The College of Arts and Sciences is welcoming four new tenure-track assistant professors this academic year whose research sits at the intersection of Earth observation, AI, and machine learning — all of whom will be affiliated with the BuckAI Observatory. 

The first two arrivals join the School of Earth Sciences this summer: Hongyu Sun, a computational seismologist bringing physics-informed machine learning to earthquake rupture, subsurface imaging, and geothermal energy questions (previously Assistant Professor at UT El Paso, with prior postdoctoral training at Caltech); and Haitao Shang, a computational Earth-life-systems scientist whose work spans biogeochemistry, microbial evolution, exoplanet habitability, and complex-systems modelling (PhD from MIT, MS in data science from Harvard). 

Two additional geo-AI colleagues joining other College of Arts and Sciences departments in early 2027 will be announced closer to their start dates.