College of Sciences New Faculty 2025-26

Elena Blanco-Suárez, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Biology

Elena Blanco-Suárez is a new faculty member in the Department of Biology. Elena is originally from Asturies, Spain, where she grew up and attended University of Oviedo to obtain her Licenciatura in Biology. She also spent a year studying at Aristotelous University of Thessaloniki in Greece as an Erasmus student. She earned her M.S. in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biomedicine at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), and soon after, moved to the UK to pursue her Ph.D. under a Marie Curie ITN fellowship at the University of Bristol.

In 2014, Elena arrived in San Diego to complete her postdoc at the Salk Institute. She became Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, before returning to San Diego and establishing her lab at SDSU. The main goal of the lab is to harness the potential of astrocytes to regulate neuronal plasticity in injury and disease to improve prevention and functional recovery. Her lab’s work has been supported by the American Heart Association and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Beyond her research, Elena is deeply committed to science communication and education, and she loves getting involved with local communities and bringing science closer to the public. In recognition of these efforts, she received the Society for Neuroscience’s Next Generation Award and was named a finalist for the AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science.

Outside the lab, she likes playing guitar and ukulele, going to punk rock shows, watching bad horror movies, and planning her next trip to Asturies.

Rodolphe Jazzar, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Rodolphe Jazzar is a new faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, with strong international research ties, notably to Rennes Institute of Chemical Sciences and the CNRS in France. His lab creates novel ligands, catalysts and functional materials at the crossroads of main-group chemistry, chirality, crystallography and theory.

Committed to teaching and mentoring, Rodolphe fosters a collaborative, globally connected research environment, offering students immersive cross-cultural experiences. Outside the lab, he enjoys playing music, gaming, cooking and swimming, but most of all he cherishes time with his family.

Jianshu Liu, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Jianshu Liu is a new faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Louisiana State University in 2024 and previously served as an Assistant Professor at Boise State University. His research interest lies in distributed systems and cloud computing, focusing on the performance and scalability analysis of evolving cloud systems, aiming to achieve good performance and high resource efficiency for evolving systems in cloud environments.

Jianshu contributes to building sustainable and secure cloud environments by employing timeline analysis to investigate factors that cause the performance variations. He also designs and evaluates automated and intelligent frameworks to address system weaknesses and boost system performance.

Jianshu has great enthusiasm for inspiring and mentoring students who are interested in optimizing modern systems with new architectures. Outside of work, Jianshu enjoys hiking, doing various sports, and exploring scenic and local cuisine.

Yifan Zhang, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Yifan Zhang is a new faculty member in the Cybersecurity Center for Research and Education and the Department of Computer Science. He recently defended his Ph.D. at Indiana University Bloomington. His research focuses on security and privacy issues in the software supply chain, mobile systems, and IoT environments.

He is dedicated to uncovering new attack vectors and identifying emerging privacy risks in these domains. His work has been published at top-tier security conferences, including USENIX Security and CCS. In 2022, his research was selected as a Top 10 Finalist for the Best Applied Security Paper Award at CSAW.

In his free time, Yifan enjoys scuba diving and esports.

Liam Courtney-Davies, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Liam Courtney-Davies is a new assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at SDSU. He received BSc and MSc degrees in Geoscience from Royal Holloway, University of London, then went on to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide (South Australia), and undertook postdoctoral research positions in the John de Laeter Centre at Curtin University (Western Australia) and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Liam is a field and lab geoscientist who researches deep time processes in Earth history and the formation of critical mineral deposits. He will be setting up a state-of-the-art Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) facility at SDSU, capable of measuring the age and composition of minerals at high precision and at micron scale resolution.

Naneh Apkarian, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Naneh Apkarian is Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at SDSU. Naneh grew up and completed her education in Southern California culminating with a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Science Education from the joint doctoral program between UC San Diego and SDSU. She previously worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Western Michigan University and Assistant Professor in Arizona State University’s School of Mathematics & Statistics.

Naneh's broad research focus is departmental change aimed at improving students' experiences with introductory STEM courses. Existing and ongoing research in RUME and DBER (and K-12 mathematics and science education fields) points to many pedagogical strategies, curricular approaches, and program structures which can support student success and broaden participation beyond the current system. However, shifts at the individual, departmental, and institutional level toward implementing these practices and structures have proven challenging at scale. Her work engages a systemic cultural approach to understand the relationships between individual, department and institutional factors that support and constrain interest, willingness and capacity for instructional change.

In her spare time, she continues to play competitive water polo, travel and build community.

Mehmet Dogan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Physics

Mehmet Dogan is a new faculty member in the Department of Physics. Mehmet studies technologically relevant materials at the sub-nanometer scale using fundamental physical equations as implemented by software. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University and has worked as a researcher at UC Berkeley and UT Austin.

Prior to joining SDSU, Mehmet studied interfaces between semiconductors, e.g. silicon, and very thin insulators. He showed that a smaller, faster and more energy efficient type of transistor (known as a ferroelectric field-effect transistor) can be made using these materials. His work at UC Berkeley helped discover nano-devices such as a new NO₂ sensor, and provided important insights to experiments in the search for a room-temperature superconductor. At UT Austin Center for Computational Materials, he focused on developing and implementing software solutions to study large nano-materials from first-principles, which has led to record-breaking calculations of silicon nano-clusters. Most recently, Mehmet worked as a Technical Advisor at Ropes & Gray LLP in the Intellectual Property Litigation Group.

Mehmet is excited to mentor the next generation of physicists at SDSU. Apart from research and teaching, he enjoys hiking, biking and live music.

Maital Neta, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Psychology

Maital Neta is a new faculty member in the Department of Psychology and Director of the MRI Center. Prior to her arrival at SDSU, Maital completed her Ph.D. at Dartmouth College, postdoctoral work at Washington University School of Medicine and served for 11 years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as faculty in the Department of Psychology and Associate Director of the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior. Her research explores individual differences in how we process emotional ambiguity, and examines related questions through the lens of neuroscience.

Maital has expertise in resting-state and task-based functional MRI, which she uses to study individual differences in brain organization that shape the way we navigate our social and emotional world. Her research aims to understand how we come to have the biases that we have, and how those biases can be shaped and changed in order to promote greater psychological well-being and interpersonal relationships. This year, Maital was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Maital is deeply committed to teaching and mentoring future scientists. In her free time, she enjoys art, hiking, picnics, and soaking up the company of her husband and three kids.