As Khoury College's newest faculty begin their research and teaching, let's take a moment to meet them. For faculty who are beginning their appointment this year but who were announced last year, see our previous announcement.

Click a faculty member’s name to jump to their section, or simply read on: 

Terra Blevins

Assistant professor, starting fall 2025 in Boston 

Blevins is interested in linguistic analysis of natural language processing (NLP) models and multilingual NLP. While completing her PhD at the University of Washington, she focused on how multilingual models acquire new language unsupervised, and on designing multilingual modeling approaches to better represent low-resource languages. She also spent time as a visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research and as a postdoctoral researcher in the Vienna NLP group at the University of Vienna. 

Upol Ehsan 

Assistant professor, starting fall 2025 in Boston (Khoury research fellow in 2024–25) 

Ehsan’s mission is to make AI systems explainable and responsible so that people who are not at the table do not end up on the menu. He coined the term “human-centered explainable AI” and his work has informed responsible AI policies at policies at the United Nations, Mozilla Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In addition to his role as an assistant professor at Khoury College, Ehsan is also a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; an affiliate at the independent nonprofit research organization Data & Society; and an advisor for Aalor Asha, an educational institute he started for children subjected to child labor. 

READ: Khoury News’ three-part series covering Ehsan’s work on the harms of dead AI systems, human-centered explainable AI, and AI in his native Bangladesh 

Gabriela Gongora-Svartzman 

Associate teaching professor and director of computing programs in Miami, started spring 2025 

Gongora-Svartzman is deeply committed to inclusive and innovative computing. That value shapes everything she does — her leadership as Khoury College’s first director of computing programs in Miami, her research into ethical machine learning frameworks for decarbonization strategies, and her pedagogical approach as a longtime professor of data analysis and machine learning. Svartzman also chairs the Committee on Teaching and Learning at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and she enjoys mentoring students in data-focused competitions. 

Lunjia Hu 

Assistant professor, starting fall 2025 in Boston 

Hu’s theoretical computer science research explores the foundations of trustworthy machine learning. A member of the Northeastern Theory Group, he researches topics from uncertainty quantification to algorithmic decision making to learning theory. Before joining Khoury College, Hu was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society. He is looking for new PhD students and encourages interested candidates to reach out. 

Xiang (Jenny) Ren 

Assistant professor, starting fall 2025 in Boston 

Ren’s work focuses on how to build better performance and reliability into system software, and on the tools that could help developers achieve those goals. Her work has appeared in such conferences as OSDI, SOSP, FAST, and FSE. Ren is a member of the Systems Research Group, and she looks forward to carrying out innovative research with motivated students.  

Jayshree Sarathy 

Assistant professor, starting fall 2025 in Boston 

Sarathy blends technical computer science expertise and social science theory to explore responsible data science, with a focus on privacy and data access. Her work analyzing public-interest data infrastructures — e.g. the Wikimedia Foundation — has been published in numerous conferences and journals, including ACM CHI, CSCW, the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and the Harvard Data Science Review. As an assistant professor and member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, Sarathy looks forward to encouraging the next generation of technologists to center sociotechnical perspectives and political advocacy in their work. 

Lorenzo Torresani 

Professor and President Joseph E. Aoun Chair, starting fall 2025 in Boston 

Torresani intends to build a research lab focusing on the creation of “perceptual AI assistants” — AI agents that use wearable cameras to observe, understand, and assist humans in daily tasks. He is fascinated by the way that vision is effortless for humans yet challenging for machines, and he wants to create multimodal video understanding systems that go beyond recognizing user actions to discern how an activity is being performed. His multimodal video recognition research has been recognized with a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, three Facebook Faculty Awards, and a Fulbright US Scholar Award. 

Rebekah Tromble 

Professor, starting fall 2025 in Boston, jointly appointed with the College of Social Sciences and Humanities 

Tromble, who was an affiliate fellow of Northeastern’s Internet Democracy Initiative even before joining the university as a professor, studies political communication, digital research methodology, and research ethics. She is a leading expert on digital platform data access for research and a co-founder of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research and is particularly interested in the impacts of toxic and abusive content on social media. 

Jia Zhu 

Assistant teaching professor, starting fall 2025 in Miami 

Zhu strives to use inclusive, hands-on, research-grounded teaching approaches to empower computing students from all backgrounds with the knowledge, mindset, and adaptability to thrive. She completed her PhD with a focus in computing education in 2024, then spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at Ohio State University, where she researched ways to enhance learning experiences, expand supports, broaden participation, and improve retention in computing education. Zhu was drawn by Khoury College’s culture of inclusive, interdisciplinary learning, and will teach foundational courses in computer science and AI.