A Trio of Women Who Have Been Named to Lead Their Academic Departments

Adrienne C. Lahti, who holds the F. Cleveland Kinney Endowed Chair and is a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, has been named chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurobiology. A member of the faculty since 2006, Dr. Lahti’s research is dedicated to the study of schizophrenia and psychosis spectrum disorders using multimodal brain-imaging techniques.

Dr. Lahti earned a medical doctorate from the Universite of Liege in Belgium. She completed a residency in psychiatry at the University of Michigan, and a fellowship in schizophrenia research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Emily Kinsky, associate professor of media communication, was appointed head of the department of communication at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, which is outside of Amarillo. Dr. Kinsky joined the university’s faculty in 2011. She teaches media design, new media, and qualitative research methods. Earlier, she taught at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

Dr. Kinsky is a graduate of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in mass communication from Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Adele Turzillo, who most recently served as the vice president for animal agriculture systems at the World Wildlife Fund, is the new head of the department of animal science in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. She earlier worked for 12 years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. From 1998 to 2004, Dr. Turzillo taught at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Turzillo holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and a doctorate in physiology, both from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.