8 Hariri Institute Faculty Affiliates Promoted with Tenure

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BU announced 25 faculty promotions with tenure, 8 of whom are affiliated faculty of the Hariri Institute. Those promoted include:

Faculty promoted to full professor with tenure 

Scott Hirst, LAW professor of law, researches corporate law, securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions, and other related areas to explain phenomena and inform policymaking. His work combines empirical methods and conceptual analyses from finance, accounting, and economics, with close attention to the institutional environment within which corporations and investors make decisions. He has written 15 scholarly articles on corporate law and regulations and has testified before the Federal Trade Commission about competition and consumer protection. He is a cofounder and organizer of the Corporate Law Academic Webinar Series and was the program committee cochair for the 2023 American Law & Economics Association Annual Meeting. Last year, he was selected by the BU School of Law graduating class to receive the Mark Pettit Award for Teaching.

Faculty promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure

Manos Athanassoulis, College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of computer science, investigates the design and optimization of modern data systems, with an emphasis on new workloads like hybrid transactional/analytical processing, the new trade-offs that cloud computing poses for data management, and emerging hardware, such as nonvolatile memories and heterogeneous computing units. Supported by multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) grants (including an NSF CAREER award) and industry partners—such as Red Hat, Cisco, Meta, and IBM—he is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has published more than 70 papers in leading data management conferences and journals, including ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and authored a 2023 book on data structure design for data-intensive applications. His work has been recognized with numerous honors, including “best of” awards from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data and the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases.

Martin Fiszbein, CAS associate professor of economics, studies the historical roots of cultural traits and political attitudes—such as individualism, gender norms, racial animus, and civic norms—and their impact on development. He also examines structural change, technological progress, and skill formation as drivers of growth, focusing on how these processes are shaped by geo-climatic and historical factors. His research has been published in leading economics journals—including Econometrica, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Review of Economic Studies, and The Journal of Economic History—and he is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Masha Kamenetska, CAS associate professor of chemistry and physics, is a quantum chemical physicist specializing in single-molecule experiments that explore the relationships between molecular structure and function. Her research bridges chemistry, physics, and biology and seeks to advance understanding of electrical properties of molecular circuits, the structural stability of RNA gene regulatory segments, and optical signatures of nanoparticle antennas for single-molecule detection. She is a past recipient of an NSF CAREER award, an Air Force Young Investigator Research Program award, and a Scialog Fellowship, and has published 22 articles in high-impact scientific journals, including Nature Nanotechnology and Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. She developed and currently oversees the chemistry and physics undergraduate major at BU.

Nicholas Wagner, CAS associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, is a developmental scientist whose research seeks to advance understanding of children’s socioemotional development. Supported by over $5 million in National Institutes of Health funding, his work examines how biological and environmental factors influence psychosocial adaptation and risk for psychopathology. He has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals and earned early career awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, the International Society for Research on Aggression, and the Association for Psychological Science. He serves on the editorial boards of Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Development and Psychopathology.

Sheila Russo, College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering, focuses on the design, development, and manufacturing of novel multiscale and multimaterial biomedical robotic systems for minimally invasive surgeries. Her work has appeared in leading robotics conferences and premier journals, including the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Materials, and Advanced Materials. She is a past recipient of the National Institutes of Health’s Trailblazer Award for New and Early Stage Investigators and a past semifinalist in MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35.

Rabia Yazicigil, ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, merges the fields of microelectronics, cybersecurity, and synthetic biology, with a focus on building cybersecure biological systems and energy-efficient hardware. Her research, supported by the NSF, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and private industry partners, seeks to advance secure, low-power, and high-performance integrated circuits for wireless communications and biosensing. She has published extensively in top-tier journals and conferences, holds multiple patents, and is a frequent invited speaker and panelist at international conferences. She is a past NSF CAREER award winner, a recipient of ENG’s Early Career Excellence in Research Award, and was recently selected as a 2025–26 IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.

Andrey Fradkin, Questrom School of Business associate professor of marketing, studies the design of digital platforms, quantitative marketing, the digitization of the economy, and search behavior in markets. He has provided expert input about the digital economy to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the Federal Trade Commission, and has published articles in top-tier journals, such as Management Science, Marketing Science, and the American Economic Review. He is a past Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow and Questrom Dean’s Research Scholar and received INFORMS’ Management Science Distinguished Service Award for five consecutive years. He is also cofounder of the Virtual Quantitative Marketing Seminar, a leading forum in his field.

Learn more about faculty recently promoted with tenure in this story published in The Brink.