Four Women in New Teaching Roles

Lydia Bourouiba is a new assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a lecturer in mathematics at MIT and a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Dr. Bourouiba’s research focuses on fluid dynamics and disease transmission. She earned a Ph.D. at McGill University in Montreal.

Sonja Stephenson Watson was promoted to associate professor of Spanish at the University of Texas at Arlington. She will also serve as director of the women’s and gender studies program at the university.

Dr. Watson holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic literature from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She is the author of The Politics of Race in Panama: Afro-Hispanic and West Indian Literary Discourses of Contention (University Press of Florida 2014).

Leah Hager Cohen was named Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. For the past five years, she has held the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the college.

Professor Cohen is the author of five novels including her latest work No Book but the World (Riverhead, 2014). She is a graduate of Hampshire College in Massachusetts and earned a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University.

Xiaohong Chen was appointed the Malcolm K. Brachman Professor of Economics at Yale University. She joined the faculty at Yale in 2007. Earlier in her career she taught at the University of Chicago, New York University, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Dr. Chen is a graduate of Wuhan University in China, where she majored in mathematics. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at San Diego.