Eight Women Faculty Members Who Are Assuming New Roles in Higher Education

Ubolrat Piamjariyakul, a professor of nursing at West Virginia University, has been given the added duties of associate dean for research and scholarship. She is a former research associate professor at the University of Kansas.

Professor Piamjariyakul is a graduate of Saraburi Nursing College in Thailand. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Kansas.

Elizabeth Fair, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, was named associate director of the Global Health Sciences master’s degree program at the university.

Dr. Fair is a disease epidemiologist with a focus on tuberculosis. She earned a Ph.D. at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

M. Christina Marchetti was named a Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University. She is the William R. Kenan Professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Marchetti joined the faculty at Syracuse University in 1987.

Professor Marchetti is the co-lead editor of the online journal Physical Review X. She holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Florida.

Roberta Marvin was appointed professor and chair of the department of music and dance at the University of Massachusetts. She was an associate professor of musicology at the University of Iowa. Earlier, she was an associate professor of musicology at the University of Alabama.

Professor Marvin holds a bachelor’s degree in flute performance from the Boston Conservatory of Music, a master’s degree in historical musicology from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Brandeis University.

Sarah Labovitz, an assistant professor of music at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, has been given the added duties as coordinator of instrumental music education at the university. She also serves as associate director of bands at the university.

Dr. Labovitz is a graduate of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She holds a master’s degree from Indiana University and a doctorate in music from the University of Kansas.

Karen Pyke, professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside, has been elected president of the Pacific Sociological Society. In this post, she will chair the society’s annual conference next April in Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Pyke is deputy editor of the Journal of Family Issues. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Riverside in 2000. Professor Pyke holds a Ph.D. in social relations from the University of California, Irvine.

Diane Kelly was named director of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She was a professor in the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Kelly is a graduate of the University of Alabama, where she majored in English and psychology. She holds a master of library and information science degree and a Ph.D. in information science from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, an associate professor of English and director of American studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has been given the added duties of associate provost for strategic initiatives and partnerships. Dr. Nwankwo joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2006.

Dr. Nwankwo is the author of Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). She holds a Ph.D. in English from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.