Four Women Named Chair of Their Academic Departments

Michele Dudash was named chair of the department of natural resource management at South Dakota State University. She was a professor of biology at the University of Maryland and has served as a program director in the division of environmental biology at the National Science Foundation.

Professsor Dudash is a graduate of Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. in plant population biology from the University of Illinois.

Catherine Kaukinen was named professor and chair of the department of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. She was an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Dr. Kaukinen holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. She earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Toronto.

Glenda Gillaspy was named chair of the department of biochemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. Gillaspy has been a member of the faculty at Virginia Tech since 1998. Her research focuses on the molecular pathways that plants use to respond to the environment.

Professor Gillaspy is a graduate of Auburn University in Alabama, where she majored in biology. She holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Lisa Kachnic was appointed chair of the department of radiation oncology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Dr. Kachnic was associate director of multidisciplinary cancer research at the Boston University School of Medicine. Earlier, she taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Dr. Kachnic is a graduate of Boston College and the Tufts University School of Medicine.