Vicki H. Grassian, the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Chemistry and director of the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Institute at the University of Iowa, has been named as the recipient of the 2012 Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology by the American Chemical Society. Professor Grassian is being honored for her work on research on mineral dust aerosol and its impact on the environment.
Dr. Grassian is a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany. She earned a master’s degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley.
Jennifer E. Copeland, United Methodist chaplain at Duke University and executive director of the Duke University Wesley Fellowship, received the 2011 Gaining Notoriety for Outstanding Ministry in Education award from the National Campus Ministry Association.
Jennifer L. Hunt was appointed chair of the department of pathology and laboratory services at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She was an associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and associate chief of pathology and chief of anatomic and molecular pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Nancy J. Huntly was named professor of biology and director of the Ecology Center at Utah State University. Since 1986, she has been a member of the faculty of the department of biological sciences at Idaho State University. Most recently, she has served as program director for the division of environmental biology and long-term ecological research programs at the National Science Foundation.
DeVry University has announced that Deidre Shaffer will be the new dean of its Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, campus. The Fort Washington site is of one of three Philadelphia-area campuses of DeVry University. Previously, Shaffer was dean of students at Rosemont College in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.
Marquette University received a five-year, $1,480,000 federal grant to support a nurse-midwife practice and develop a breastfeeding support program at the university’s Neighborhood Health Center. The grant will allow the center to hire three certified midwives and a support staff. It is expected that about 1,200 births will take place at the center over the next five years.
Tony Award-winning actress Phylicia Rashad was named to be the inaugural holder of the Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre at Fordham University in The Bronx, New York. Rashad is perhaps best known for her role as Claire Huxtable on the long-running television comedy, The Cosby Show. Rashad is a magna cum laude graduate of Howard University.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, is one of three women awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Sharing the prize are Leymah Gbowee, the executive director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa, and Tawakkul Karmen, president of Women Journalists Without Chains in Yemen. The three women were honored for “their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
Youlonda Copeland-Morgan was named vice chancellor of enrollment management at the University of California at Los Angeles. Since 2008, she has been associate vice president for enrollment management at Syracuse University. Previously, she held admissions and financial aid positions at Harvey Mudd College, Occidental College, and the University of La Verne.
Sharon Stahl, associate vice chancellor for students and dean of the First Year Center at Washington University in St. Louis, will serve as interim senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University.
Paige Atkins was appointed vice president for cyber and information technology research at the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation. She was director of strategic planning and information for the Defense Information Systems Agency.
Kumea Shorter-Gooden was named associate vice president and chief diversity officer at the University of Maryland, effective January 1. She has been serving as associate provost for international/multicultural initiatives at Alliant International University.
Tamara Young Lee was promoted to associate vice president for state and regional government affairs at Tuskegee University in Alabama. She was assistant vice president and assistant university counsel.
Marsha V. Gable was named associate dean for extended opportunities programs and services at Santa Ana College in California. She was associate director for university outreach programs at California State University at San Marcos.
Rachel Nelson Moeller was promoted to executive director of alumni relations at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She was associate director of career services for externships and internships.
Wokie Nwabueze was named ombuds officer at Princeton University. In this role she will provide guidance and assistance to members of the university community who have concerns or complaints about their work or studies. She was vice president for ethics and employee resolutions programs at Prudential Financial.
Karla Carney-Hall was named dean of students and vice president of student affairs at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, effective in January. She has been serving as vice president for student affairs at Hendrix College.
Renee Hampton was promoted to dean of student life at Columbus State Community College in Ohio. She has been at the college since 1999, most recently serving as special assistant to the provost and director of TRIO programs.
Beverley Pitts, who has served as president of the University of Indianapolis for the past six years, has announced that she will retire at the end of the current academic year. In an e-mail to colleagues, Dr. Pitts wrote, “The time is right for new leadership.”
Pamela Hemenway Simpson, who served on the faculty at Washington and Lee University for 38 years, died at her home in Lexington, Virginia. She was 65 years old.
The board of governors of Colorado State University named Lesley A. Di Mare as the first woman to serve as permanent president of the university. She is currently interim president of Nevada State College in Henderson. She joined Nevada State in 2007 as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. Previously, she was associate vice provost at Arizona State University West in Tempe.
New rules drafted by the National Science Foundation are designed to make it easier for women to balance their research with family obligations. Under the proposal, men and women would be able to suspend research grants for up to a year in order to care for a new child, tend to an elderly parent, or deal with other urgent family matters.
Margaret Katherine Banks was named vice chancellor for engineering and dean of the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. The appointment is effective in January. She is currently the Jack and Kay Hockema Professor and head of the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University.
Colorado State University reports that there are 13,812 women students enrolled at the university this fall. They make up 51.7 percent of the total enrollments. While enrollments overall are nearly evenly divided between men and women, there are large gender gaps in some divisions of the university.
The Women’s Resource Center at Utah Valley University in Orem has been renamed the Women’s Success Center. Previously, the center had a specific mission to help older women students. Now the center’s resources are available for all women on campus and for women in the local community.
Leah Hager Cohen, who holds the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, recently published the novel 
President Obama recently named seven scholars as winners of the National Medal of Science. The recipients will be honored at a White House ceremony later in the year.
Jacqueline K. Barton is the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. She was honored for her discovery of a new property of the DNA helix.
Marilynne Boyle-Baise, professor of curriculum and instruction at the Indiana University School of Education, is the recipient of the 2011 Jean Dresden Grambs Career Research in Social Studies Award. The honor was bestowed by the National Council for the Social Studies.
Nancy D. Polikoff, a professor of law at American University in Washington, D.C., received the 2011 Dan Bradley Award from the National LGBT Bar Association. The award honors a practitioner whose work has been dedicated to efforts to enhance equality under the law for the LGBT community.
Olivia Graeve, associate professor of material science at the Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University, received the Jaime Oaxaca Award from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. The award is given to an individual who has made “selfless and outstanding contributions to the fields of engineering and science to the Hispanic community over an extended period of time.”
Bernadette Brooten, the Robert and Myra Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, is spending this academic year as a visiting scholar in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for this academic year to conduct research on early Christian women who were enslaved or who owned slaves during the first to fourth centuries.
Dena S. Cox, a professor of marketing at the Kelly School of Business of Indiana University, received a two-year, $99,600 grant from Merck Inc. to study factors that go into the decisions of young women whether or not to receive the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. She will explore the best practices for informing young women of the benefits and risks of the vaccine.
Lauren Vasquez, a sociology doctoral student at Mississippi State University, received a grant from the Verizon Foundation to study violence against women college students. Her research is examining the relationship between school policies and the accessibility of victims’ services to sexual crime rates.
Debora Shaw was named dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. She has been serving in the position on an interim basis since January. She has been a full professor of library science at Indiana since 2003. She is an associate editor of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Rebecca M. Henderson was named the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University. The chair is named for a former dean of the business school and his wife. Since 2009, Professor Henderson has been serving as the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at Harvard Business School. Previously, she was the Eastman Kodak Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University has announced that four visiting scholars will spend this academic year at Stanford conducting independent research, completing writing projects, and participating in the center’s seminars and forums. Two of the four scholars are women.
Bridget Ford is an associate professor of history at California State University-East Bay. She is completing work on a book entitled American Crossings: Forging Union in a Civil War Borderland.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She is working on a book with the title of Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color.
Six faculty members at the flagship campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign have earned the title of University Scholar. The designation comes with a cash award of $10,000 for each of the next three years. The money can be used for research, equipment, travel, or subscriptions. Two of the six new University Scholars are women.
Naira Hovakimyan is a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois. She is an expert on robotic control systems for aircraft.
Cynthia Oliver is a professor of dance at the university. She has been on the faculty since 2000.
Angela M. Sewall, dean of the College of Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), was elected chair of the Unit Accreditation Board of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).
Olufunmilayo Arewa has a joint appointment in the departments of law and anthropology. She previously practiced law in New York and California.
Katherine Porter was named professor of law at the university. She concentrates on bankruptcy, consumer, and commerical law. She was on the faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law.
Shu-Ming Wang was named professor of anesthesiology and perioperative care at the university’s medical school. She received her medical training at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey and completed her residency at the New York University Medical Center. She was also trained in acupuncture at the American College of Acupuncture in New York City.
Marie Chisholm-Burns was appointed dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She is the first African-American to hold the position in the college’s 113-year history. Also, she is only the second African American to be named a dean at the UTHSC.
Judy Ashcroft was named founding dean of the University College at the University of South Florida in Tampa, effective October 31. Since 2007, she has been serving as dean of continuing and innovative education at the University of Texas.
Judie F. Charlton was named vice dean for clinical affairs at the West Virginia University School of Medicine and chief medical officer of WVU Healthcare. She has been a faculty member in the WVU department of ophthalmology since 1989.
Lillian Mills was appointed chair of the department of accounting at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. She holds the Wilton E. and Catherine A. Thomas chair in accounting at the university.
Mary Holz-Clause was named vice president for economic development at the University of Connecticut, effective December 2. She has been serving as associate vice president for extension and outreach at Iowa State University.
Karlene Burrell-McRae is the new director of the Black Cultural Center at Swarthmore College in suburban Philadelphia. She was the director of the Black Cultural Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nancy G. Guerra, a professor of psychology and associate dean for research in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware, has been appointed director of the university’s Global Research Consortium. The effort will seek to identify collaborative research projects among the university’s seven colleges. She joined the university faculty in August after teaching at the University of California at Riverside.
Libby Shelton was promoted to controller at the University of Memphis. She has been on the staff at the university for 23 years, most recently as director of business operations for the university’s physical plant.
Allayne Barrilleaux was appointed vice president of academic affairs at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. She has been serving in the post on an interim basis. Previously, she was assistant vice president of academic affairs.
From time to time, Women in Academia Report will provide links to online articles that may be of interest to our readers. We invite subscribers to e-mail us at editor@WIAReport.com with suggestions of articles for inclusion in this feature.
Burlington College President Jane O. Sanders has announced her intention to resign, effective October 14. The announcement came as the board of trustees was holding a meeting. Published reports had revealed that one of the items on the agenda was “removal of the president.”
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