Four Women Faculty Members Appointed to New University Posts

Sherine O. Obare, professor of chemistry and interim associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, is being given the added duties of associate vice president for research at the university. Professor Obare has been a member of the faculty at Western Michigan since 2004.

A graduate of West Virginia State University, Dr. Obare earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of South Carolina and then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Christine Getz, a professor of musicology and associate director for graduate studies in the School of Music at the University of Iowa, has been given the added duties as associate dean of graduate education in the College of Liberal Arts and Science. Dr. Getz has been on the faculty at the University of Iowa since 1999.

Professor Getz earned a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Texas. She is the author of Mary, Music and Meditation: Sacred Conversation in Post-Tridentine Milan (Indiana University Press, 2013).

Amel Ahmed, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was named director of diversity advancement for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Ahmed has been on the university’s faculty since 2007.

Dr. Ahmed is the author of Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice: Engineering Electoral Dominance (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Athena Papas, director of the division of oral medicine at the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine was named a Distinguished Professor at the university. She is only the third faculty member at the dental school to be awarded the title of Distinguished Professor.

In 2000, Dr. Papas was the first dental school faculty member to be named to an endowed chair. She has been on the Tufts University faculty for more than 40 years. Dr. Papas is a 1966 graduate of Tufts University, where she majored in biology. She received a Ph.D. in oral biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to earn a doctorate in dental medicine at harvard University.