Seven Women Faculty Members Taking on New Roles

Barbara Cantalupo was promoted to full professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts at the Lehigh Valley campus of Pennsylvania State University in Center Valley. Professor Cantalupo has been on the faculty at the university for 25 years. She is the author of Poe and the Visual Arts (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).

Dr. Cantalupo is a graduate of the University of Rochester, where she double majored in English and history. She holds a master or social work degree, a master’s degree in photography and English, and a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York System.

Alicia Carriquiry, the Distinguished Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University, has been given the additional responsibility as director of the Forensic Science Center of Excellence. The new center is a collaboration between Iowa State University, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Carriquiry joined the statistics department at Iowa State University in 1990. A graduate of the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, Professor Carriquiry holds a master degree in animal science from the University of Illinois. She earned a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. in statistics and animal science from Iowa State University.

Hannah Scherer was appointed assistant professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg.

Dr. Scherer is a graduate of Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She earned a Ph.D. in geological and environmental sciences from Stanford University.

Helen Elaine Lee was named director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a professor of fiction writing in the department of comparative media/writing. She joined the MIT faculty in 1995. Professor Lee is the author of two novels: The Serpent’s Gift (Athenaeum, 1994), and Water Marked (Scribner, 1999).

Professor Lee is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School.

Natasha Kirienko has agreed to join the faculty in the department of biosciences at Rice University in Houston. She has been serving as a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School and as an assistant in molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Dr. Kirienko is a graduate of Southern Federal University in Russia. She earned a master’s degree at the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Wyoming.

Maria E. Doerfler, an assistant professor of the history of Christianity in late antiquity at Duke Divinity School, has been given the additional responsibility as director of the Duke/University of North Carolina Center for Late Ancient Studies.

Dr. Doerfler is a graduate of Princeton University and the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a master’s degree from the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

Katie Corcoran is joining the faculty in the department of sociology and anthropology at West Virginia University in Morgantown. She has been serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Texas.

Dr. Corcoran holds a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, and a Ph.D. in sociology, all from the University of Washington.