UMass Boston

Professor Ding combines expertise in AI, data mining, machine learning, and ​computational semantics—applied in healthcare and environmental, astronomical, and geological sciences—with a deep ​knowledge of UMass Boston and a strong connection to students, gained over 14 years on the faculty.

In this role, she facilitates the PEAAII Lead Planning Team, coordinates the curricular working group, and supports and ​consults with the Student Advisory Council. Wei balances leading the institute with teaching ​while also fulfilling significant responsibilities as PI on significant externally sponsored research projects.

Human rights and literature; American literature (including Asian American literature, Native American literature, and literature of the American South); interdisciplinary approaches to literature; literature in the context of comparative race and ethnicities; pedagogy of literature; literatures of the Middle East

My work focuses on topics in early American writing, especially its transatlantic dimensions. A current book project, German Fractures, traces how a non-Anglophone republicanism was transformed by the emergence of a multilingual republic in the early nineteenth century premised on both secularization and liberalism's division of public and private spheres, and explores that history's implications for English language learners in the public sphere today.

Nir Eisikovits is a professor of philosophy and founding director of the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston. Before coming to UMass he was associate professor of legal and political philosophy at Suffolk University, where he co-founded and directed the Graduate Program in Ethics and Public Policy. Professor Eisikovits' research focuses on the moral and political dilemmas arising after war, the culture of war and the ethics of technology.