Three Women Scholars Who Have Been Appointed to Named Professorships

Rachel Beatty Riedl has been named the new director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She is the former director of the program of African studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She will serve as the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies in the department of government at Cornell.

Dr. Riedl is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University in New Jersey.

Victoria Niederhauser, dean of the College of Nursing at the University of Tennessee, has been named to the Sara Rosenbalm Croley Endowed Dean’s Chair. Dr. Niederhauser is a board-certified pediatric nurse practitioner. She has served as dean since 2011. The focus of her research is child and adolescent health promotion and disease prevention, with an emphasis on immunizations and childhood obesity.

Professor Niederhauser is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She earned a master’s degree in nursing at Boston College and a doctorate in public health from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Velma McBride Murry, who holds the Lois Autrey Betts Chair in Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt Univerity in Nashville, Tennessee, has been named University Professor of Human and Organizational Development and University Professor of Health Policy. Dr. Murry is the first Peabody College professor, the third woman, and the first person of color to be named a University Professor. She is one of only eight faculty members at Vanderbilt who currently has this title. She has been a faculty member at Vanderbilt since 2008.

Dr. Murry attained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia.