Three Women Who Have Been Appointed to Endowed Chairs at State Universities

Katherine McCulloh is the first faculty member to hold the newly created Rebecca Blank Professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This new professorship fund was created by donations from alumni and friends of the university, to honor the leadership and service of Chancellor Emerita Rebecca Blank. Dr. Blank died on February 17. (See WIAReport post.) Dr. McCullloh joined the university’s faculty as an assistant professor in the department of botany and was granted tenure in 2019. Earlier, she taught at the University of Oregon

Dr. McCulloh, who is a plant ecological physiologist, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah.

Artha Gillis, a psychiatrist who studies the long-term effects of early-life adversity on children, will be the inaugural holder of the RNPH Board Advisors Term Chair in Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Gillis has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 2021, after serving as a staff psychiatrist at UCLA Health. She specializes in evaluating and treating children who have experienced sexual trauma.

Dr. Gillis holds a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University and a medical doctorate from the University of California, Davis.

Jenna Jambeck was named the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering at the University of Georgia. Dr. Jambeck researches the impact of plastic contamination on the world’s oceans and waterways. For this work, she was awarded a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “Genius Grant.”

Dr. Jambeck holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in environmental engineering, all from the University of Florida.