Five Women Earn Promotions at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts has announced that 15 faculty members have received promotions. Of those receiving promotions, five are women.

(L to R) Ulrike Brisson, Kathryn Fisler, Huong Higgins, Lorraine Higgins, and Ingrid Matos-Nin

Ulrike Brisson was promoted to associate teaching professor of German. She has been on the faculty at the university sincw 2006 after serving as a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Earlier she taught at the Goethe Institute in Boston and Connecticut College. Dr. Brisson is the co-editor of Not So Innocent Abroad: The Politics of Travel and Travel Writing (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Dr. Brisson is a graduate of the University of Hanover in Germany. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Pennsylvania State University.

Kathryn Fisler was promoted to full professor of computer science. She is the director of the university’s Cybersecurity Program. Dr. Fisler joined the WPI faculty in 2000. She is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she doubled majored in computer science and Asian studies. Professor Fisler holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University.

Huong Higgins was named a full professor in the School of Business. She has served on the faculty at WPI since 1998. She is currently participating in a National Science Foundation funded study aimed at developing visual analytic tools for detecting financial risk and fraud within real-time streaming data. Professor Higgins is a graduate of the University of Saigon in Vietnam. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in accounting from Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Lorraine Higgins is the director of the WPI Writing Center and the Communication Across the Curriculum program at the university. She has been promoted to associate teaching professor of humanities and arts. Dr. Higgins in the co-author of Learning to Rival: A Literate Practice for Intercultural Inquiry (Erlbaum, 2000).  Before joining the faculty at WPI, she taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Higgins holds a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree in English, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric, all from Carnegie Mellon University.

Ingrid Matos-Nin has served on the WPI faculty since 2006 and has now been promoted to associate teaching professor of Spanish in the department of humanities and arts. Before joining the WPI faculty, she taught at Assumption College, Clark University, and Boston University. Dr. Matos-Nin is a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. She holds two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico and a Ph.D. in Hispanic language and literature from Boston University.