Six Women in New Higher Education Administrative Posts

Deloris Pettis is the new vice president for enterprise risk management at Northeastern University in Boston. She was a risk and audit services consultant for Barone and Associates, a firm with clients mostly in higher education and the nonprofit sector. She previously worked at Harvard University for 13 years in a number of senior positions.

Pettis is a graduate of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system. She holds an MBA from Tulane University in New Orleans.

Judith Burnfield was named director of the Nebraska Athletics Performance Lab at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The lab, which will be housed in the university’s football stadium, will enable athletics programs at the university to team up with private sector in innovative health and performance research. Dr. Burnfield is currently the director of the Institute for Rehabilitation Science and Engineering at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln. She will begin her new duties in July.

Dr. Burnfield holds a Ph.D. in biokinesiology from the University of Southern California.

Christine Tysor was appointed program manager at the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. She has been a research project manager for the Center for Naval Systems at the institute.

A graduate of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, Tysor served in the U.S. Navy for eight years as a helicopter pilot. She later earned a master’s degree in education at Virginia Tech.

Amber Ivins was named director of marketing and business development for the Executive Education division at Rice University in Houston. She was the assistant director of executive education at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

Ivins is a graduate of Duke University and holds an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business.

Monica Medina was appointed executive director of the Wharton Public Policy Initiative. The initiative will serve as a nonpartisan research organization offering government policymakers the latest research an and analysis from scholars at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Medina has been serving as a special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia Law School.

Cara Leeman, was named director of risk management at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She was director of risk management for the Tribune Company in Chicago.

Leeman is a graduate of Northern Illinois University, where she majored in English. She holds an MBA from Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois.