Celeste González de Bustamante is the new vice dean at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Dr. González de Bustamante most recently served as the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair in Communication in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. She also served as founding director of the Moody College’s Center for Global Change and Media. Earlier in her career, she was co-founder and director of the University of Arizona Center for Border and Global Journalism.
Dr. González de Bustamante is a graduate of San José State University in California, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in broadcast journalism and foreign languages. She holds a master’s degree in Latin American history and a doctorate in history from the University of Arizona.
Heather Tookes is the inaugural vice provost for faculty and academic affairs at Yale University. Dr. Tookes, a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, has been a faculty member with the Ivy League university since 2004. She previously served as deputy dean for faculty at the School of Management. Her research focuses on how market liquidity, leverage, and trading frictions impact firms and financial markets.
Dr. Tookes is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she majored in economics. She holds a Ph.D. in management and finance from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Blaire Koerner is the inaugural director of the Center for Music Leadership and Community Engagement in the Florida State University College of Music. Dr. Koerner comes to her new role from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, where she was an adjunct instructor of arts leadership and associate director of the Institute for Music Leadership. She has also taught at Syracuse University in New York as an adjunct bassoon instructor.
Dr. Koerner holds a bachelor’s degree in bassoon performance and a master’s degree in elementary education from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. She holds a master of music degree and doctor of musical arts degree from the Eastman School of Music.
Qingxiao Zheng is a new assistant professor of human-centered computing and social informatics in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. She also holds a faculty appointment with Penn State’s Institute for Computational Data. Dr. Zheng’s research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and human-centered AI, where she studies how AI can augment — not replace — human expertise.
Dr. Zheng received graduate training in social science theory and mixed-methods research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She earned a Ph.D. in information sciences and human-computer interaction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Nakia Davis is the new associate dean for academic affairs at the North Carolina Central University School of Law. Professor Davis, a faculty member since 2006, previously served as the law school’s associate dean of clinical legal education and experiential learning. She has served in several other capacities at the university, including co-director and facilitator of the NCCU School of Law Virtual Justice Project, and co-director of the Performance-Based Admission Program. Before transitioning to academia, Professor Davis practiced family law in Durham, North Carolina.
Davis received her bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her juris doctorate from North Carolina Central University.
Haley Hutto Gandy is a new assistant professor of management in the Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business at Clemson University in South Carolina. Her research examines how entrepreneurs navigate the tensions that arise when pursuing objectives beyond economic performance.
Dr. Gandy holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and an MBA from the University of West Florida. She earned a Ph.D. at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.
Alexandra Decker is a new assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Decker most recently served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research combines behavioral studies, eye tracking, neuroimaging, computational modeling, and advanced statistical methods to examine how the brain and cognition change throughout childhood.
Dr. Decker earned a bachelor’s degree from McGill University in Montreal and a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Toronto.
Jean Beaman was promoted to full professor of sociology, international studies, and Black, racial, and ethnic studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Prior to joining the CUNY faculty in 2024, Dr. Beaman taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Purdue University in Indiana. Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, global migration, and state violence in both France (and Western Europe) and the United States. She is the author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017).
Dr. Beaman earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in sociology, all from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Mary Hoopes is a new associate professor at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco. Most recently, Dr. Hoopes served as an associate professor and director of the Matthew Byrne Jr. Judicial Clerkship Institute at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. As a scholar, she studies how the law shapes the lives of immigrant workers and asylum seekers.
A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Dr. Hoopes received her juris doctorate from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Erin Baldwin is a new assistant professor of lawyering skills at the University of Dayton School of Law. Baldwin comes to her new appointment from Ohio State University, where she was director of academic excellence in the Moritz College of Law. Before transitioning her career to academia, she worked for law firms in New York and Ohio, primarily focusing on commercial litigation and government investigations.
A graduate of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Baldwin earned her juris doctorate from Yale Law School.