AFFDP Cohort 3

Dr. Bacchus joins the College of Health and is affiliated with the Departments of Population Health and Community and Global Health.

Daniela P. M. Fonseca holds a B.S. in Physics and transitioned to Materials Science during her M.S. at the University of São Paulo – Nuclear and Energy Research Institute (IPEN). She earned her Ph.D. at the University of São Paulo – Polytechnic School, which included a research stay at Berkeley Lab sponsored by a Brazilian government fellowship. Her expertise lies at the intersection of microscopy and materials science, with a focus on investigating nanoscale phenomena in metallic materials, primarily utilizing electron microscopy while integrating other multiscale microstructural characterization techniques. Beyond research, she is committed to fostering a collaborative scientific community. She founded the LPDA and is the current chair of the Early Career Committee of the Microscopy Society of America (MSA).

Dr. Sourav Ghosh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History at Lehigh University. Before joining Lehigh, he served as a Visiting Lecturer at UC Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley, and his research focuses on state formation, political culture, and identity in early modern South Asia. His work has recently been published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. In the classroom, Dr. Ghosh integrates these diverse themes into his teaching, offering courses that connect South Asian history with the broader contexts of Indian Ocean and global history. Currently, he is working on his first book project while teaching courses on South Asia and the Indian Ocean World.

Jiaqi Liu holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California San Diego. She joined the Department of Mathematics at Lehigh University in Fall 2025 after serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Broadly, her research uses stochastic models to capture real-life phenomena and provides mathematical foundations for conjectures arising from biology and physics. Her work has two main themes. First, as a parameter in a random system changes, the properties of the system can shift abruptly. She studies such phase transitions and the associated critical phenomena in various physical systems. Second, she uses probabilistic models to study population evolution, investigating how forces such as mutation and selection shape gene frequencies in large populations.