New Assignments or Roles for Eight Women Who Serve as University Faculty Members

Michelle Smith, the Ann S. Bowers Associate Professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, will take on the added duties of senior associate dean for undergraduate education.

Dr. Smith is a graduate of Hanover College in Indiana. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Dayton in Ohio and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Chelsey Carter will join the faculty at the Yale School of Public Health in 2022. She is completing work on a master of public health degree and a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and will spend the coming academic year as a Presidential Fellow at Princeton University.

Carter is a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta. She holds a master’s degree in sociocultural anthropology from Washington University.

Kimberly Cox-York, an assistant professor of food science and human nutrition at Colorado State University, has been given added duties as the new research integrity officer at the university. She joined the department of food science and human nutrition in 2009 as a research scientist.

Dr. Cox-York is a graduate of Fort Lewis College in Colorado, where she majored in biology and chemistry. She holds a master’s degree in nutrition from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and a Ph.D. in nutrition from Colorado State University.

Jameela J. Yusuff, an associate professor in the College of Medicine of the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York in Brooklyn, was named chief medical officer at the University Hospital of Brooklyn. She is the first woman to hold the position.

Dr. Yusuff received a master’s degree in healthcare delivery leadership and her medical degree from the Icahn School of Medicine of the Mount Sinai Health System. She holds a master of public health degree from SUNY Downstate.

Hanna Reisler was named a University Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She holds the Lloyd Armstrong Jr. Chair in Science and Engineering and is a professor of chemistry at the university. She studies detailed mechanisms of chemical reactions in the gas and condensed phases by using laser and molecular-beam techniques.

Dr. Reiser is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned a Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Crystal Wilkerson, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky has been appointed poet laureate for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. She is the first African American woman to hold the position. Professor Wilkerson is the author of The Birds of Opulence (University of Kentucky Press, 2016), winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence.

A native of Hamilton, Ohio, Wilkerson grew up on her grandparents’ farm in Indian Creek, Kentucky. She is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University, where she majored in journalism. Professor Wilkerson holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Spaulding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

Keila Grinberg was appointed professor of history and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. A native of Rio de Janeiro, she joins the university after being a member of the history department of the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro for almost 20 years.

Dr. Grinberg is the author of A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). She holds a Ph.D. from the Universidade Federal Fluminense.

Cassidy Sugimoto was named chair of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, effective June 1. Dr. Sugimoto has been serving as professor of informatics and director of graduate studies in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington.

Dr. Sugimoto holds a bachelor’s degree in music performance, a master’s degree in information science, and a Ph.D. in information science, all from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.