Nine Women Faculty Members Taking on New University Roles

Wenqi Shen was hired as an assistant professor in the department of business information technology of the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. She joined the staff at Virginia Tech in 2012 as an e-commerce operations manager.

Dr. Shen is a graduate of the City University of Hong Kong. She earned a Ph.D. at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Nicole Stokes-DuPass, a professor of sociology at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, has been given the added duties of associate vice president for institutional effectiveness and diversity at the university. Dr. Stokes-DuPass is the author or co-author of several books including Integration and New Limits on Citizenship Rights: Denmark and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Professor Stokes-DuPass holds a master’s degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Heather L. Petcovic, an associate professor of geosciences at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo was named associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the university. She joined the faculty at the university in 2004 and has been serving as interim associate dean since January.

Dr. Petcovic is a graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Oregon State University.

Basuk Kus was promoted to associate professor of sociology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She was also granted tenure. Dr. Kus joined the faculty at Wesleyan in 2012 after teaching at University College Dublin in Ireland.

Dr. Kus is a graduate of Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. She holds a master’s degree from Stony Brook University in New York and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California Berkeley.

Lynn Fiellin, an associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine, will be taking on additional duties as director of the Alcohol and Other Drug Harm Reduction Initiative at Yale College. She has been on the Yale faculty since 2000.

Dr. Fiellin is a  graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she majored in chemistry. She earned her medical degree at Yale.

Elizabeth Wellman Sepper was promoted to full professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. She joined the faculty at the law school in 2012.

Professor Sepper is a summa cum laude graduate of Boston University, where she majored in history. She holds a juris doctorate and a master’s degree in international legal studies from New York University School of Law.

Madalina Akli was hired as lecturer in international studies and as director of the Office of National Scholarship Achievement at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Akli has been serving as associate director of global engagement at Rice University in Houston, texas.

Dr. Akli is a native of Romania. She holds a Ph.D. in French studies from Rice University.

Kristen Pullen was appointed professor and chair of the theatre department at the University of Illinois. She will be the first woman to chair the department. Dr. Pullen has been serving as a professor of performance studies at Texas A&M University.

Professor Pullen’s latest book is Like a Natural Woman: Spectacular Female Performance in Classical Hollywood (Rutgers University Press, 2014). She holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sarah Cohen was appointed to the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University. Cohen has written for The New York Times since 2012. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 while working for the Washington Post.

Professor Cohen is the former Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park.