Six Women Faculty Members Who Are Taking on New University Assignments

Debra Bangasser was appointed professor of neuroscience at Georgia State University. She will also serve as associate director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience and will be the university’s first Distinguished Investigator with the Georgia Research Alliance. Dr. Bangasser has been the director of the College of Liberal Arts Program in Neuroscience Systems, Behavior and Plasticity at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Dr. Bangasser holds a Ph.D. in biopsychology and behavioral neuroscience from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Vanderbilt has named Leah Lowe, a theatre department faculty member who has developed and strengthened ties between the university and the Nashville arts community, as director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy. Dr. Lowe joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2011 after teaching at Connecticut College.

Dr. Lowe is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, where she majored in theater and religion. She earned a master of fine arts degree in directing at the University of Minnesota and a doctorate in dramaturgy and a certificate in women’s studies at Florida State University.

Jennifer Simmons, a member of the faculty at the University of Mississippi since 2002 was named assistant provost. She had been serving as assistant dean for new media in the School of Journalism and New Media at the university.

Simmons earned her bachelor’s degree in elementary education and her master’s degree in higher education from the University of Southern Mississippi.

Belle Rose Ragins the Sheldon B. Lubar Professor of Management in the Lubar College of Business was named a Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She joined the faculty in 1998. Dr. Ragins is the former editor-in-chief of the Academy of Management Review.

Professor Ragins is a graduate of Southern Illinois University, where she majored in psychology. She holds a master’s degree in social welfare management from the University of Illinois-Chicago and a Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from the University of Tennessee.

Charmaine A. Nelson has joined the department of history of art and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Since 2020, she was a Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement and the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax. Earlier, she taught at McGill University in Montreal for 17 years. Dr. Nelson is the author or co-author of seven books including Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (Routledge, 2016).

Dr. Nelson holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from Concordia University in Montreal. She earned a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Manchester in England.

Heather Ross has been appointed to serve as assistant dean of the Ivester College of Health Sciences at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. She will continue to serve as the program director and chair of the department of physical therapy. She joined the university in 2015 and has led the physical therapy program since 2018.

Dr. Ross earned a bachelor’s degree in exercise and sport science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a master of physical therapy degree from East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and a Ph.D. in anatomy and neurobiology from Virginia Commonwealth University.