Ten Women Appointed to New Administrative Posts at American Colleges and Universities

Amanda Kelso was promoted to assistant vice provost and executive director of the Global Education Office for Undergraduates at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She has been on the staff at the Global Education Office since 1997, most recently serving as associate director.

Dr. Kelso holds bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned a doctorate in higher education administration from North Carolina State University.

Angela Lee Gieras was appointed executive director of the Kansas City Repertory Theater. The group serves as the professional theater-in-residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She was the director of development for the Florida Theater in Jacksonville.

Gieras is a graduate of the University of Florida. She holds a master’s degree and an MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Joyce E. Coffee was named managing director of the Global Adaptation Index at the University of Notre Dame. ND-GAIN ranks the world’s nations on how prepared they are to deal with natural disasters. She is a former consultant for the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Coffee is a graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She holds a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kristen Fischer is the new chief financial officer of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory which is managed by Princeton University for the U.S. Department of Energy. She was the director of budget and grant operations for the Office of the Attorney General of New Jersey.

Fischer is a graduate of Rutgers University, where she majored in psychology. She holds an MBA  from Georgian Court University in Lakewood, New Jersey.

S. Laurel Weldon, a professor of political science, was named interim vice provost for faculty affairs at Purdue University. She has been on the Purdue University faculty since 1999.

Dr. Weldon, whose research focuses on gender and social policy, is a graduate of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. She holds a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of When Protest Makes Policy: How Social Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups (University of Michigan Press, 2011).

Poonam Arora was named associate dean for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at Grinnell College in Iowa. She will also serve as the Rosenfield Professor of Diversity and the Liberal Arts. She has been serving as a professor of English at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Earlier in her career, she taught for 20 years at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Dr. Arora is a graduate of St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, India. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University, a campus of the State University of New York system.

Lynne O’Brien was appointed the inaugural associate vice provost for digital and online education initiatives at Duke University. She has been serving as the director of the Center for Instructional Technology at the university.

O’Brien has been spending the past year coordinating Duke’s efforts with Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. One of the university’s online courses in philosophy enrolled more than 180,000 students.

Alonda Thomas is the new director of media relations for the Office of Communication at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. She has been serving as a senior publicist at The FrontPage Firm, an entertainment public relations firm in Los Angeles.

Thomas is a graduate of Florida A&M University and holds a master’s degree from Florida State University.

Allison Rains, an assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Kentucky, was named medical director of emergency medical services for the University of Kentucky’s Good Samaritan Hospital.

Dr. Rains completed her medical training at the University of Kentucky.

Kathy Bickel was appointed vice president for alumni relations and director of the Alumni Association at Oregon State University in Corvallis. She was vice president for outreach for the Ohio State University Alumni Association. She will begin her new duties on August 26.

Bickel has been on the staff of the Ohio State Alumni Association since 1994. She holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in labor and human resource management from Ohio State University.