New Faculty Appointments for Five Women Scholars

Laurie J. Patterson has been appointed associate dean for academic affairs and curriculum in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has previously held several leadership positions with the university, including chair of the department of computer science, program coordinator of the undergraduate information technology degree, and interim associate dean.

Dr. Patterson holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and master of education degree from the University of Minnesota. She holds a doctorate in computer information technology from Nova Southeastern University.

Laurel Harris has been named director of the baccalaureate honors program at Rider University in New Jersey. She has been a faculty member with the university for the past 10 years, currently serving as an associate professor of English. Her academic interests center around Anglophone and British modernism, the relationship between fiction and film in the early twentieth century, sound technologies and literary modernism, and modernist women writers.

Dr. Harris is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, where she majored in creative writing and film studies. She holds a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the City University of New York.

Rachel Schneider has been appointed director of the Religion and Public Life Center at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She currently serves as the associate director of academic programs at Rice’s Boniuk Instiute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance and an assistant research professor of religion. Her academic research on religion led her to co-editing Emerging Church, Millennials and Religion, Volume 2: Curations and Durations (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2022).

Dr. Schneider is a graduate of Seattle Pacific University, where she double-majored in global studies and English literature with a minor in history. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in religion from Rice University.

Yana Zavros has been named a professor of interdisciplinary biomedical sciences and the inaugural Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular Medicine at the University of Georgia. She comes to her new role from the University of Arizona, where she was a professor of cellular and molecular medicine, associate head of research at the College of Medicine in Tuscon, and director of the university’s Tissue Acquisition and Cellular/Molecular Analysis Shared Resource.

Dr. Zavros holds a Ph.D. from the department of surgery at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Kirsten Nielsen has joined the Virginia Tech faculty as a professor of microbiology and immunology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. Prior to her new position, she served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota’s department of microbiology and immunology for 17 years. Her current research focuses on medical mycology with an emphasis on the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans.

Dr. Nielsen holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a Ph.D. in botany and plant pathology from North Carolina State University.