Two Women Who Have Been Selected to Serve as Provosts

Michele Gillespie was named provost at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, effective July 1. She has been serving as dean of Wake Forest’s College of Arts and Sciences. She joined the faculty at the university in 1999. From 2007 to 2010, Dr. Gillespie was associate provost for academic initiatives at the university. Prior to her time at Wake Forest, Dr. Gillespie spent nine years at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where she taught U.S. history. She is the author of Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789-1860 (University of Georgia Press, 2000)  and Katharine and R.J. Reynolds: Partners of Fortune and the Making of the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2012).

Dr. Gillespie is a graduate of Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she double-majored in history and English. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in New Jersey.

Marie Chisholm-Burns was appointed executive vice president and provost of Oregon Health & Science University. For the past 10 years, she has been dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She was the first African-American to hold the position in the college’s history. Earlier in her career, she was a professor and chair of the department of pharmacy practice and science at the University of Arizona. Before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona, she taught at the Georgia Health Sciences University in Augusta and at the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy.

Professor Chisholm-Burns holds bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Georgia. She earned a master of public health degree at Emory University in Atlanta.