Six Women Scholars Taking on New Faculty Assignments

Boni E. Elewski was appointed chair of the department of dermatology in the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama Birmingham. She has been on the faculty for 17 years and holds the James E. Elder M.D. Endowed Professorship for Graduate Education. Earlier, she taught at Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine and the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Dr. Elewski earned her medical degree at Ohio State University and completed her internship and residency at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Jo Handelsman was named director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She will also hold a named chair at the university. She has been serving as the Frederick Phineas Rose Professor in the department of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University. For the past two years, she has been the associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Dr. Handelsman is no stranger to the University of Wisconsin. She served on the faculty from 1985 to 2009. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin.

Maria Minniti, who holds the Bantle Chair in Entrepreneurship and Public Policy at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University in New York, was named the founding director of the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society at the university.

Professor Minniti is the editor of The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Data (Oxford University Press, 2011). She holds a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.

Kim Caldwell was named to the Marilyn Williams Elmore and John Durr Elmore Professorship in the biological sciences at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Professor Caldwell joined the faculty at the university in 2004.

Dr. Caldwell earned a Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology at the University of Tennessee. She conducted postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University and Columbia University.

Ladda Thiamwong is a new assistant professor in the graduate department of the School of Nursing at the University of Central Florida. She was an assistant professor of nursing at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

Dr. Thiamwong earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in nursing at universities in Thailand and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, San  Francisco.

Haifa Abou Samra was appointed chair of the department of nursing at the University of South Dakota. She has been on the faculty at the university since 2014.

Dr. Samra is a graduate of the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. She holds a master’s degree in nursing and a Ph.D. in biological sciences from South Dakota State University.