Incoming Faculty
Kyle Aune
Kyle Aune, Ph.D., is an environmental epidemiologist who uses high dimensional climate and other environmental datasets along with data science and spatial statistical methods to answer questions about the health effects of climate change. He earned his PhD in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2022 and holds an MPH in epidemiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Public Health and a BS in biomedical sciences from Auburn University. His research aims to improve climate threat exposure assessments with big climate data; explore climate and environmental determinants of infectious diseases using existing public datasets, vital records, and large climate datasets as well as through primary data collection; and identify and remedy climate and environmental justice issues through community-engaged research.
John Bartholomew
Dr. Bartholomew is a Professor of Kinesiology, where he serves as Department Head. He is an exercise psychologist and is interested in the design, implementation and evaluation of interventions to increase physical activity, with a particular interest in the elementary school setting. His teaching centers on the role of physical activity in public health.
Zachary Bigalke
Zach Bigalke is a historian and visiting assistant teaching professor in the Department of Kinesiology, where he teaches courses on sport history and sport philosophy. Zach’s research focuses on sport and physical culture as a site for narrative construction at local, regional, and national levels. He also researches ways in which sport has historically developed unhealthy practices and how local pastimes evolve into modern sports.
Brad DeWeese
Brad DeWeese who serves as the Director of Human Performance Science, lives at the intersection of elite sport preparation and applied sport science. As a coach, he has supervised Team USA athletes to 21 Olympic and World Championship medals alongside 7 World Championship titles. Coinciding with his work in the field, Brad’s publications and research emphasizes the determination of best practices related to the comprehensive training process for world class competitors.
Benjamin Fry
Benjamin Fry, Ph.D., will join the Department of Biobehavioral Health as an Associate Teaching Professor in January. Dr. Fry was previously an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. He is a Behavioral Neuroscientist and expert on the role of midbrain dopaminergic circuitry as it pertains to diverse facets of human experience, including learning and memory, reward, addiction, and neuropsychiatric illness. His research previously focused on the use of in-vivo optogenetic and chemogenetic techniques in pre-clinical models of schizophrenia. Dr. Fry’s most recent research involved a combination of Pavlovian learning theory and Bayesian Inference to understand the manner in which the brain processes incoming sensory information and gives rise to such phenomena as hallucinations as well as the unique impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patient populations with schizophrenia.
Xi Gong
Xi Gong, Ph.D., will join the Department of Biobehavioral Health as an Associate Professor and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences as a Faculty Co-hire in January 2025. He is currently an Associate Professor of GIScience in the Department of Geography & Environmental Studies and the Center for the Advancement of Spatial Informatics Research and Education (ASPIRE) at the University of New Mexico, where he also directs the Spatially Integrated Social Science (SISS) Lab. Dr. Gong earned his doctoral degree in GIScience from Texas State University in 2016. Building on his training in GIScience, software engineering, statistics, and epidemiology, Dr. Gong's research aims to elucidate the complex relationships among human health, society, and the environment through spatial-temporal analysis of geospatial big data. Specifically, his research in Environmental Health Science focuses on advancing exposure assessment models and further investigating the links between environmental exposures and adverse health outcomes via geospatial big data analytics.
Xiangming Ji
Xiangming Ji is an incoming Associate Professor of Nutritional Sciences and his research focuses on metabolic studies in the airway epithelium, spanning from normal cells to at-risk epithelial cells, and ultimately to cancer cells. He is accumulating evidence that metabolic reprogramming plays a critical role in the airway epithelial compartment, central to the development of lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis (CF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and lung cancer. His current research aims to elucidate the pathogenesis of cystic fibrosis-related diabetes and the associated metabolic reprogramming. His work is highly interdisciplinary, encompassing molecular biology, induced pluripotent stem cell-derived organoids, and metabolic flux analysis. Ultimately, the goals of these projects are to identify potential metabolites that could be used as therapeutic and diagnostic biomarkers in the future.
Mary Justis
Mary Justis, Ph.D., will be joining the Department of Biobehavioral Health in August as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Dr. Justis, an experienced educator, has shared her expertise in several undergraduate health and human development programs in Pennsylvania and New York. She earned her doctorate in educational theory and research from Binghamton University, which focused on promoting student engagement and inclusion through collaborative and experiential learning and has been instrumental in preparing her students for real-world experiences. Her research has informed her teaching that centers on the social, behavioral, and environmental factors influencing health outcomes for individuals and communities. Mary's contributions extend beyond the classroom, as an active member of several professional organizations that support health promotion and equity and has served on numerous planning committees for undergraduate and graduate health degree programs.
Sue Kelley
Sue Kelley, Ph.D., will join the Department of Biobehavioral Health in January as an Associate Teaching Professor. Dr. Kelley received a degree in psychology from the Pennsylvania State University (Schreyer Honors College). She graduated summa cum laude with honors. She went on to earn her M.S. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Kelley's research has focused on the socioemotional development of toddlers. She has studied factors related to self-conscious emotions and mastery, learned helplessness, and attachment. After spending nearly 20 years teaching psychology at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA, Dr. Kelley transitioned into an administrative position at Pennsylvania College of Technology as Dean of the School of Business, Arts & Sciences.
Jennifer Keluskar
Jennifer Keluskar, Ph.D., will be joining the Department of Biobehavioral Health in August as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Jennifer Keluskar, Ph.D. previously taught as an adjunct professor for the department of psychology at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is a New York State Licensed Clinical Psychologist specializing in cognitive-behavioral interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and anxiety disorders. Previously, Dr. Keluskar provided diagnostic evaluations and psychotherapy for Stony Brook Hospital’s Outpatient Department of Psychiatry. She continues to lecture to trainees as a part of Stony Brook’s voluntary faculty. Dr. Keluskar also has an interest in understanding and addressing the mental health impacts of climate change and is involved in writing projects concerning this topic. As a blog writer for Psychology Today, she is committed to educating the community about various mental health topics.
Taewon Kim
Taewon (Tay) Kim is a neuroscientist and Assistant Research Professor of Motor Control in the Department of Kinesiology and the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at Penn State College of Medicine. His research utilizes behavioral and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying human motor skill learning and neurorehabilitation for individuals who need to acquire or re-learn essential motor skills following unilateral impairments.
Mohanraj Krishnan
Mohanraj Krishnan, Ph.D., will be joining the Department of Biobehavioral Health in August as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Krishnan’s doctoral studies focused on the genetic determinants of obesity and its clinical sequalae and established his methodological skills in health research, genomics, and computational biology; making him ideally positioned to perform health research on how the role of ‘omics’ is integral in an individual’s unique physiology and health outcomes. He contributed to establishing a unique international genomics biobank that has served as a platform to test and validate combinations of key clinical, environmental, and molecular markers to predict disease outcomes.
Lucy McClain
Lucy McClain is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management Department. Her teaching is focused on sustainability and environmental education. Trained in the learning sciences, McClain studies how individuals and family groups learn in non-formal educational settings – including outdoor spaces and nature centers – using both non-mobile and mobile devices as learning tools.
Troy Phillips
Troy is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Health Policy and Administration. He has over three decades of healthcare experience largely focused on finance and revenue cycle, which includes executive roles in health systems, healthcare IT firms, and most recently serving as CEO of an orthopedic specialty hospital. Troy teaches courses in the Master of Health Administration program.
Abigail Pauley
Abbie is an Assistant Research Professor of Kinesiology.
Jonelle Prokopchak
Jonelle Prokopchak’s role as Assistant Teaching Professor includes teaching Clinical Phonetics and working on the provision of clinical, fluency, and gender affirming voice care in the Speech, Language, and Hearing Clinic for the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Jonelle has over 15 years’ experience working as a school based Speech-Language Pathologist.
Mark Ramos
Mark is an Assistant Research Professor of Health Policy and Administration. He is a statistician with research experience in statistical method development, specifically in the areas of multiple testing and efficient sampling. His research utilizes large, complex datasets such as the United Kingdom Biobank, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Screening dataset, and the United States Military Health System.
Ligia Reyes
Ligia Reyes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and her research focuses on food choice. She studies social influences on early childhood dietary behavior by examining the social networks and food environments in which food exposures occur. This research builds on the understanding that early-life food exposures pave dietary trajectories in later-life, dietary behavior is highly socialized, and families and communities with limited resources and living in rural settings experience inequities that disproportionately influence their nutrition and health. The underlying goal of this research is to address health inequities by optimizing interventions that promote nourishing diets and enabling environments for improved nutrition, health, and overall potential to thrive.
Jessica Thompson
Jessica is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Administration. Her research interests include community-engaged approaches, chronic disease prevention, rural and Appalachian women's health, and systems science. She uses mixed method and participatory approaches to study contextual and social factors affecting disparate chronic diseases (e.g., lung cancer, CVD) among Appalachian women.
Kim Wiersielis
Kim Wiersielis, Ph.D., will be joining the Department of Biobehavioral Health in January as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Wiersielis’s research investigates the cognitive impacts resulting from perinatal exposure to organophosphate flame-retardants (OPFRs), a type of endocrine-disrupting compound, as well as stress/corticotropin-releasing factor in adult rodents. Through Dr. Wiersielis’s investigation, they've uncovered sex-, hormone-, and exposure-dependent effects on cognitive processing, illuminating the intricate relationship between OPFR exposure, stress, and cognition. These findings underscore the importance of examining the neurobiological underpinnings of these effects and their potential implications for human cognitive health throughout the developmental lifespan.
Xue Zhang
Xue Zhang, Ph.D., will be joining the Department of Biobehavioral Health in August as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Zhang's research focuses on rural health disparity, population health, regional economics, and government policy. Her current research employs a human ecological framework to examine geographic differences in demographic structure, social determinants of health, urban planning, social policy, and population health outcomes with a specific focus on rural-urban differences.