Four Women Join the Faculty at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York

Hamilton College, the highly rated liberal arts institution in Clinton, New York, has announced five new faculty members for the fall semester. Four of the new hires are women.

Catherine Beck was named an assistant professor of geosciences. Her research focuses on how sediments from the East African Rift Valley preserve changes in paleoclimate and paleoenvironment over the past 4 million years. Dr. Beck is a graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where she majored in geology and archaeology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Farah Dawood is a new assistant professor of chemistry. She recently completed postdoctoral work at the Center for Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She did earlier postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland. Dr. Dawood is a graduate of Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. She earned a Ph.D. in material chemistry at Pennsylvania State University.

Cynthia Downs was hired as an assistant professor of biology. She is an ecological physiologist who investigates how the diverse physiological traits expressed by animals alter an animal’s interaction with its environment and mediates the animal’s ecology and evolutionary trajectories. Dr. Downs is a graduate of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nevada at Reno.

Quincy D. Newell was appointed associate professor of religious studies. She has been on the faculty at the University of Wyoming for the past 11 years. Dr. Newell’s specializes in American religious history, focusing on the construction of racial, gender, and religious identities in the nineteenth-century American West. She is the author of Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic Colonists, 1776-1821 (University of New Mexico Press, 2009) and the co-editor of New Perspectives in Mormon Studies: Creating and Crossing Boundaries (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). Dr. Newell is a graduate of Amherst College in Massachusetts and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.