A Trio of Women Scholars Appointed to Endowed Chairs at Major Universities

Laurie Santos was appointed the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She is the director of the Comparative Cognition Lab and the Canine Cognition Center at Yale.

Dr. Santos is a graduate of Harvard University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and biology and a Ph.D. in psychology.

Jody Koenig Kellas was named the Willa Cather Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is chair of the communications studies department. Her research lab, Narrative Nebraska, investigates the links between storytelling and well-being. Professor Kellas joined the faculty in 2004 after teaching at San Francisco State University.

Dr. Kellas is a graduate of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in speech communication from the University of Washington.

Rachel Mednick Thompson has been named as the inaugural holder of the William and Patricia Oppenheim Presidential Chair in Pediatric Orthopaedics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Thompson joined UCLA in 2017 and was promoted to director of the Center for Cerebral Palsy in the same year.

A native of Chicago, Dr. Thompson earned her bachelor’s degree in public policy and her medical degree at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.