Willamette introduces new tenure-track faculty members

by Jennifer Johnson,

Faculty members join departments in the College of Liberal Arts.

Three new tenure-track faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts arrive at Willamette with backgrounds in energy justice, environmental microbiology and citizenship in the Middle East:

Catalina M. de Onís

Civic Communication and Media

Catalina de Onis

Catalina M. de Onís is a *Latinx communication scholar with interests in a field that combines the humanities with science and ethnographic research methods.

De Onís earned a B.S. from Northwestern University, her master’s degree from the University of Montana and her Ph.D. from Indiana University. Her research examines the ways people in social movements communicate about environmental, climate and energy justice in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

She’s working on a book project based on her dissertation, “Energy Remix: Decolonial Discourses of Decarbonization.” De Onís also received a Willamette Green Fund grant for the “Salem Spark/la Chispa de Salem” initiative, which strives for environmental, climate and energy justice. She looks forward to working with Bearcat community members on the project.

*gender-inclusive term

Rosa León Zayas

Biology

Rosa Leon Zayas

Rosa León Zayas is an environmental microbiologist and bioinformatician.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico, she studied genome analysis of ultra deep-sea single-cell microbes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and during her postdoctoral work at the University of Delaware. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, and she has also collaborated with the University of Delaware Sea Grant College Program to create a series of science videos in English and Spanish.

León Zayas pursues several passions, including music. She welcomes visitors to her office and lab on the first floor of the Olin Science Center — tea and her guitar are waiting.

Saghar Sadeghian

History

Saghar Sadeghian

Saghar Sadeghian has primarily researched minority groups and the concept of citizenship in the Middle East. During the 2016-17 academic year, she joined Willamette as a visiting assistant professor in the history department.

Sadeghian received her bachelor’s degree at the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education in Iran. She completed her master’s degree at Lancaster University and her Ph.D. at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the McMillan Center at Yale University, where she also received the Rice Faculty Fellowship. Sadeghian also serves as the associate director of Yale Iranian History Internet Archives.

She’s finishing a book, “Non-Muslims and the Constitutional Revolution: A Quest of Identity,” and working on a manuscript, “Forestry and Exploitation of Caspian Forests of Northern Iran in the 19th and 20th Centuries.”

Willamette University

University Communications

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