The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2023), offers a sustained ethnographic account of how communities endure, narrate, and reconfigure histories of insurgency and state violence. Across his body of work, he integrates critical perspectives from postcolonial theory, moral anthropology, and the anthropology of governance to elucidate how suffering is represented, mediated, and ethically engaged.

In addition to his ethnographic contributions, Dean has developed a growing research agenda at the intersection of anthropology and global public health. His current projects examine cardiometabolic disease transitions in Amazonian populations and the design of resilient digital health infrastructures for rural Amazonia. 

Dean is also an active institutional leader and international collaborator. He serves as Vice President of the Anthropological Association for Humankind and plays a central role in organizing the World Applied Anthropology Congress (WAAC 2026) in Hyderabad, India. His leadership emphasizes the integration of anthropological knowledge into policy, infrastructure development, and global health initiatives. 

At KU, he has been instrumental in fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, and advancing initiatives that connect anthropological research to public engagement and institutional partnerships. Educated at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, Dean brings to his work a distinctive combination of historical depth, ethnographic rigor, and applied orientation. His contributions to the University of Kansas reflect a sustained commitment to scholarly excellence, institutional innovation, and the ethical practice of anthropology in a global context.

Abigail Fields, Hall Assistant Professor, French, Francophone & Italian Studies, CLAS 

Abigail Fields is the Hall Family Foundation Assistant Professor of French in the French, Francophone & Italian Studies Department. They joined the faculty at the University of Kansas after completing their PhD at Yale University. But their experience at KU dates back to 2013, when they first enrolled as an undergraduate student. They aim to bring their experience as a KU student to bear on their teaching and departmental and university service, providing mentoring support that helps students make concrete connections between their experience here and real-world opportunities, and creating accessible avenues for them to explore these possibilities through coursework and extracurricular programming. Their research is broadly interested in the representation of “environment(s)” in French and Francophone public media from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Their current book project, The Literary Field: Agriculture, Narrative and Ecocritical Imaginaries in Nineteenth-Century France, analyzes representations of agriculture fields in nineteenth-century French literary production to argue: 1. That agriculture operates not only as a material reality but as an aesthetic, narrative and rhetorical force that actively shapes how people imagine land, labor, and themselves; and 2. That writing about land requires experimentation with and indeed a redefinition of commonplace narratological constructions like setting, character and even plot. They also have ongoing translation and critical projects on queer and feminist ecopoetics in the work of North African writers, in particular Yamina Mechakra, Samira Negrouche and Jean Sénac. They are co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, the official journal of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC).

Scott Harris, Senior Specialist and Director of Debate, Communication Studies, CLAS

Scott Harris is a Senior Specialist in Communication Studies and the David B. Pittaway Director of Debate at the University of Kansas. He has been the Director of KU Debate since the fall of 1991. He received his PhD from Northwestern University. He teaches a variety of classes in Communication Studies including The Rhetoric of War, The Rhetoric of Sports in American Culture, and Ethics in Political Communication. In 2023 he was named to the Collegiate Hall of Fame by the Kansas Speech Communication Association. He was the 2020 winner of a Steeples Service Award from the University of Kansas. He was named "Educator of the Year" by the Kansas Speech Communication Association in both 2018 and 2019. He was the inaugural winner of the Gene A. Budig Teaching Professorship for the Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2011. He has served as President of the American Forensic Association and the Cross Examination Debate Association. Under his leadership KU has won two National Debate Tournament Championships and reached the Final Four of the NDT ten times.

Chad Kraus, Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture & Design

Chad Kraus, AIA, is a Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas, where he has taught since 2009 and currently directs the award-winning Dirt Works Studio, a community-engaged designbuild program that integrates architectural education with hands-on construction and public service. A licensed architect in the State of Kansas, Kraus’ work centers on designbuild pedagogy and material research. Prior to joining the KU faculty, he practiced in New York with Pritzker Prize laureate Shigeru Ban, an experience that continues to inform his emphasis on craft, material experimentation, and socially engaged architecture. Kraus is the editor of the book Designbuild Education (Routledge, 2017) and served as an editor of the journal Technology | Architecture + Design from 2017 to 2023. His research and creative work explore sustainable materials—including earthen construction and mass timber—and the integration of research, design, and community partnerships within architectural education. Through his scholarship, public presentations, and collaborative designbuild projects, Kraus advances a model of architectural education that connects the university to communities while preparing students to translate design excellence into meaningful social and environmental impact.

Haiying Long, Professor, Educational Psychology, School of Education & Human Sciences 

Dr. Haiying Long is a professor in the Research, Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics program in the Department of Educational Psychology and the Director of the Center for Research Methods Consultation at the University of Kansas. Her research is at the intersection of methodological issues in educational research and substantive issues in educational psychology. She has published about 60 articles in peer-reviewed, top-tier journals and has received about 20 federal and state grant awards as PI, co-PI, evaluation lead, and research methodologist. She served on more than 70 graduate student dissertation committees as chair or member. At the university level, she was the chair of Faculty Senate Restricted Research Committee and University Senate International Affairs Committee and as a member of University Promotion and Tenure Committee, Faculty Senate Restricted Research Committee, Survey Coordination Committee, and ACE Lab Collaboration and Partnership Committee. She also organized university faculty coaching circle sessions. At the School of Education and Human Sciences, she was the chair of Impact and Belonging Committee and the Educational Psychology Department Personnel Committee and a member of Dean Search Committee, Committee on Academic Programs and Curriculum, Research Award Committee, and the Lichtenberg Lecture Committee. Within the professional community, she has served as an editor, associate editor, and editorial board member for numerous journals, the secretary of American Educational Research Association SIG-Rasch Measurement and a member of American Educational Research Association Division D mentoring committee and American Psychological Association Division 10 Mini Grant committee. 

Erik Lundquist, Professor, Molecular Biosciences

Erik Lundquist is currently a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, a position he started in 2000. He is co-Investigator on the Center for Molecular Analysis of Disease Pathways NIH COBRE project, and he is a member of the KU Center for Genomics and the KU Cancer Center. Erik served as Associate-Vice Chancellor for Research for the University of Kansas from 2018-2025. Erik is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Erik earned a B.S. degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska, and a Ph.D. degree in Genetics from the University of Minnesota with Dr. Robert K. Herman and Dr. Jocelyn E. Shaw. He then completed post-doctoral research at the University of California-San Francisco with Dr. Cornelia I. Bargmann, with support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Sarah McCall, Undergraduate Engagement Librarian, KU Libraries

Sarah McCall is an Undergraduate Engagement Librarian with KU Libraries, providing information literacy instruction and facilitating library programs and initiatives that aim to support students’ development as researchers and scholars and strengthen their sense of belonging in academic spaces. Her research explores questions around whose knowledge is recognized and valued within learning institutions and whose perspectives have been marginalized or excluded, and the role of libraries in advancing anti-oppressive research processes. Sarah has published and presented on topics that include compassionate librarianship, student success initiatives, and community-centered research.

Tyler Myroniuk, Assistant Professor, Sociology, CLAS

Tyler Myroniuk is a social demographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Tyler conducts research in the areas of internal migration, family dynamics, and health—particularly mental health, obesity, and aging. Most of his work is set in sub-Saharan Africa (Malawi, South Africa, and Kenya), though he has recently conducted health research and quality improvement studies in the United States and Canada. He primarily uses longitudinal quantitative methods for his research yet also employs qualitative techniques and multi-method approaches when appropriate.

Tyler would like to be one of your representatives on the Faculty Senate as a pragmatic contributor and someone who has worked in multiple fields within- and adjacent to- academia—including public health and medicine. He has worked at several universities and has come to understand how the interwoven dynamics of funding, politics, and unexpected shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic affect faculty and their administrative units. Tyler believes that he could be an effective voice for you in the Senate and bring his non-linear career experiences to advocate for you. Tyler will make sure to be open to any questions you have, as your representative, and offer “no-nonsense” answers. Thank you for considering Tyler’s candidacy. 

Rebecca A. Orozco, Electronic Services and Emerging Technologies Librarian, Wheat Library, School of Law

Rebecca A. Orozco joined the Wheat Law Library as the Electronic Services and Emerging Technologies Librarian in September 2025. She holds a Master of Library and Information Science from St. Catherine University, a Master of Science in biology from Saint Joseph’s University and a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Kansas. Orozco began her career practicing science librarianship, first at the University of Kansas and later at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Most recently, Orozco held a library faculty position at the United States Air Force Academy, where she collaborated with fellow librarians to improve information discovery and access. Her interdisciplinary academic background informs her work in partnering with colleagues on teaching, research and student learning through information literacy, electronic resource management, and the integration of emerging technologies at Wheat Law Library. 

Shahnaz Parsaeian, Assistant Professor, Economics 

Shahnaz Parsaeian is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on econometrics, with applications to macroeconomic and financial data. She teaches econometrics courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and is actively involved in mentoring students. At KU, she has contributed to the department, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the broader university community.

Cameron Piercy, Associate Professor, Communication Studies, CLAS

Cameron Piercy is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. His research examines human–machine communication and organizational communication, with a focus on how people coordinate work and decision‑making in complex work environments. He directs the Human-Machine Communication Lab (https://hmc.ku.edu). Cameron has served in leadership roles for the National Communication Association, chaired the CLAS-Committee on Graduate Studies, and currently co-directs the CLAS-Mentored Scholars Program. He is committed to supporting evidence‑based, transparent decision‑making across the university and views shared governance as crucial to the future of the university.

Amanda Schlumpberger, Faculty and Community Engagement Librarian, KU Libraries

Amanda is an assistant librarian whose work and research focuses on community engagement. She joined KU Libraries in January 2025. Although relatively new to KU as a faculty member, her connections to the KU community go further back. She earned her MA and PhD in History at KU, graduating in 2015. 

After graduating, she worked in policy research for the State of Kansas for 8 years and 2 years additional years doing nonprofit community engaged policy research and advocacy. Her policy and community engagement experience has provided her valuable skills and insight into the nuance of policies and procedures, the importance of strategic and mission alignment in governance, giving communities and constituents space for their voices and impact to be heard, and the way policy decisions can impact communities differently and with unintended consequences. 

In her role as Faculty and Community Engagement Librarian at KU, her experience and research interests intersect to facilitate community building at the Libraries, KU, and beyond. Her research interests surround questions on how community building and engagement can transform spaces and break down barriers for previously excluded individuals and communities. She uses community engaged research methods to explore these questions and develop actionable research results and practices. In her work at KU she develops, executes, and assesses programming and partnerships that promote and expand the discovery and use of KU scholarship and library resources and services with the outcome of creating more equitable and accessible opportunities for research, learning, and knowledge creation and exchange in the KU community and beyond. To achieve these objectives she identifies, coordinates, and facilitates initiatives related to engaging the various communities the Libraries’ activities touch. She partners with local, regional, state, national, and international communities to ensure mutually beneficial work occurs among partnerships. 

Using her experience and community engaged research and work, she hopes to promote well-being, community, and expanded opportunities and support for all KU community members. 

Sean J. Smith, Professor, Special Education, School of Education & Human Sciences 

Dr. Sean J. Smith is a Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Kansas. His teaching and research focus on improving learning opportunities for students with disabilities and supporting educators who serve them. At KU, Dr. Smith works with faculty, graduate students, and school partners to translate research into practical tools that improve teaching and learning. His work has been supported through several federally funded projects that examine writing instruction, social communication, and inclusive classroom practices. Dr. Smith values collaboration across departments and believes shared governance plays an important role in strengthening the university. If elected to the University Senate, he looks forward to contributing to conversations that support faculty, advance teaching and research, and strengthen opportunities for KU students.

Shuai Sun, Associate Teaching Professor, Chemistry, CLAS

Shuai Sun is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kansas. He teaches foundational chemistry courses and studies chemistry education, with a focus on course design, assessment practices, and strategies that support student engagement and persistence in STEM.

Sun also serves as the Director of the Mentored Scholars Program (MSP), a first-generation student mentoring program at KU that supports students as they navigate their academic and professional pathways. He is committed to mentoring undergraduate students and contributing to initiatives that strengthen the learning environment and sense of belonging within the university community.

Emily Vietti, Associate Teaching Professor, Organizational Communication, School of Professional Studies

Emily Vietti is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Organizational Communication graduate program and Professional Studies undergraduate program. Dr. Vietti is also the Civic Engagement Faculty Fellow for the KU Center for Service Learning.

Prior to joining the School of Professional Studies, Dr. Vietti was the director of undergraduate studies for the KU Institute for Leadership Studies and the director of Ready to Run Kansas®, a nonpartisan training program that aims to give Kansas women the knowledge, skills, and confidence to run for public office and increase their capacity for civic engagement and leadership. She has taught at the University of Kansas for more than 10 years.

Judy Watts, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communications

Judy Watts is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications and is a first-generation scholar. Her research examines the effects of mass communication (entertainment, testimonials, popular media) on attitudes and emotions. Prior to obtaining her doctorate, Dr. Watts worked in public radio and local and regional governments conducting outreach to communities. She believes that governance is only as effective as the thoughtful engagement of the constituents it represents.