Six Maxwell School faculty members have new titles for the 2026-27 academic year following a round of promotions across four departments.

The Syracuse University Board of Trustees has granted tenure to four faculty members in their advancement from assistant to associate professor: Bernard Appiah, Ethan Coffel, Jun Li and Tomás Olivier. Seth Jolly has been promoted from associate to full professor, and Michael Lorenzo has been promoted to associate teaching professor.

Appiah, associate professor of public health, joined the University in fall 2020 and directs the Research Program on Health Communication and Public Engagement (H-COPE). Before Syracuse, he was an assistant professor at Texas A&M University’s School of Public Health. His research applies socio-behavioral communication strategies to global health challenges, including sickle cell disease, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, Wellcome, Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and UK National Institute for Health and Care Research. In 2025, the American Public Health Association awarded him the K. Everett M. Rogers Award for his contributions to public health communication. He serves on the World Health Organization Technical Advisory Group on Alcohol and Drug Epidemiology and the U.S. Pharmacopeia Expert Committee on Healthcare Quality, Safety and Nomenclature. He is a senior research associate for the Maxwell African Scholars Union and received a DrPH from Texas A&M in 2013.

Coffel, associate professor of geography and the environment, joined Maxwell in fall 2020 following a Neukom Institute postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College. His research uses earth system models along with geospatial and socioeconomic data to examine how climate extremes affect food systems, water supplies, energy grids and other systems society depends on. He has published 14 peer-reviewed articles since joining Maxwell, including in Nature Climate Change and Nature Food, and his work has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and the BBC. He has received two National Science Foundation grants, in 2021 and 2023, totaling more than $942,000, and this year received the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, Maxwell’s highest honor for untenured faculty. He received a Ph.D. in earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University in 2018.

Li, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, joined Maxwell as a tenure-track assistant professor in fall 2020 and teaches courses in statistics, health policy and health economics. Her research examines how Medicare and Medicaid payment policies shape access, quality and equity in home health care for older Americans, with current projects on care for people with dementia, wages for direct care workers, and patient access to home health services. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Health Affairs, JAMA Network Open and the Journal of Health Economics. Li received the Cordelia Myers AJOT Best Article Award from the American Occupational Therapy Association in 2026 and the Early Investigator Outstanding Paper Award from the Health Economics Interest Group of AcademyHealth in 2024. She received the Laura and J. Douglas Meredith Teaching Recognition Award for Early Performance from Syracuse University in 2021. She earned a Ph.D. in health services organization and policy from the University of Michigan in 2020.

Olivier, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, is a senior research associate for the Center for Policy Research and assistant director of the Center for Policy Design and Governance. Born and raised in Argentina, he researches the governance of natural resources, particularly water systems, in the United States and Argentina; a 2025 study in the Journal of Environmental Management compares reservoir-operation rules at Coyote Valley Dam in the U.S. and Ameghino Dam in Argentina. His research has also appeared in Ecology and Society, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the Policy Studies Journal and Public Administration. In 2024, he received the Birkhead-Burkhead Teaching Excellence Award and Professorship, a distinction he holds through 2028. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona's School of Government and Public Policy in 2017.

Jolly has been promoted from associate to full professor of political science. Jolly has been with Maxwell since 2008 and began serving as chair of the Political Science Department in January 2024. He teaches courses on European politics, quantitative methods, comparative political parties, ethnic conflict and the European Union. Since 2010, he has served as a principal investigator for the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which collects expert assessments of European political party positions and is used widely by scholars of European politics. His book, The European Union and the Rise of Regionalist Parties (University of Michigan Press, 2015), examines how European integration has shaped regionalist political movements. Jolly is a senior research associate for the Center for European Studies. He received the Excellence in Graduate Education Faculty Recognition Award from Syracuse University in 2019 and a Ph.D. from Duke University in 2006.

Lorenzo has been promoted to associate teaching professor of economics. He joined Maxwell’s Economics Department as an assistant teaching professor specializing in open-economy macroeconomics and previously taught as a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University. He teaches Intermediate Macroeconomics, Introductory Macroeconomics, and Introductory Microeconomics as well as an upper-level elective in open-economy macroeconomics and international finance. He has designed multiple courses for online use through the College of Professional Studies. His research examines the role of heterogeneous current account imbalances on macroeconomic volatility within currency unions, with a focus on European integration. Lorenzo received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Connecticut in 2018, where his dissertation examined net foreign asset positions, home bias in consumption and current account adjustment in the euro area.