Mark Padoongpatt, an associate professor within UNLV's Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies, serves as director of the Asian and Asian American Studies program. 

Padoongpatt researches and writes on the histories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the 20th-century United States, with a focus on empire, migration, race, and urban and suburban cultures. His Ph.D. thesis-turned-book, Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017) — which explores how and why Thai food shaped the contours of Thai American community and identity since World War II — landed him an appearance on Padma Lakshmi's Hulu show "Taste the Nation." Padoongpatt is currently writing a book and developing a podcast series on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Las Vegas titled "Neon Pacific," which explores histories of race, space, and placemaking in Vegas.

At UNLV, Padoongpatt teaches a range of courses in Asian American Studies and on the interdisciplinary research process, including Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, Interdisciplinary Research Methods, and the Interdisciplinary Capstone class.

Daniel "Dan" Bubb  — a former airline pilot — is an expert on commercial aviation and airport history in the American West. His other research areas include United States, American Western, and world history.

An associate professor in residence with the UNLV Honors College, Bubb also serves as the college's coordinator of academic affairs.

In 2012, he published his first book, Landing in Las Vegas: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Tourist City (University of Nevada Press). Currently, Bubb is researching and writing a second book that examines the role airlines and airports play in connecting Western American cities with the world.

Bubb serves as the deputy director of the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame.

Aya Louisa McDonald is an expert in modern and contemporary Japanese art, manga, and anime.

Her research examines themes of violence in contemporary Japanese art, Japanese war art of WWII, and the historical relationship between art and war. McDonald also studies the historical and contemporary interconnections between Japanese art and the West, and the work of Japanese artist, Foujita Tsouguharu.

Her research has been featured in several publications including Art Journal and the Journal of War and Culture Studies.

Elizabeth Nelson is an associate professor of history who specializes in pop culture and advertising in the 19th century, as well as food history.

Her research areas include American history on the National Period; the Civil War and Reconstruction; 19th-century cultural and intellectual history; cultural theory; and the relationship between political economy, domestic economy and national identity in the antebellum United States.

Nelson, who has taught courses at UNLV since 1996, is the author of Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in 19th-Century America (Smithsonian Books, 2004), as well as a contributor to The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (Routledge, 2000).

Gregory Borchard is professor of mass communication and journalism with UNLV's Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. Borchard focuses in journalism history, reporting, and research methods.

Borchard's publications include the books A Narrative History of the American Press (Routledge, 2018), Lincoln Mediated: The President and the Press through Nineteenth-Century Media (Transaction, 2015), Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), and Journalism in the Civil War Era (Peter Lang, 2010). His manuscripts appear in Journalism and Communication Monographs, American Journalism, Journalism History, and The Journal of Popular Culture. A former newspaper reporter, he has written for the Minnesota Daily.

In 2018, Borchard was named the editor for the Journalism History, the official academic journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s History Division. 

Jennifer Byrnes is an expert in bioarchaeology (the study of archaeologically derived human remains) and forensic anthropology (modern/recent human remains). Her bioarchaeology work focuses on disability and impairment in humans in the past, particularly injuries resulting from trauma and/or pathology that leave changes on the bones. 

Her research in forensic anthropology centers on personal identification and the reliability of positive identifications made using medical imaging comparisons.

Byrnes' work has been published in numerous academic journals, including the Journal of Forensic Sciences and Archeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Caryll Batt Dziedziak is a visiting faculty in-residence with UNLV's Department of History and assistant director of the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada. She specializes in U.S. women’s history, political activism, and feminism, particularly the rise of the second wave feminist movement and the equal rights amendment ratification campaign in Nevada.

Dziedziak co-founded the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada (WRIN) in 1999. She often leads the Women’s History workshop for the institute's NEW Leadership Nevada program.

Barbara Roth is an anthropologist whose research focuses on hunter-gatherer adaptations to arid environments, primarily in the Southwest and Mojave Desert. She studies events surrounding the adoption of agriculture in the southern Southwest and its impact on hunter-gatherer populations. An example is her work in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico, where she has been examining changes in household and community organization that occur as groups become more sedentary and dependent on agriculture.

Roth, professor and chair in the department of anthropology, is the author of an award-winning book, Agricultural Origins in the American Southwest, seven edited books, and multiple articles and book chapters.