Seven Women Faculty Members Who Are Assuming New Duties at Universities

Lynne McLandsborough, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been named interim associate vice chancellor for research and engagement and interim director of the Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment at the university. She has been on the faculty since 1995 and her research focuses on food safety.

Professor McLandsborough is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she majored in microbiology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in food science from the University of Minnesota.

Melanie E. Loehwing is the new associate dean for academic affairs for the College of Arts and Sciences at Mississippi State University. She joined the university’s communication faculty in 2013 and is now an associate professor. Dr. Loehwing is the author of Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018).

Dr. Loehwing holds a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a Ph.D., all in communication and culture and all from Indiana University Bloomington.

Saida Grundy was promoted to associate professor of sociology and African American studies and granted tenure at Boston University. She specializes in the sociologies of race and gender, focusing on formations and ideologies of gender and racialization within the Black middle class — specifically men. Her work examines masculinity and social justice capitalism, racialized rape culture, and bridging hegemonic masculinity theories to improve public understanding of campus sexual assault. She is the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (University of California Press, 2022).

Dr. Grundy is a graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology & women’s studies from the University of Michigan.

Linda C. Samuels, a professor of urban design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, will serve as interim director of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design for the 2023-24 academic year. Dr. Samuels joined the faculty as an associate professor in 2015 and was promoted to professor in 2023. She teaches architecture and urban design studios as well as seminars on infrastructural urbanism, urban history and theory, and alternative sustainability metrics. She is the author of Infrastructural Optimism (Routledge, 2022).

Professor Samuels is a graduate of the University of Florida. She holds a master of architecture degree from Princeton University in New Jersey and a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Beth Belmont will serve as the director of experiential education for the law school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. A member of the faculty since 2001, Professor Belmont leads the Community Legal Practice Center.

Professor Belmont is a graduate of Southern Illinois University. She earned a juris doctorate at Loyola University of Chicago.

Bonnie Dow, professor of communication studies, Distinguished Professor of Communication, Science, and Technology, and dean of academic affairs, will serve as vice dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville for the 2023–24 academic year. She is the author of Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Dr. Dow is a graduate of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She holds a master’s degree in communication from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Minnesota.

Taryn Loyd, a licensed and certified audiologist, has joined the communication sciences and disorders faculty at the University of Arkansas. She will be offering audiology services at the university’s Speech and Hearing Clinic and supervising graduate and undergraduate student clinicians.

Dr. Loyd earned a bachelor’s degree in communication disorders from the University of Arkansas. She holds a clinical doctorate in audiology from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.