UW Tacoma welcomes a dozen new faculty members for the 2025-26 academic year

Atyeh (Ati) Ashtari, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Planning
School of Urban Studies

Atyeh (Ati) Ashtari joins UW Tacoma as an assistant professor in the School of Urban Studies. Previously, she was an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Memphis. Ashtari is an interdisciplinary feminist urban scholar. She earned a doctorate in urban planning from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024. She also holds two graduate minors in global studies and gender relations in international development, a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Art in Tehran, Iran. 

Drawing from an extensive interdisciplinary background, Ashtari’s research centers community as the main unit of analysis and emphasis. Her interests include intersectional humane urbanism, community-based development, community economies, participatory action research and digital storytelling. She has conducted research in Iran, the United States and Ecuador. Her work has been nationally recognized and supported by the American Association of University Women and the International Center for Research on Women.

Wenjun Fan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Information Technology
School of Engineering & Technology

Dr. Wenjun Fan earned his Doctor of Philosophy in telematics systems engineering from the Technical University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) in 2017. Dr. Fan’s research interests stretch across tech, including cybersecurity, cloud computing, network softwarization, blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence. His work explores how emerging technologies can be securely and efficiently integrated into modern digital infrastructures. He is an active member of several professional organizations, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

Timothy Feagan, Ph.D.

Assistant Teaching Professor
School of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership

Timothy Feagan joins UW Tacoma as an assistant teaching professor in the School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership. He has over 25 years of industry experience, including 17 years in healthcare leadership. Most recently, he served as Vice President and Chief Talent Officer for Providence St. Joseph Health. In 2020, he made the transition from corporate life to higher education and has held positions at Seattle Central College, Fort Hays State University and Whitworth University. Feagan holds a BA in Finance from Eastern Washington University, an MBA from Washington State University and a Ph.D. in Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University. He is a fellow with the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Abel Hernandez, MBA

Assistant Teaching Professor of Management
Milgard School of Business

Abel Hernandez teaches courses in leadership, management and communication, drawing from 18 years of professional experience in business development, organizational leadership and corporate training. With previous experience teaching marketing courses, Hernandez now focuses on preparing students to lead with authenticity, clarity and impact in today’s organizations.

Carmen Lewis, Ed.D.

Assistant Teaching Professor
School of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership

Carmen Lewis fell in love with teaching while attending nursing school. Inspired to model the same level of excellence in education that she was shown, Lewis immersed herself in the study of education and leadership. Her nursing experience — caring for critically ill infants, school-aged children, teenage mothers and new families — motivates her work in the community to this day. 

Lewis’s scholarship focuses on community engagement, innovative teaching strategies and curriculum evaluation. She is particularly interested in developing future healthcare leaders and fostering meaningful connections between academic institutions and the communities they serve. Lewis’s research interests include maternal-child health and leadership development. Known for her ability to bridge theory and practice, Lewis creates learning environments that are both rigorous and deeply human-centered.

Xutong Liu, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Systems
School of Engineering & Technology

Xutong Liu is an assistant professor whose research focuses on developing structure-aware online learning and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. His work leverages the underlying action, feedback and agent structures to make optimal decisions in networked systems. He emphasizes theory-grounded guarantees for data efficiency, scalability and robustness, ensuring RL algorithms are applicable to real-world decision-making challenges in edge-based multimedia systems, conversational recommendation systems and cost-effective large language model (LLM) serving platforms. 

Dr. Liu holds a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science and engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Bachelor of Science in computer science and technology from the University of Science and Technology of China. His postdoctoral experience includes appointments in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, computer science and engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and as a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was awarded the RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship, and his research has been recognized as the best paper runner-up at ACM SIGMETRICS 2025 and selected for a long oral presentation the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning.

Morteza Nabavinejad, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Computer and Electrical Engineering
School of Engineering & Technology

Morteza Nabavinejad earned his Doctor of Philosophy in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Before joining UW Tacoma, he held positions at Brown University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM). His research focuses on energy- and power-aware computing, artificial intelligence for systems, resource allocation, scheduling and GPU accelerators.

Anthony Pratcher II, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Labor Studies
School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Anthony Pratcher II is an African American historian from the Salt River Valley. His previous appointments include the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University; Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University; the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University; and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. 

While his public scholarship explores space and race in the American Southwest, he has co-edited a textbook on planning history, Planning Future Cities (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 2017), with Walter Greason. He is completing a new manuscript, Searching for My People: Black Arizonans and the Making of the Metropolitan Southwest, under contract with University of Arizona Press. His work has been published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Pennsylvania Magazine of Biography and History, Southern California Quarterly, and Technology and Culture. He was the first alumnus from a historically Black college or university (HBCU) — earning a Bachelor of Arts in history from Howard University — to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in American history from the University of Pennsylvania. In his spare time, he enjoys yoga, hiking and biking.

Cindy Sousa, Ph.D., MSW, MPH

Professor of Social Work
School of Social Work & Criminal Justice

Cindy Sousa is a tenured professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice. Through interconnected community engagement, teaching and research, Cindy examines the health impacts of political violence and climate disasters from a liberatory, feminist and anti-colonial lens. Spanning multiple decades and destinations, her work highlights the mental health implications of violations to the lived environment; the importance of culture, place, political action, social support and organizational strengths; and professional responsibility in the face of collective suffering. 

Her current projects include collaborations studying family survival of genocide and disasters, using critical perspectives on caregiving, foreground sovereignty, cultures of survival, multigenerational resistance and grassroots healing. Cindy has served in leadership roles within the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR). She is a Research Affiliate at two international labs — the Global Adversity and Wellbeing Research Group at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario and the Health Conflict Psychology Lab at The University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy.

I-An “Amy” Su, Ph.D., Esq.

Assistant Professor of Cognitive Psychology
School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

I-An “Amy” Su earned her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University, with a minor in Cognitive Science. She is also a licensed attorney in Taiwan and the founding managing partner of LegalChime Attorneys-at-Law, where she specialized in capital defense and psycho-legal consultation. Her research focuses on children’s eyewitness memory and suggestibility, false memory, the death penalty and the intersection of psychology and law.

Sarah Arvey Tov, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Special Education
School of Education

Dr. Sarah Arvey Tov is passionate about education that affirms and celebrates disability as part of students’ multifaceted identities and experiences. Her work in special education spans more than 15 years as a special education teacher, activist, researcher and teacher educator. She brings an intersectional lens to educational justice and uplifts student wholeness through community-grounded, arts-based and cross-disability collaborations that are explicitly anti-racist and anti-ableist. She works with disabled youth, educators, artists and activists to develop curriculum and community-research partnerships, including the One Out of Five: Disability History and Pride Project, the Disability Justice in Schools series, and her most recent project, Cripping Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. In all her work, Dr. Tov is humbled by the incredible brilliance and creativity of disabled youth.

Zikai Alex Wen, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Information Technology
School of Engineering & Technology

Zikai Alex Wen teaches and conducts research in human-computer interaction, with a specialization in usable privacy and security. His work focuses on designing evidence-based interactive interventions — including educational video games, explanatory visualizations and AI assistants — to enhance users' understanding and control of digital privacy and security technologies. He leads the User Autonomy, Security and Privacy Enhancing Technologies Lab (User ASPECT Lab). 

Dr. Wen's research interests include AI safety, anti-phishing and differential privacy. His research has been published in top-tier venues including the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the Association of Computing Machinery CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He has received several scholarly honors, including the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention.