Three Universities Have Announced the Appointment of Women to Dean Positions

Ayanna Howard will be the first woman dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. She will begin her duties at Ohio State on March 1. Dr. Howard is currently chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Earlier, she worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, designing robots for space exploration.

Dr. Howard is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. She also holds an MBA from Claremont Graduate University in California.

Michelle Roehm has been appointed interim dean of the School of Business at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She has been serving as vice dean of the School of Business. She holds the Peter C. Brockway Chair of Strategic Management and is a professor of marketing at the business school. She joined the faculty in 2007.

Dr. Roehm holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in communication from the University of Illinois. She earned a Ph.D. in marketing from Northwestern University.

Noma Anderson was named dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Vermont, effective February 1. Most recently she was dean of the College of Health Professions at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She also served as a special adviser to the University of Tennessee System president on diversity and inclusion. Earlier, she was chair and a professor in the department of communication sciences and disorders at Florida International University in Miami. She was also dean of the School of Health Sciences at FIU for five years.

Dr. Anderson received a bachelor’s degree in speech pathology and audiology from Hampton University in Virginia. She earned a master’s degree in speech pathology from Emerson College in Boston and a Ph.D. in speech-language pathology from the University of Pittsburgh.