Three Women Selected for Endowed Chairs at Universities

Tara Cox has been named to the Fuller E. Callaway Professorial Chair at Savannah State University in Georgia. She is an associate professor of marine and environmental sciences who specializes in spatial ecology and conversation biology, marine and coastal policy and management, and human interactions with marine mammals. She also serves as assistant scientific program director of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission in Maryland.

Dr. Cox holds a master’s degree in coastal environmental management and a Ph.D. in ecology from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Jennifer Homans has been named the inaugural Van Cleef & Arpels Chair in the History of Dance at New York University. A Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the university for nearly two decades, she currently serves as the founding director of NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts. She is the author of several award-winning publications, including Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (Random House, 2010).

Dr. Homans earned her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York City and her Ph.D. in modern European history from NYU.

Esther Freeman has been named the inaugural L’Oréal Dermatological Beauty/CeraVe Endowed Chair in Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She currently serves as the hospital’s director of global health dermatology and an associate professor of dermatology at Harvard. As a physician-scientist, she conducts epidemiological research in the area of HIV dermatology and global health.

Dr. Freeman is a summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in infectious disease epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and her medical degree from Harvard.