Five Women Scholars Taking on New Assignments at Major Universities

Hui Cao was appointed the Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics at Yale University. Her research focuses on mesoscopic physics and nanophotonics.

Dr. Cao joined the faculty at Yale in 2008, after teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She earned a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University.

Cynthia Feliciano was appointed a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, effective July 1. She has been serving as an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Feliciano is the author of Unequal Origins: Immigrant Selection and the Education of the Second Generation (LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2006).

Dr. Feliciano is a graduate of Boston University and earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Tayari Jones will join the faculty in the English department at Emory University in Atlanta this fall. She is spending this academic year at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is a founding member of the graduate program in creative writing at Rutgers University in Newark. Professor Jones is the author of four novels including her latest book An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, 2018).

Professor Jones is a graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta. She holds master’s degrees from the University of Iowa and Arizona State University.

Jane Aiken, a professor and vice dean at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., was given the added duties of chairing the university’s new Task Force on Gender Equity. The task force will study and make recommendations on how to strengthen university’s commitment to advance gender equity among faculty and staff.

Professor Aiken is a graduate of what is now Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She earned her juris doctorate at New York University and holds a master’s degree in law from Georgetown University.

Mary Beth Kirkham was named a Distinguished Professor of agronomy at Kansas State University. She joined the faculty in 1980. Dr. Kirkham is an international authority on the plant-water relations of winter wheat and the uptake of heavy metals by crops grown on polluted soil.

Professor Kirkham is a graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she majored in biological sciences. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in botany from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.