Ratika Gore

Assistant Professor of Professional Practice

Management and Global Business

Rutgers Business School

Dr. Ratika Gore is a top-rated faculty member and academic leader with 27+ years of international experience in business and academia across the USA, Singapore, Belgium, Philippines, and India. She also serves as a speaker, consultant, and advisor to EdTech ventures and non-profit boards. She is a certified Leadership coach and her research and thought leadership focus on online user behavior and entrepreneurship

Nitish Kumar

Assistant Professor of Professional

Practice

Finance and Economics

Rutgers Business School

Nitish Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Rutgers Business School. Before joining Rutgers, Prof. Kumar was an Assistant Professor at the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. His research interests include financial intermediation, corporate finance, investment banking, and sustainable finance. He has published in leading academic journals, presented his work in top international conferences, and his work has received many research excellence awards, including the WFA Charles River Associate Award for Best Paper on Corporate Finance.

Prof. Kumar received a Ph.D. in Finance from the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago in 2015 and an MBA degree from Anderson School of Management, UCLA in 2009. He is excited to join Rutgers University and looks forward to contributing to its vibrant academic community and collaborative research environment.

Nilofar Varzgani

Assistant Professor of Professional

Practice

Management Science and Information Systems

Rutgers Business School

Nilofar Varzgani is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice in the Management Science and Information Systems Department at Rutgers Business School and a proud Rutgers alumna (Ph.D., Management Science, 2017). With a decade of teaching experience, she previously served on the faculty at La Salle University, where she was recognized as a Lindback Emerging Scholar (2022–2024) and served as university liaison for Johnson & Johnson’s Bridge to Employment (STEM2D) program in Philadelphia (2021–2024). Her teaching focuses on business analytics, data visualization, and research methods, with an emphasis on experiential, case-based learning and industry engagement. Her research spans applied optimization and decision analytics with social impact—covering healthcare operations, financial inclusion, and crowd dynamics—with publications in the International Journal of Management and Decision Making, International Journal of Systems Science: Operations & Logistics, and Decision Analytics Journal, as well as a chapter in the Handbook of Data Envelopment Analysis.

Wei Xia

Assistant Professor of Professional Practice

Management and Global Business

Rutgers Business School

Wei Xia received his PhD in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington in 2025. He has published in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Journal of Business Venturing. Wei’s teaching has been recognized with the Star Teacher Award. He also has extensive entrepreneurial experience. Prior to entering the PhD program, he founded a strategy consulting firm that advised Chinese startups on IPOs and M&As.

Joanne Dera

Librarian

John Cotton Dana Library

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As the Science Librarian at Rutgers-Newark, Joanne serves as the library liaison to the science departments within the School of Arts and Sciences, including Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Science, Physics, and Biological Sciences. In this role, she designs and delivers information literacy instruction, provides research consultations for undergraduate and graduate students, curates subject-specific resources, and collaborates with fellow Rutgers University Librarians (RUL) and science faculty on information literacy initiatives. Joanne has a B. S. in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University and worked in the electric power industry, and a Master of Information and Library Science from Rutgers University. Her research interests are in the ethics of AI, integration of AI into STEM disciplines, and pedagogical best practices for teaching information literacy.

Amanda Neisch

Assistant Professor

Biological Sciences

School of Arts and Sciences - Newark

Amanda received her PhD in Developmental Biology from the University of Chicago and did her postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. While at the University of Minnesota she was an instructor in both Developmental Biology and Cell Biology courses. Her research group is interested in the Cell Biology of neural circuits. They study how cellular cargoes are transported to the appropriate location, at the correct time, to maintain neural circuits. She was awarded an R21 Exploratory Research grant from the National Institute on Aging to carry out this research.

Tiana Marrese

Assistant Professor of Professional Practice​

School of Public Affairs & Administration

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Dr. Tiana Marrese is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University–Newark. The core of her research studies paid and unpaid (volunteer) work in nonprofit and public sectors. Her interdisciplinary projects are connected by an interest in understanding how and why people provide labor to public-serving organizations and the resulting implications this has for the market. She specializes in quantitative, macro-level analyses of publicly available datasets. 

Allison Puglisi

Assistant Professor of Professional Practice

African Studies​

School of Arts and Science - Newark

Allison Puglisi is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She received a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College with a BA in History. She is a historian of Black social movements with an emphasis on gender and ecology. 

Her book in progress, Where We Reside: Black Environmental Thought in New Orleans, explores how housing activists—particularly Black women—laid the groundwork for modern Black environmental organizing. It was through housing issues that a variety of Black political groups came to critique environmental degradation. They believed housing inequities were inextricable from the land on which their homes sat, and they understood home both as one’s house and the earth. This book in progress is based on Dr. Puglisi’s dissertation, which received honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize.

Yana Kosenkov

Assistant Professor

Chemistry​

School of Arts and Science - Newark

Dr. Yana Kosenkov is an accomplished scientist, educator, and leader with more than thirty peer-reviewed publications in chemical education and computational chemistry. She has led curriculum development initiatives that integrate emerging technologies into undergraduate research and teaching. Her current work focuses on creating innovative automation tools to enhance accessibility and student success in chemistry laboratories.

Jéssica Marisol Marroquín

Assistant Professor

Social Work​

School of Arts and Science - Newark

Dr. Jéssica Marisol Marroquín is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at RU-N, and she is a Licensed Master Social Worker. Her work focuses on the health and mental health equity of historically marginalized communities, and she specializes in working with Latinx, immigrant, and autistic communities. Her work investigates how social and cultural factors, like systemic inequities and belonging, impact individuals throughout their life spans. She utilizes community-based participatory research (CBPR) among interdisciplinary teams to improve wellness among communities by acknowledging the value of intersectionality.

Marcy Karin

Professor of Law and Director of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Women’s Rights and Gender Justice Clinic​

School of Law

Marcy L. Karin is a Professor of Law and Director of the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg Women’s Rights and Gender Justice Clinic. Her work focuses on law and policy at the intersection of gender, workplace, and disability justice.  Her research examines legislative lawyering, women’s legal history, and the rights of marginalized workers—including those who menstruate, experience (peri)menopause, are breastfeeding, caregiving, or disabled, have survived gender-based violence or harassment, or are part of military families.  Through the clinic, she collaborates with students, clients, and community stakeholders to advance gender justice through direct representation, systemic reform, and impact-driven legal advocacy.

Michail Xyntarakis

Assistant Professor ​

Rutgers Business School

Michail Xyntarakis is an Assistant Professor of Practice at Rutgers Business School (part-time), teaching Management Science and Information Systems. He holds a Master's degree in Transportation Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a professional degree in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. 

He has extensive industry experience as a transportation consultant and has held technology leadership positions for companies in location analytics. His research focuses on large-scale analytics on mobility data, multimodal transportation planning applications, machine learning, and network algorithms.

Sean Trott

Assistant Professor 

Psychology​

School of Arts and Sciences

Sean Trott is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at RU-N, and uses language models (LLMs) as “model organisms” for human cognition and also as objects of study in their own right. Research topics include: representation and comprehension of lexical ambiguity; mechanisms underpinning the development of Theory of Mind; and the role of sensorimotor grounding in language and cognition.

Omolara Joseney

Assistant Professor 

Law​

School of Law

Omolara Bewaji Joseney is an Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School — Newark, where she teaches Consumer Law and Civil Procedure. She previously taught in the clinical program at Georgetown University Law Center.

Professor Joseney’s scholarship focuses on consumer protection and unfair and deceptive trade practices. Her latest article, Targeting Unfairness—forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review— uses case studies to examine the potential impact of targeted advertising practices on health.

Professor Joseney began her legal career in private practice as a litigator at Davis Polk in New York. She then served as an enforcement attorney for the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection for several years. Professor Joseney holds a B.A. from Boston College, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was an editor for the Columbia Law Review.