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Division of Academic Affairs

Cohort Members

The URT Cohort is made up of faculty from throughout the Fresno State campus.

Please take a moment to meet us!

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Antonio Avalos, Associate Professor of Economics

Antonio Avalos

Craig School of Business
Peters Business Building, Room 385B
559-278-8793
aavalos@csufresno.edu

Professor Avalos is chair of the Economics Department.

Hongwei Dong, Assistant Professor of Geography

Hongwei Dong

College of Scoial Sciences
Science Building, Room 172
559-278-2890
hdong@csufresno.edu

Dr. Hongwei Dong earned his doctorate degree in Urban Studies in 2010 from Portland State University. Before joining the department in August 2011, he worked as a research associate in the Center for Urban Studies at Portland State University. His research interests include land use and transportation planning and modeling, smart growth, urban spatial structure, and application of quantitative analysis and GIS in urban studies and planning.

Qin Fan, Assistant Professor of Economics

Qin Fan

Craig School of Business
Peters Business Building, Room 319
559-278-4931
qfan@csufresno.edu   

Dr. Qin Fan earned her doctoral degree in Environmental and Regional Economics from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on climate change impacts on household location choices and economic consequences. She conducts both empirical work and modeling work to simulate economic impacts due to climate-induced migration. Dr. Fan’s previous and current work on climate change impacts and adaptation is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Dr. Fan enjoys interdisciplinary research that bridges economics, natural science, and engineering. She has published in the Journal of Transportation Research Board and presented in many national and international conferences in the field of environmental economics, energy economics and climate change. Her research interests include environmental economics, regional economics, applied econometrics, and nonmarket valuation. Dr. Fan devotes her passion to teaching and mainly teaches urban & regional economics, and environmental economics.

Luz Gonzalez, Dean, College of Social Sciences

Luz Gonzalez

Social Science Building, Room 108
559-278-3013
luzg@csufresno.edu  

Robert Harper, Dean, Craig School of Business

Robert Harper

Peters Business Building, Room 282
559-278-2482
roberth@csufresno.edu 

Alam Hasson, Professor of Chemistry

Alam Hasson

College of Science and Mathematics
Science Building, Room 250
559-278-2420
ahasson@csufresno.edu 

Dr. Hasson is chair of the Chemistry Department in the College of Science and Mathematics. Dr. Hasson earned his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Oxford University, and his PhD in Physical Chemistry from Birmingham University, United Kingdom. He then carried out postdoctoral research in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at UCLA before joining Fresno State in 2001.

Alicia Iriberri, Assistant Professor of Information Systems

Alicia Irberri

Craig School of Business
Peters Business Building, Room 221
559-278-4852
airiberri@csufresno.edu  

Dr. Alicia Iriberri joined Fresno State in the Fall 2013. She was Assistant Professor in Management Information Systems at University Illinois, Springfield. She was Visiting Professor at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and teaches various MIS courses including Management of Information Systems, Business Process Integration, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Database Systems.

Dr. Iriberri co-authored four journal articles in Electronic Government: An International Journal, Research in Computing Science, Decision Support Systems, and ACM Computing Surveys. She also published 11 refereed proceedings. Professional experiences for Dr. Iriberri include Manger of Strategic Information and Business Intelligence at Seguros Serfin Lincoln and Systems Engineer at IBM de Mexico.

Dr. Iriberri holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems and Technology and an MS in Computer Information Systems from the Claremont Graduate University, CA. She holds a BS in Computer Information Systems from Universidad Iberoamericana, México.

Chris Langer, Public Services

Library , Room 1139
559-278-8152
clanger@csufresno.edu

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Sam Lankford, Professor of Community Recreation and Youth Services

Sam Lankford

College of Health and Human Services
Professional and Human Services, Room 121
559-278-2838
slankford@csufresno.edu 

Professor Lankford is chair of the Recreation Administration Department.

Jesus Larralde-Muro, Associate Dean, Lyles College of Engineering

Jesus Larralde-Muro

Engineering East Building, Room 124
559-278-2566
jesuslm@csufresno.edu 

Dr. Larralde-Muro is professor of transportation engineering. 

Ram Nunna, Dean, Lyles College of Engineering

Ram Nunna

Engineering East Building, Room 122
559-278-2500
rnunna@csufresno.edu

Dr. Nunna is professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Jennifer Randles, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Jennifer Randles

College of Social Sciences
Social Sciences Building, Room 225
559-278-5146
jrandles@csufresno.edu

Dr. Jennifer Randles earned her Master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. She taught for two years at Austin College before joining the faculty of California State University, Fresno in the fall of 2013. She specializes in the sociology of family, marriage, gender, social inequality, and qualitative methodologies. Her current research addresses how social and economic inequities affect American family life and how public policies address these intimate inequalities. Current research projects include qualitative investigations of government-supported relationship and marriage education programs for low-income couples, parenting skills and work support programs for low-income fathers, and how colleges and universities can best support student parents. She thoroughly enjoys teaching classes on family/marriage, race/ethnicity, research methods, childhood, and medicine/health and has advised numerous student research projects on family-related issues and internships in family-focused community benefit organizations.

Aly Tawfik, Assistant Professor of Civil and Geomatics Engineering

Aly Tawfik

Lyles College of Engineering
Engineering East Building, Room 198
559-278-8791
atawfik@csufresno.edu

Dr.  Aly Tawfik is assistant professor of Transportation Systems Engineering at California State University, Fresno’s Department of Civil and Geomatics Engineering. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses that include travel survey methods, transportation planning, transportation GIS, sustainable transportation systems and transportation econometrics. His research interests include modeling and simulation of travel behavior and transportation systems, with particular focus on the sustainability and future of our transportation systems. Examples of his active research projects include investigating implications of connected and automated vehicles, employing agents of artificial intelligence for optimization of transportation systems, exploring ramifications of food accessibility on human diet and health, and benchmarking low- and zero- emission vehicle technologies. Dr. Tawfik is an active member in the transportation community. He is the author of many peer-reviewed publications and a member on a number of national research committees; including the TRB’s Travel Survey Methods Committee, Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications Committee, and Special Taskforce on Climate Change and Energy. Dr. Tawfik has experience working on transportation projects of varying scales in both developed as well as developing countries. His work experience ranges from working on local traffic impact studies, to national, regional and international transportation planning projects.

Rosa Toro, Assistant Professor of Psychology 

Rosa Toro

College of Science and Mathematics
Science II Building, Room 355
559-278-4061
rtoro@csufresno.edu

Dr. Rosa Toro earned her doctorate degree in Psychology (Developmental Psychology emphasis) in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside. Before joining the Department of Psychology at Fresno State in July 2013, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the MacArthur Network on How Housing Matter for Families with Young Children at Tufts University. Her research interests are framed within an ecological systems perspectives and immigrant children and families. Specifically, some of her research interests are centered on the influence of housing (quality and crowding) in young children's development and the relationship involving neighborhood social process variables in the parenting-child outcomes link.

Chic-Hao Wang, Assistant Professor of Geography

College of Social Sciences
Science Building, Room 154
559-278-6041
cwang@csufresno.edu

Dr. Chih-Hao Wang received his Ph.D. (2013) and Master (2010) degrees in City and Regional Planning, The Ohio State University. Before joining the department in 2014, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the City and Regional Planning Section of the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on environmental planning from the perspective of natural hazard mitigation. Another of his research interest is to apply spatial statistics to analyze spatial or social interactions in earthquake process, transportation planning, and water management.

Zhi Wang, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

College of Science and Mathematics
Science II Building, Room 121
559-278-4427
zwang@csufresno.edu

Dr. Zhi (Luke) Wang is Professor of Hydrology and Soil Physics at California State University, Fresno in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and is the Coordinator of this GIS Certificate Program. Dr. Wang learned GIS in the 1990s and has been teaching the subject on campus since 2002. His PhD dissertation and many of his research involved many of the GIS applications, especially the 3-D, surface and geostatistical analyses. Dr. Wang participated in many ESRI user conferences, hands-on training sessions and user-model collaborations,  and presented as a speaker in several of California’s local GIS meetings. His GIS analysis maps on the Fresno River Monitoring project were adopted by the Madera County Library for display to the public.

Sarah Whitley, Assistant Professor of Sociology

College of Social Sciences
Social Sciences Building, Room 218
559-278-2275
swhitley@csufresno.edu

Dr. Sarah Whitley is currently a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. Her research interests focus on food insecurity and hunger in rural and urban settings. She specifically evaluates how grocery retailing changes in the past twenty years have affected food access for low-income populations. Her data shows that grocery retailing has affected the shopping behaviors and patterns of residents, which also effects individual diet and health. She also discusses in her research how public policy is addressing the increasing hunger epidemic. She has published refereed conference papers and journals.

Wei Wu, Assistant Professor of Construction Management

Wei Wu, Assistant Professor

Lyles College of Engineering
Engineering East Building, Room 132
559-278-6011
weiwu@csufresno.edu

Dr. Wei Wu is assistant professor in the construction management program. He received his bachelor degree in civil engineering from Hunan University, China; a master degree in environmental science from University of Oxford in the UK, and a PhD degree in design, construction and planning from University of Florida in the US. Wei has been actively engaged in scholarly publication, funded research, innovative teaching and professional services. He has been publishing in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, on topics of BIM, green building design and construction, cloud computing and information modeling and construction education. He has also been the PI and Co-PI for several internal and external grants on projects that investigated climate change impacts on building performances and community infrastructure.

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Pei Xu, Assistant Professor of Ag Business

Pei Xu, Assistant Professor

Jordan College of Ag Sciences and Technology
Peters Business Building, Room 311
559-278-5685
pxu@csufresno.edu

Dr. Pei Xu received a M.S. in applied economics from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Purdue University. Her research focuses on consumer food purchase behavior and agribusiness management strategies. Dr. Xu is working with a group of food nutrition experts from Alaska to explore the feasibility of enhancing Alaskan salmon consumption in its rural school districts. Dr. Xu's recently funded research will support her and her team to investigate the possibility of helping California dairy farmers better use futures and options contracts to improve farm level profit. Dr. Xu enjoyed teaching undergraduate agribusiness courses. In the summer of 2012, she brought 14 agribusiness students to visit China's food production and processing facilities and toured Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing.

Xiaoming Yang, Geospatial Information Center 

Library , Room 1130
559-278-8457
xmyang@csufresno.edu

Manoochehr Zoghi, Professor of Construction Management

Lyles College of Engineering
Engineering East Building, Room 192
559-278-6056
mzoghi@csufresno.edu