Five Women Named to Endowed Faculty Positions

Xu Cheng was appointed the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Cheng is a member of the university’s economics department and her research focuses on econometric theory and applied econometrics.

Dr. Cheng has been on the faculty at Penn since 2009. She is a graduate of Peking University in China and holds a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Dana Priest was named the third holder of the John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland College Park. Priest has been serving as an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, concentrating on national security issues. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Priest is the author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America’s Military (W.W. Norton, 2003). She is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Marie Harvey was named Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, the highest faculty honor bestowed at the university. She has been serving as associate dean and professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences. Professor Harvey joined the faculty at the university in 2005. Her research focuses on preventing unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases among young adults.

Professor Harvey is a graduate of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where she majored in psychology and European history. She holds a master of public health degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Katherine Knowlton was appointed the Colonel Horace E. Alphin Professor in Dairy Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Professor Knowlton has been on the faculty at Virginia Tech since 1998.

Dr. Knowlton is a graduate of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She holds a master’s degree from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Adrienne Martin was named the inaugural holder of the Akshata Murty ’02 and Rishi Sunak Professorship of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Claremont McKenna College in California. She will begin her new role this fall. She currently serves as an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of How We Hope: A Moral Psychology (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Dr. Martin is a graduate of New York University. She earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of California at San Diego and a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.