Jennifer Gandhi has been named the Phyllis A. Wallace Dean of Faculty Development for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. A Yale faculty member since 2022, Dr. Gandhi currently serves as the Howard Wang ’95 Professor of Global Affairs and Political Science and deputy dean of the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously, she was chair of the department of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. Her scholarly research focuses on authoritarian regimes and transitions to and from democracy.
A graduate of Columbia University in New York City, Dr. Gandhi earned her Ph.D. in political science from New York University.
Catherine Volle is the inaugural Joanne Paulsen Buresh ’51 and Wendy Buresh, MD ’74 Endowed Chair in Biology at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Dr. Volle, an associate professor of biochemistry, focuses her research on antibiotic resistance. Her current work centers on the biomechanical changes that occur when bacteria are treated with antimicrobial peptides and how the bacterium Bdellovibrio responds to the challenges of living in a mammalian microbiome.
Dr. Volle received her bachelor’s degree in biology from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology and biochemistry from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She completed postdoctoral research at the National Cancer Institute.
Kalmia Kniel was named the Unidel S. Hallock du Pont Chair at the University of Delaware. Dr. Kniel, a professor of microbial food safety in the department of animal and food sciences, has been a University of Delaware faculty member since 2004. She currently directs the university’s Center for Environmental and Wastewater Epidemiological Research. In her lab, she explores issues of food safety and public health that involve transmission of viruses, protozoa, and pathogenic bacteria.
Dr. Kniel is a three-time graduate of Virginia Tech, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in sociology, her master’s degree in molecular cell biology, and her Ph.D. in food science and technology with a focus on food microbiology and parasitology.