New faculty members further elevate USC Dornsife’s natural sciences prowess
Five natural sciences professors join the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences for the fall 2024 semester. Their research focuses on a variety of subjects, from tiny microbes that inhabit deep sea hydrothermal vents to complex questions concerning quantum physics.
Nathan Benjamin | Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Benjamin is a theoretical physicist interested in quantum field theory, the rules that govern the universe’s tiny particles and forces. His recent research involves using consistency conditions to constrain quantum field theories with conformal symmetry. This work can help us understand things such as how materials change from one form to another (like ice melting into water) and how gravity works on the smallest levels. He is also interested in the deep and often surprising interplay between quantum field theory and pure mathematics.
Meng Chen | Assistant Professor of Psychology
Chen uses dynamic models to study changes in human behavior over time. She also develops tools for analyzing intensive longitudinal data. In particular, she examines the use of modeling and statistical methods to capture changes within individuals, differences between them, and processes across different time scales. Chen was born and raised in Dalian, China. She received her PhD in human development and family studies from Penn State University.
Sandy LaTourrette | Assistant Professor of Psychology
LaTourrette studies how humans learn language and use language to learn more about the world. His research uses behavioral and computational methods to determine how infants and children navigate the many challenges of language learning — including variation across speakers, language switching, and the ambiguity of most word-learning contexts. His work addresses how children learn the meanings of words and how labeling objects or individuals changes the way children categorize and remember them.
Karen Lloyd | Professor of Earth Sciences
Lloyd studies tiny single-celled organisms inside Earth’s crust, through environmental molecular biology and geochemistry. She believes that microbes are best studied in their natural environment, so she designs her experiments to be as field-based as possible, working in deep-sea methane seeps, subduction zones, and hydrothermal vents, as well as hot springs and permafrost on land. She is helping to discover and describe the vast amount of diverse life that lies buried deep beneath our feet.
Noah Phillips | Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences
Phillips and his group study how rocks and minerals deform internally to accommodate the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates. His group maps rocks in the field and then analyzes them in the lab using light and electron microscopy to understand — down to a few nanometers — how they deformed. These observations are used to develop models of the seismic cycle and tectonic plate motion, and to constrain how critical metals are mobilized and trapped during deformation.
Andrew Steen | Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Steen is interested in how microbes live and eat on Earth. His research focuses on how they stay alive and eat in very low-energy environments, such as deep marine sediments and permafrost soils. These organisms appear to live for thousands of years in a state of near (but not total) stasis, a very different mode of life than the fast-growing microbes that dominate Earth’s surface. The Steen Lab uses bioinformatics, rate measurements, organic carbon characterization, and machine learning to reconstruct the lifestyles of these microbes, most of which resist growth in the lab. The group’s goal is to understand the physical and chemical environment of Earth microbes, their metabolic requirements and their environmental histories to better understand how they influence — and are influenced by — the Earth’s geochemical cycles.
Yizhe Zhu | Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Zhu’s research primarily explores high-dimensional probability and mathematical data science. He is analyzing mathematical structures and developing rigorous algorithms for various data science applications, including community detection, signal processing, neural networks and data privacy. Further, he investigates random matrices, random graphs, and tensors, which are powerful mathematical tools used to model and understand complex systems with many interacting components.