HMC Welcomes New Faculty, Fall 2025

The College welcomes three new faculty members this fall. They will join 116 faculty colleagues charged with educating future scientists, engineers and mathematicians and inspiring them to become passionate problem solvers who understand the impact of their work on society.

Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment and Department of Mathematics

Robert Sanchez is a coastal physical oceanographer interested in understanding how estuaries and coastal systems respond to climate change. He joins the Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment as associate professor of climate science and mathematics. Sanchez’s postdoctoral research included the investigation of the response of estuaries to various oceanic forces, including winds, sea level fluctuations and ocean salinity changes. He has also conducted research on the fluid dynamics of glacial fiords, which are intricately linked with the melting and retreat of Greenland’s glaciers. Sanchez’s fieldwork experience includes a course centered on the UN Sustainable development goals which took place on a large sailing vessel. The course provided hands-on experience with modern and historical observations methods and local outreach in the Caribbean Sea.

A passionate mentor and proponent of interdisciplinary science, Sanchez looks forward to leading an undergraduate research program centered on climate change, including introducing new courses within the Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment that center the physics and mathematics underpinning climate science. Sanchez received his bachelor’s degree (geophysics) from Caltech and his master’s degree and PhD (both in oceanography) from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Mathematics

Harrison Li’s research interests are in experimental design, causal inference and model interpretability. As a graduate student at Stanford University, Li studied various design problems that arise in modern experimentation under limited resources, motivated substantially by problems in the social sciences. Li is interested in designing experiments that eliminate an imprecise or biased estimate of the true treatment effect. He holds a PhD (statistics) from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree (statistics and mathematics) from Harvard University. Before entering graduate school, Li worked as a quantitative trader on Wall Street and in various capacities as a data scientist for companies like Waymo and YouTube.

Physics

Eduardo Ibarra García Padilla is interested in problems that require ingenuity and modeling to study the diverse properties of materials that arise from the behavior of electrons in a lattice. His research focuses on computational physics to explore questions of condensed matter physics and atomic physics and, he seeks to understand fundamental physics governing electron behavior in lattices by stripping the system down to its simplest form. To accomplish this, he creates ultracold atomic systems to serve as quantum simulations of macroscopic materials. His quantum simulations give him the power to carefully tune the parameters of the system and isolate exactly the effect he wants to study. Ibarra García Padilla received his master’s degree and PhD (atomic, molecular, optical, and condensed matter physics) from Rice University and his bachelor’s degree (physics) from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad Universitaria.