Eleni Pliakoni was named assistant professor of urban food production and post-harvest handling at the Olathe campus of Kansas State University. She is the first faculty member hired in the new graduate-level program in horticulture at the university. She has been conducting postdoctoral research at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida.
She is a graduate of the University of Thessaloniki in Greece. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Crete and a Ph.D. from the University of Thessaly.
Esther M. Sternberg was named director of research at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona at Tucson. She has been conducting research in neuroimmunology at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. She has served on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis and American University in the nation’s capital. She is the author of Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Dr. Sternberg received her medical training at McGill University in Montreal.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tamara Jones was named the 2013 T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor for the fall semester at the University of Montana. Jones has worked for the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. She shared the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the shootings at Virginia Tech.
Jones is a graduate of San Diego State University where she majored in Spanish and journalism.