Diane M. Simeone has been named the inaugural Korman Family Presidential Director’s Chair of the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center. Before coming to UC San Diego, Dr. Simeone was director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center and associate director of translational research at Perlmutter Cancer Center at New York University Langone Health. She is an internationally renowned pancreatic surgeon whose work centers on treating pancreatic cancer and pancreatic cystic tumors.
Dr. Simeone is a graduate of Brown University, where she majored in neuroscience. She earned her medical degree from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and completed her residency at the University of Michigan.
Merrilee “Mimi” Davies Wroten was named the inaugural Paul D. Cronin Chair of Riding at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. Wroten has been an instructor and coach with the college’s riding program for the past three decades. After several years of service as associate director, she was promoted to program director in 2011.
Wroten earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Sweet Briar College.
Veena Shankaran, professor of medicine at the University of Washington, is the inaugural Lert Family Endowed Chair at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. A gastrointestinal cancer specialist, she currently serves as co-director of the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research. Dr. Shankaran’s new endowed appointment will support her research connecting financial hardship and patient outcomes.
Dr. Shankaran is a magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she majored in philosophy. She earned her medical degree and completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Michigan, followed by a fellowship in hematology and oncology at Northwestern University in Illinois.
Hong Wang was named a Silver Professor of Mathematics at New York University. The title is the university’s most prestigious named professorship. A leading scholar in Fourier analysis and geometric measure theory, Dr. Wang is known for her 2025 resolution of the Kakeya conjecture, a central problem in harmonic analysis and geometry that had been unsolved since it was first posed in 1917. Dr. Wang joined the NYU faculty in 2023 after teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Wang earned her bachelor’s degree from Peking University in China and her master’s degrees from Université Paris Sud and Ecole Polytechnique in France. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mary Beth Klinger was named the Distinguished Faculty for the Tomas V. Mike Miller Jr. Center for Leadership at the College of Southern Maryland. Dr. Klinger, a professor of business, has been a faculty member with the college for the past 25 years. Her research focuses on organizational innovation and change, as well as community and connectedness.
Dr. Klinger received bachelor’s degrees in psychology and economics from Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. She holds a master’s degree in international management from Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, an MBA from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in e-business from Capella University.