Six Women Receive Tenure-Track Faculty Appointments at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania

Olivia Chu has joined the Bryn Mawr College faculty as an assistant professor of mathematics. Prior to her new role, she served as a lecturer in the department of mathematics at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where she currently holds an appointment as a visiting scholar in the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. Her research focuses on building mathematical models to study social and biological systems.

Dr. Chu is an honors graduate of New York University, where she majored in mathematics. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology from Princeton University.

Elizabeth Dinella has joined the Bryn Mawr College faculty as an assistant professor of computer science. She previously served as a visiting assistant professor with the college. Her research centers around software engineering and machine learning with a particular focus on the integration of symbolic program analysis and neural techniques to improve software correctness.

Dr. Dinella received her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York and her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Neus Penalba has joined the Bryn Mawr College faculty as an assistant professor of Spanish. Before assuming her new faculty position, she served as a teaching associate with the University of Cambridge. Her researches focuses contemporary Iberian fiction and film, viewed through the lens of environmental humanities.

Dr. Penalba received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. She holds a second bachelor’s degree in literary theory and comparative literature and a master’s degree from Universitat de Barcelona in Spain; a second master’s degree from Université Denis Diderot-Paris VII, France; and a Ph.D. in humanities, heritage, and cultural studies from Universitat de Girona, Spain.

Yeon Soon Shin has joined the Bryn Mawr College faculty as an assistant professor of psychology. She previously served as a postdoctoral research associate for the Princeton University department of psychology and the Yale University department of psychology. In her research, she studies how our brains make sense of complex experiences by inferring the underlying structure when we cannot directly observe the intricate inner workings of the world.

Dr. Shin is a graduate of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, where she received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in psychology. She holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton University.

Zhenlan Wang has joined the Bryn Mawr College faculty as an assistant professor of psychology. Most recently, she served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. As a cultural psychology, her research focuses on everyday coping and how people respond to stressful situations in their daily lives.

Dr. Wang is a graduate of Belarussian State University in the Republic of Belarus, where she majored in social and pedagogical psychology. She holds a master’s degree in general psychology and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from The New School in New York City.

Hannah Shoenhard will join the Bryn Mawr College faculty in January 2025 as an assistant professor of biology. She most recently served as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pennsylvania, where her lab leveraged fruit flies as a model organization to discover the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which sleep facilitates long-term memory consolidation.

Dr. Shoenhard holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.