University of Illinois Hires Three Women for Its President’s Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program

In 2018, the University of Illinois System announced the three-year, $60 million President’s Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program. The goal of the program was to recruit world-class faculty of national and international distinction across the broad spectrum of disciplines, expanding the exceptional scholarship that attracts students and research funding to the system’s three universities.

The university recently announced the hiring of 10 new faculty members under the program. Three of the new hires are women.

Ana P. Barros will be the Donald Biggar Willett Chair of Engineering and new head of the department of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering. She will join the faculty at the University of Illinois in February 2021. She currently teaches at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Dr. Barros’ primary research interests are in hydrology, hydrometeorology, and environmental physics. In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. She earned a diploma in civil engineering and a master’s degree in ocean engineering at the University of O’Porto in Portugal. He holds a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the Oregon Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the Univerity of Washington.

Bernadette Sánchez is a professor of educational psychology in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She previously taught at DePaul University in Chicago. She is an expert on the role of mentoring relationships in the positive development of urban, low-income adolescents of color. Professor Sánchez is a graduate of Fairfield University in Connecticut, where she majored in psychology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in community and prevention research from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Lesley Sneed will join the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago in January 2021 as a professor of civil engineering. She has been serving on the faculty at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her research focus includes reinforced and pre-stressed concrete structural members and systems, structural models and experimental methods, innovative methods of repair and strengthening of structures subjected to seismic loading or other extreme hazards, and design codes for structural concrete. Dr. Sneed holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.