Four Women Selected for Endowed Positions in the Academic World

Karletta Chief is the inaugural Agnese Nelms Haury Endowed Professor in Indigenous Resilience at the University of Arizona, where she is a professor of environmental science. A faculty member since 2011, she currently directs the university’s Indigenous Resilience Center. In this role, she focuses on addressing water access, energy, and food challenges that affect tribal communities.

Dr. Chief earned her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University in California. She holds a Ph.D. in hydrology and water resources from the University of Arizona.

Aviva Abosch has been named the Esernia Endowed Chair in Surgical Treatment of Adult Epilepsy and Movement Disorders at Baptist Health, which manages the faculty group practice and serves as the teaching hospital for the Florida International University College of Medicine. Before joining Baptist Health, Dr. Abosch was the Nancy A. Keegan and Donald R. Voelte, Jr. Chair in Neurosurgery at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Dr. Abosch earned her medical degree and Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Pittsburgh. She completed a general surgery internship and a neurosurgery residency at the University of California, San Francisco.

Sophia Henneberg has joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty as an assistant professor and Norman Rasmussen Career Development Professor in the department of nuclear science and engineering. Her research focuses on developing, utilizing, and extending optimization tools to identify new, promising stellarator designs, which are a promising path toward fusion energy. Before MIT, Dr. Henneberg was a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany.

Dr. Henneberg holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, a master’s degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of York in England.

Angela Gapa has been named a Lantis Endowed University Chair at California State University, Chico, where she teaches as an associate professor of international relations. Throughout her career, she has focused her scholarship on the sources of political and economic variation among resource-rich countries. Her current research explores the global and local geopolitics of the diamond, platinum, oil, and rare earth mineral industries; the geopolitics of energy in southern Africa; and the role of identity politics in international relations.

A graduate of the National University of Science & Technology in Zimbabwe, Dr. Gapa earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in international relations from Florida International University.

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