Laurel Smith-Doerr has been named a Provost Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She currently serves as associate chair of the sociology department and is affiliated with the university’s Institute for Social Science Research and UMass ADVANCE. Her research areas include science and technology studies; gender, race, and class; organizations; and social networks.
Dr. Smith-Doerr is a graduate of Pomona College in California, where she majored in sociology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona.
Lindsey A. Welch was promoted to full professor of chemistry at Cedar Crest College, a women’s liberal arts education institution in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Dr. Welch currently serves as chair of the college’s department of chemistry and physical sciences. Her research centers on the fields of catalysis, environmental chemistry, and green chemistry, while her teaching spans from introductory chemistry to senior-level inorganic and physical chemistry courses.
Dr. Welch holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Liza Stepanova has joined the University of Cincinnati faculty as an associate professor of piano in the College-Conservatory of Music. She comes to her new role from the University of Georgia, where she has been serving as the Despy Karlas Professor in Piano and piano area chair. Earlier, she taught at The Juilliard School in New York City and Smith College in Massachusetts. She has also served as a guest artist at the University of Colorado Boulder, Ohio State University, James Madison University in Virginia, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
A graduate of the Hanns Eisler Academy in Berlin, Germany, Dr. Stepanova earned her doctor of musical arts degree from The Juilliard School.
Anjali Iyer-Pascuzzi was appointed head of the department of horticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. A professor of botany and plant pathology, Dr. Iyer-Pascuzzi focuses her research on the mechanisms that plant roots use to perceive and respond to the environment. She has been a Purdue faculty member for the past 13 years.
Dr. Iyer-Pascuzzi holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate in plant genetics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She completed postdoctoral research in plant biology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Jennifer Olmsted was named chair of the James Pearson Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. Olmstead, a professor of art history, has been serving as the department’s associate chair. Her teaching and research interests include European art, architecture, and design from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; art and memory; portraiture; and art that emerges from the intersection of trade, colonialism, and cross-cultural exchange in the Mediterranean world.
Dr. Olmsted holds three degrees in art history: a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.