A Quartet of Women Scholars Who Have Been Appointed to Head Schools at Major Universities

Gulsah Akar was appointed head of the School of City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the former professor and director of the Ph.D. program in city and regional planning at Ohio State University. Her research focuses on travel demand analysis and choice modeling. Dr. Akar is the editor of the Journal of Planning Literature.

Dr. Akar holds a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Maryland.

Karen C. Spence is the new director of the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. Spence is a registered architect in Maryland and Missouri and has served since 2015 as associate dean of the Hammons School of Architecture at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, where she has taught since 2002.

Dr. Spence earned a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Arkansas. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, both in architecture.

Tusty ten Bensel, associate professor of criminal justice, has recently been named the director of the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Ten Bensel, the former graduate coordinator for the School of Criminal Justice, is also the director of the Justice Research and Policy Center at the university.

Dr. ten Bensel received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in criminal justice as well as a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She holds a Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Tijana Rajh has been appointed director of the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University. She had a 25-year career at Argonne National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary science and engineering research center of the U.S. Department of Energy in Lemont, Illinois.

Dr. Rajh grew up in Serbia and attended the University of Belgrade, where she earned a Ph.D. Her research focuses on the fields of photoelectrochemistry and semiconductor particle research.