Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.
Augusta University in Georgia received a five-year, $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study gestational diabetes in pregnant women and its effect on offspring. As many of 10 percent of pregnant women in Georgia have gestational diabetes. The research is under the direction of Jennifer Thompson, a postdoctoral fellow at the university. Dr. Thompson holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Western Ontario.
Smith College, the highly rated liberal arts college for women in Northampton, Massachusetts, received a donation from alumna Charlotte Feng Ford to endow a curator’s position at the Smith College Museum of Art. The endowed position, which will carry Ford’s name, will focus on the field of contemporary art.
Although it was initially founded as school for women, the University of Montevallo has never had a woman president. Now the university has reached a historic milestone and selected selected Michelle R. Johnston to serve as its next president.
The women who are taking on new leadership roles with professional academic organizations are Yasmeen Shorish of James Madison University in Virginia, Elena Carbone of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Shelley Lusetti of New Mexico State University, Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School, and Keisha Blain of Brown University.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a national program run by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Dr. Yelick, a computer scientist and longtime UC Berkeley faculty member, will become the laboratory's next director on July 1.
The selected candidate should have expertise and experience in theoretical models in labor and public economics as well as in microeconometrics and programming.