New faces, new fields: meet the new faculty and scholars joining Brandeis this Fall

Brandeis Stories

New faces, new fields: meet the new faculty and scholars joining Brandeis this Fall

October 4, 2026 • General

The latest cohort of faculty and postdoctoral fellows at Brandeis represents fields ranging from neuroscience to environmental law. It includes a soft-robotics researcher, a mathematician revealing how patterns emerge out of chaos, and a marine archaeologist who now studies international law. Meet this rich and diverse group of researchers below.

Richard (Rick) Freedman - Computer Science

Rick Freedman joins Brandeis this fall as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Freedman completed his Ph.D. in 2020 at UMass Amherst and had been a researcher at Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT) since 2018, while also teaching classes at Wentworth Institute of Technology and Tufts University as an adjunct instructor and visiting lecturer. He combines his experiences as a scientist, educator, and artist to introduce students to various STEAM and research careers beyond software development. Freedman was an EAAI New and Future Educator Award recipient in 2017, and he currently organizes the EAAI Mentored Undergraduate Research Challenge.

Spencer Brown - Biology/Neuroscience, Volen Center for Complex Systems

Spencer Brown joins the Volen National Center for Complex Systems in the School of Science, Engineering and Technology this January as an Assistant Professor of Biology. He earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Northwestern University unravelling the complex ways that the brain choreographs movement. After Northwestern, Brown continued that work as a postdoctoral fellow at University College London, where he helped develop optical imaging tools that could watch brain signals ripple across large networks of neurons in lab animals. His publications span neurobiology, optical engineering and neuromorphic computing, a field that seeks to build computer hardware that can mimic how brains process information.

Wing-Sum Law - Engineering

Wing-Sum Law joins Brandeis this fall as an Assistant Professor of Engineering. Law completed her PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford University (2025), where she was also a lecturer (2026). She has a great enthusiasm for undergraduate teaching and is looking forward to developing courses with Brandeis' new engineering program. Her research focuses on the design of soft robots, which she plans to further develop both academically and as an artistic practice.

Amanda Shilton - Biochemistry

Amanda Shilton '18 returns to Brandeis this fall as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry - this time on the other side of the lectern. Shilton completed both her bachelor's and master's degrees at Brandeis in 2018 before heading to The Rockefeller University, a leading center for CRISPR research, where she earned her Ph.D. in 2025 studying the molecular mechanisms behind bacterial CRISPR-Cas immune systems, the biological machinery that now underlies modern gene-editing technology. She is passionate about undergraduate science education, outreach, and creating environments that encourage diverse students to explore their scientific identities.

Clin Lai - Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Artificial Intelligence and Society

Clin Lai will join Brandeis this fall as the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Artificial Intelligence and Society, serving as Lecturer in the Departments of Psychology, Sociology, and Computer Science, with an affiliation in Computational Linguistics. Lai completed a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology in 2026 at The Pennsylvania State University, where she also earned an M.S. in Cognitive Psychology in 2023, and holds a B.A. with Honors in Psychology from Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Her research sits at the intersection of creative cognition, collaboration, and artificial intelligence, with work published in journals including Nature Human Behaviour, Thinking Skills and Creativity, as well as a contributed chapter in the Handbook of Creativity in Schools (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026).

Gaby Nair - Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

Gaby Nair completed her Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University in 2026. A political theorist focused on democratic theory and the history of political thought, Nair's dissertation and forthcoming book manuscript build a case for participatory democracy through a close study of the U.S. student movement of the 1960s. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Political Theory, and at Princeton she was honored with a George Kateb Preceptor Award for her teaching.

Morgan Breene - Madeleine Haas Russell Postdoctoral Fellow in Indigenous and Environmental Law

Morgan Breene will teach in both the Legal Studies and Environmental Studies departments at Brandeis. She earned her JD from Harvard Law in 2026 and, before that, a DPhil in Global and Imperial History from Oxford, where her thesis examined colonial Madras through the lens of its ships and shorelines. Breene's path there started underwater: as a University of Rhode Island undergraduate, she was a certified scientific diver who explored Napoleonic-era shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, becoming URI's first-ever Marshall Scholar in the process. That scholarship funded master's degrees in maritime archaeology at Southampton and European history at UCL - training that still shapes how she reads the sea's role in empire, law, and land.