Five Women Faculty Members Who Are Taking on New University Duties

Chandra L. Ford has joined the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta as a professor holding joint appointments in the department of African American studies and in the department of behavioral, social, and health education sciences at the Rollins School of Public Health. She was a professor of community health sciences and founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Ford is co-editor of Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional (APHA Press, 2019).

Professor Ford is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, where she majored in nutrition. She holds a master of library and information science degree and a master of public health degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Biwei Huang is a new assistant professor in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. Her research is focused on automated causal discovery in complex environments with theoretical guarantees, advancing machine learning from the causal perspective, and using or adapting causal discovery approaches to solve scientific problems.

Dr. Huang earned a master’s degree in neural information processing at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Alison Bailey has been named University Professor at Illinois State University. She joined the faculty at the university in 1993. Professor Bailey has directed the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the university for nearly 20 years. She is the author of The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance (Lexington Books, 2021).

Professor Bailey is a graduate of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she majored in philosophy and art. She holds a master’s degree n philosophy from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cincinnati.

Breezy Taggart was appointed assistant dean of the Honors College at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Taggart first taught in the Honors College in 2019, and she became an assistant instructional professor in 2021.

A native of Las Vegas, Dr. Taggart earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She holds a Ph.D. in design, environment, and the arts from Arizona State University.

Brett Abarbanel has been named executive director for the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The institute is a nonprofit academic center that offers research and educational programs for the global gaming industry. Dr. Abarbanel has been the director of research at the institute since 2016. She is an associate professor in the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality at the university.

Dr. Abarbanel earned bachelor’s degrees in statistics and architectural studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Nevada Las Vegas.