{"id":14234,"date":"2025-06-16T15:48:26","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T22:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/?p=14234"},"modified":"2025-08-20T20:45:34","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T03:45:34","slug":"hmc-welcomes-new-faculty-fall-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/2025\/06\/16\/hmc-welcomes-new-faculty-fall-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"HMC Welcomes New Faculty, Fall 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment and Department of Mathematics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Robert<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Robert Sanchez<\/strong> 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 assistant professor of climate science and mathematics. Sanchez\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s degree (geophysics) from Caltech and his master\u2019s degree and PhD (both in oceanography) from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mathematics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Harrison<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Harrison Li<\/strong>\u2019s 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, assistant professor of mathematics, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Eduardo<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Eduardo Ibarra Garc\u00eda Padilla<\/strong>, assistant professor of physics, 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 Garc\u00eda Padilla received his master\u2019s degree and PhD (atomic, molecular, optical, and condensed matter physics) from Rice University and his bachelor\u2019s degree (physics) from Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico, Ciudad Universitaria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The College welcomes three new faculty members this fall. They will join 116 faculty colleagues charged with educating future scientists, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":11837,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,638,22,24],"class_list":["post-14234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty","category-hixon-center","category-mathematics","category-physics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14234"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14634,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14234\/revisions\/14634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}