Five Women Scholars Selected for Endowed Faculty Positions

Lea P. Stewart has been named the Richard D. Heffner Professor in Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. A faculty member since 1981, she currently serves as director of the Center for Communication and Health Issues. Throughout her four-decades long tenure, she has held other leadership positions such as chair of the department of communication, director of the Ph.D. in communication, information, and library studies program, and dean of the Livingston campus.

Dr. Stewart is a graduate of Allegheny College in Pennsylvania where she majored in arts in psychology. She holds a master’s degree in communication theory and a Ph.D. in interpersonal and organizational communication from Purdue University in Indiana.

Connie Rogers has been appointed to the Bill and June Flatt Chair in Foods and Nutrition in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Georgia. She previously served on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University for 14 years before joining the University of Georgia faculty in 2022.

Dr. Rogers received her bachelor’s degree in biology and master’s degree in physiology from Pennsylvania State University. She holds a master of public health degree in epidemiology and a Ph.D. in cell biology and physiology from the University of Pittsburgh.

Sana D. Karam has been appointed the James S. McDonnell Professor of Radiation Oncology and head of the department of radiation oncology in the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She currently serves as a professor and holds the Marisco Endowed Chair of Head and Neck Cancer Research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She also serves as vice chair of translational research in the department of radiation oncology.

Dr. Karam completed her undergraduate education at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon where she majored in nursing. She holds a master’s degree in trauma and critical care nursing from the University of Maryland, a Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics from the University of Washington, and a medical doctorate from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Barna Saha has been named to the Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies Endowed Chair at the University of California, San Diego, where she has taught for the past two years. In addition to her faculty appointment, she currently serves as the director of the National Science Foundation’s TRIPODS Institute for Emerging CORE Methods in Data Science.

Dr. Saha holds a bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University in India, a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Réka Albert has been named Evan Pugh University Professor at Pennsylvania State University. She currently serves as a distinguished professor of physics and biology and has been with the university for the past 20 years.

Dr. Albert is a graduate of the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania where she received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in physics. She holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.