Heads of the class
Meghan Sobel Cohen
One of Meghan Sobel Cohen’s most lasting memories of studying journalism at CU Boulder was Cokes with Voakes—office hours that then-Dean Paul S. Voakes would host to get to know students outside of class over sodas.
It’s a tradition she carried forward in her time as chair of the communication department at Regis University, in Denver, and is excited to bring back to the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information as an associate professor of journalism.
“Coming back to CU feels like such a full-circle moment for me,” she said. “So, maybe we’ll start coffee with Cohen, or cookies with Cohen, in the fall.”
Cohen (Jour’09), an expert on media systems in authoritarian contexts and journalism’s role in peacekeeping, is among 13 new faculty—three of them alumni—joining CMDI this fall, with another set to begin in the spring.
“I am so excited by the wealth of experience that our new faculty will bring to CMDI,” said Lori Bergen, founding dean of the college. “The perspectives, knowledge and curiosity they will bring to our teaching, research and creative work will continue to enrich our students and community.”
Cohen said she’s especially excited to return to what she called “a truly inspiring campus.”
“I feel really excited and grateful to be back in Boulder,” she said. “I was here when it was a school of journalism—and it’s inspiring to see the evolution of CU alongside the changes in journalism and communication. I’m excited to become a part of that, to encourage that evolution and help change the way our students think about communication, media and journalism more broadly.”
In addition to Cohen, the following faculty will join CMDI this academic year.
Hyun Seung Jin, associate professor. Jin joins the college from the business school of Queensland University of Technology, in Australia. His work explores psychology, creativity and technology.
Richard Khleif (PhDMediaSt’07), assistant teaching professor. Khleif brings decades of global technology industry experience to the college. He also is an emeritus founding member of CMDI’s advisory board, and completed the integrated marketing communication program from the former School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1999.
Lamiyah Bahrainwala, assistant professor. Bahrainwala was previously chair of the communication studies department at Southwestern University. She studies anti-Muslim sentiment through surveillance, race, the environment and more.
Alicen Rushevics, assistant professor. Key themes in Rushevics’ research include discourses of reparation and apology, indigenous human rights and U.S. imperialism in the Pacific. She completed her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2026.
Sophie Weston Chien, assistant professor. After completing two master’s degrees in landscape architecture and planning from Harvard University, Chien joined CMDI as a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow. Her research involves organizing in design, participatory textile research and fabrication, and theorizing contemporary design practice.
Pol Fité Matamoros, assistant professor. Fité Matamoros completed his PhD at the University of California–Berkeley, where he has been a designer in residence since 2025. He examines connections between visual culture, the spatial production of social and racial difference, and regime building.
Priyanka Sen, assistant professor. Sen will join CMDI in the spring after completing her PhD from Cornell University. She studies the intertwined histories of the built environment and agricultural practices tied to South Asian migration.
Nettie Skievaski (EnvDes’22), assistant teaching professor. In addition to her career in graphic design, Skievaski has been an instructor at CMDI since 2022.
Jason Lucas, assistant professor. Lucas earned his PhD from Pennsylvania State University. He develops multilingual A.I. systems across underserved languages to advance safe, equitable technology.
Aspen K.B. Omapang, assistant professor. Another Cornell scholar, Omapang researches political relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers in managing natural resources.
Katlyn Turner, assistant professor. Turner has been a research affiliate and instructor with CMDI since 2023. Her work focuses on environmental and climate justice, technology, policy, systems, and self-determination.
Susan Abbott, assistant teaching professor. Abbott brings more than two decades of experience in media development, digital democracy and civil society to her teaching. She was previously a lecturer at CMDI.
Meagan Doll, assistant professor. Doll has held postdoctoral roles at the universities of Minnesota and Washington. She studies news consumption and production, with particular interest in perceptions of news in nondemocratic contexts.
Jason Lucas
Interdisciplinary importance
New faculty called the interdisciplinary nature of the college and its work a key factor in their decisions to come here. Cohen, whose work experience includes the U.S. State Department—where she observed the disconnect between the needs of human rights organizations and the limitations of journalists who cover them, leading her to her research niche—said the changing nature of the news business is a call for educators to combine related disciplines, to better prepare students for the challenges that await them after graduation.
Jason Lucas, of information science, said the department’s values and culture of collaboration were major draws to him—though also important is that his wife, Umniya Najaer, has been a postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder since July 2025. His work studies artificial intelligence from the lens of language.
“There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world. And only about 20 of them have sufficient digital footprints to train robust models that can be useful for end users,” Lucas said.
It’s a safety concern, not just a usability issue, he said, as models can be attacked based on the data used to train them, leaving certain communities more vulnerable to the spread of disinformation or cybercrime. “And even with reinforcement learning, we cannot solve that basic security issue,” he said. “So we have to concern ourselves with both equity and safety.”
Lucas hopes to engage with these problems through SEAL, the Secure and Ethical A.I. Research Lab, which he’ll direct at CMDI.
Pol Fité Matamoros
Pol Fité Matamoros’ education spanned design disciplines like architecture, urban design and landscape architecture, which drew him to an environmental design department that brings all these areas under one roof. His research interest—which considers the advancement of fascist movements as expressed through visual and spatial culture—draws on these disciplines, plus humanities and social sciences.
“It’s easy to fall into this trap of saying the global rise of nationalist movements we see today is the same as it was in the 1920s. And it’s not,” Fité Matamoros said. “But there are similarities, and I think understanding how fascist movements in the ’20s and ’30s operated gives us a clue as to how they operate today.”
He studies the phenomenon through the lens of his native Spain, which watched its American colonial empire fall apart following war with the United States. The country’s attention turned to Africa, seen as a bountiful land of riches that could offset Spain’s decline—a concept Franco exploited in his rise to power.
He sees some of that today in the United States, where the Trump administration has pushed to rename the Gulf of Mexico and speak of colonizing Greenland and Canada.
Renaming, he said, is not just changing a label, “it repositions a space within a broader narrative of national rebirth. These spatial moves are not only moments of rhetorical excess, they create an appealing spatial argument for a violent nationalist narrative.”
Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.