Esther Brown, an assistant professor at the School of Nursing at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, received the 2011 Distinguished New Faculty Award from the International Conference on College Teaching and Learning.
Dr. Brown is a graduate of Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. She holds a master’s degree in nursing from West Chester University and an educational doctorate from Immaculata.
Sonia Nieto, professor emerita in the department of teacher education and curriculum studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was selected as a laureate of Kappa Delta Pi, the international education honor society established in 1911. Membership in the laureate division of KDP is limited to 60 living individuals whose work exemplifies the highest ideals of education.
Dr. Nieto is a graduate of St. John’s University. She earned a master’s degree in Spanish and Hispanic literature at New York University and a doctoral degree at the University of Massachusetts.
Kathy Beauregard, director of athletics at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, was named AD of the Year by the National Association of College Directors of Athletics. She originally was hired by the university in 1979 as a gymnastics coach.
Beauregard earned a bachelor’s degree from Hope College in 1979 and a master’s degree from WMU in 1981.
Katherine L. Heilpern, chair of the department of emergency medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine, received the 2011 Advancement of Women in Academic Emergency Medicine Award from the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.
Dr. Heilpern is a graduate of the Emory School of Medicine and completed her training in internal medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Carolin Crawford, fellow of Emmanuel College and professor at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University in England, was named to deliver a series of six public lectures in London from November 2011 to June 2012 as the Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College. Some 354 years ago Sir Christopher Wren was appointed to the same position.
Naadu Mills, first lady of Ghana, received an honorary doctorate at Goodwin College in East Hartford, Connecticut. Mills was honored for devoting her life to the education of young girls in Ghana.
Adjoa A. Aiyetoro was named the founding director of the Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Since 2004, she has served as an associate professor at the university’s William H. Bowen School of Law.
The Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, has named Amanda Nickerson as director of the Jean M. Alberti Center for the Prevention of Bullying, Abuse, and School Violence. She was an associate professor of school psychology at SUNY-Albany.
Mary Madden, associate research professor in the Center for Education and Research at the University of Maine, was named director of the university’s ADVANCE Rising Tide Center. The center, funded by a $3.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, aims to increase the number of women faculty in the sciences.
The University of Pennsylvania announced that the director of its new Center for Global Women’s Health will be Lynn Sommers. She is currently the Lillian S. Brunner Professor of Medical/Surgical Nursing at the university.
Mary Simoni was appointed dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The appointment is effective on October 1. For the past seven years, she has been serving at associate dean for research and community engagement and professor at the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at the University of Michigan.
Kimberly Kempf-Leonard was named dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, effective August 1. She is currently chair of the department of criminology and criminal justice at the university. She previously taught at Temple University, Kent State University, the London School of Economics, the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and the University of Texas at Dallas. She joined the faculty at SIU in 2007.
On August 15 Lynn Okagaki will become dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Delaware. She is currently commissioner of the National Center for Educational Research at the Institute of Education Sciences in Washington, D.C.
Teri Britt Pipe was named interim dean of the College of Nursing and Health Innovation at Arizona State University. She was director of nursing research and innovation and associate professor of nursing at the College of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic.
Sonya Premeaux was appointed associate dean for graduate programs at College of Business of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She was associate dean of the College of Business at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana.
Colleen Garland was named vice president for university relations at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. She will join the university’s staff in August. She has been serving as assistant vice president for university development at Ohio State University. She previously held fundraising positions at Denison University and Otterbein University.
Caroline Levander was appointed vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives at Rice University in Houston. She has been serving as the Carlson Professor of Humanties, professor of English, and director of the Humanities Research Center at the university. Her appointment takes effect on July 1 but she will be spending a year on sabbatical before assuming her full duties. She will spend the year completing work on two books.
Eve J. Higginbotham, executive dean for health sciences and senior vice president at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was elected to the board of trustees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mary Sortino is the new director of academic affairs for the Delaware campus of the University of Phoenix. She was chair of the department of human services and social sciences at Delaware Technical & Community College campus in Dover.
Margaret Higgins was named vice president for student affairs at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. The appointment is effective August 1. She was assistant to the president for special projects at the University of San Francisco.
Deborah E. Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, was appointed by President Obama to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Elizabeth I. Dadzie is the new associate vice president for enrollment management at Tuskegee University. She previously was on the administrative staff at Indiana University.
Dorothy A. Hauver was named assistant treasurer and director of finance at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Since 1991 she has been an auditor for KPMG in Boston.
Angela L. Pannell, business manager for the College of Business at Mississippi State University, was appointed by Governor Haley Barbour to the Mississippi State Board of Public Accountancy.
Rachel Fleck was appointed director of development for the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University in Houston. She was a development officer at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Carolyn Arthur “Biddy” Martin was named the 19th president of Amherst College, the highly rated liberal arts institution in western Massachusetts. Since 2008, she has been chancellor of the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus in Madison. Previously, she served as professor and provost at Cornell University. In accepting the position, Dr. Martin stated, “Amherst represents everything I value in higher education.”
Dartmouth College is losing one of its most longstanding woman faculty members.
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Jessica Jennrich was named director of the Center for Women and Gender at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She has been serving as director of undergraduate advising, curriculum, and programming for the department of women’s and gender studies at the University of Missouri. She has been on the department’s staff since 2005.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cheryl Hyman, chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, have recommended Reagan Romali as the next president of Truman College, one of the system’s seven colleges. The board of trustees is expected to vote on the nomination at its June 16th meeting.
A report by the National Union of Students in Australia offers disturbing statistics on sexual assault on college campuses in the country. The survey found that two out of every three women had “an unwanted sexual experience” while enrolled in college. One in six women who responded to the survey said they had been raped in college and another 12 percent said that they had fended off an attempted rape.
The University of Tennessee has appointed Joan Cronan as interim vice chancellor and director of athletics. Cronan has been director of women’s athletics at the university since 1983. She is the former president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.
The university also named Theresa M. Lee as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, effective January 1, 2012. She is currently chair of the department of psychology at the University of Michigan. She has been on the psychology department faculty at the University of Michigan since 1988.
Constance Hess Williams, a trustee of Barnard College from 1990 to 2000, has made a generous contribution to the college to endow the directorship of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies on the Barnard campus. Williams, daughter of the late Leon Hess, founder of Hess Oil, is a leading Democratic politician in Pennsylvania. She served in both the Pennsylvania House of Representative and the State Senate. She is also chair of the board of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Kathryn Kolbert, who has led the Athena Center since it was founded in 2009 will now become the Constance Hess William Director. Kolbert, a civil rights attorney, is a graduate of Cornell University and the Temple University School of Law.
Michelle M. Kalis was named provost at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut. She will also serve as a professor of biology and pharmaceutical sciences. Dr. Kalis was vice president for academic affairs and provost at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. Prior to her 10-year tenure at MCPHS, she taught at the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Long Island University.
On July 26 Darby Dickinson will become dean of the School of Law at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. She will also hold the W. Frank Newton Endowed Professorship at the law school. Since 2004 Dickerson has been serving as dean of the Stetson University College of Law in Deland, Florida. She joined the faculty there as an assistant professor in 1995.
Shirley K. Baker, vice chancellor for scholarly resources and dean of university libraries at Washington University in St. Louis will retire at the end of the month. She has been dean of university libraries for 23 years.
Rosemary Loria was appointed professor and chair of the department of plant pathology at the University of Florida, effective August 19. She was a professor of plant pathology at Cornell University.
Cynthia M. Daily was named interim chair of the department of accounting at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has been an associate professor of accounting at the university since 2004.
The University of Utah College of Social Work has announced that two of its faculty members will serve consecutive 18-month terms as the holder of the Belle S. Spafford Endowed Chair in Social Work. Marilyn Luptak is an assistant professor of social work at the university.She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in social work from the University of Minnesota.
Fran Wilby is an assistant professor and executive director of the university’s W.D. Goodwill Initiatives on Aging. She holds a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, and a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Utah.
Irene Vasquez was appointed associate professor of American studies and director of the Chicano Hispanic Mexicano Studies program at the University of New Mexico. Her appointment is effective in August. She has been serving as professor and chair of the Chicana/o studies department at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Salem College, the women’s college in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has announced that it is adding three new majors this fall. Students at the college, which was founded in 1772, will now be able to major in criminal studies, environmental studies, and teaching, schools, and society. Students in the teaching, schools, and society major will choose between concentrations in advocacy, mathematics, environment, literacy, natural sciences, or social sciences.
After it was disclosed that she contributed $25,000 to Emily’s List, Roxanne Martino has resigned from the board of trustees of the University of Notre Dame. The Cardinal Newman Society, formed in 1993 to strengthen Catholic identity in Catholic higher education, had voiced objection to the contributions because Emily’s List supports many pro-choice women candidates. The society also objected to Martino’s contributions to the Chicago Foundation for Women, which reportedly has ties to Planned Parenthood.
Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci, associate professor of foreign languages and literatures at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvnia, received the College/University Teacher of the Year Award from the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Geoffrion-Vinci has taught at Lafayette since 1998.
Kathy Lu, associate professor of material science and engineering at Virginia Tech, received the 2011 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This honor allows professor Lu to spend a year conducting research at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt’s Institute for Materials Science in Germany.
Andrea Tawney is the new assistant dean for development at the College of Business at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. For the past eight years, Dr. Tawney has been an administrator and faculty member at the University of Arizona and Texas Tech University.
Lyn Brodersen was named vice president for student and academic affairs at North Iowa Area Community College in Mason City. She was dean of the College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences at Southwestern Minnesota State University in Marshall.
Carmen I. Canales was named associate vice president for human resources and chief human resources officer at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was a human resources professional for major law firm.
Sidney S. Evans was promoted to vice president of student affairs and dean of students at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She was the associate dean for law student services at the university.
Leslie Cedar is the new executive director of Texas Exes, the alumni association at the University of Texas at Austin. She was senior vice president of Rearden Commerce Inc., a Silicon Valley e-commerce company.
Frances J. Feltner was named director of the University of Kentucky Center for Excellence in Rural Health in Hazard. She has served as interim director since last July.
Annemarie Seifert was appointed associate vice chancellor for student development at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She was associate vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at Georgia Southern University. She will assume her new duties on June 27.
Margaret Semmer was named vice chancellor for academics for the northwest region of Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana. Since 2007, she has been dean of career and technical education at Joliet Junior College in Illinois.
Jane Chumley Ammons was appointed chair of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and System Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the first woman named to a school chair at Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.
Laura Saunders, who served as vice president of administrative services at Bellevue College in Washington State from 2005 until her retirement in 2008, was named interim president of the educational institution. Dr. Saunders is replacing Jean Floten who left to become chancellor of the Washington branch of Western Governors University.
Among the eight Ivy League colleges, Brown University has the highest percentage of women undergraduates. According to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education, 53 percent of the undergraduate students at Brown are women. At Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, women make up 52 percent of the undergraduate student body.
“We can’t expect to hold back the potential of one half of our world and believe we will have the same progress and balance as we would if all people have the option to realize their potential.
The Falls Center in Philadelphia is an urban renewal project that will include offices, apartments, and stores. The 12-acre site is located at the site of the former Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Construction workers recently discovered a time capsule that was sealed in 1930 and placed behind the cornerstone of the medical college’s main building.
Texas Woman’s University in Denton has announced that it will be offering an online Ph.D. program in occupational therapy beginning this fall. The program will eventually replace the on-campus Ph.D. program in occupational therapy.
The Ph.D. program is under the direction of Professor Sally Schultz.
As series of posters and e-mails targeting women has plagued the campus of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, for several months. One e-mail, that claimed to be from the university’s president, showed a nuclear bomb and Marie Curie and made the case that women should not be entrusted in positions of power. Campaign posters of women running for student government positions were defaced with similar messages. E-mail messages were also sent to students at Wilfrid Laurier University, which is also in Waterloo.
Catherine Lord, an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of autism, has been chosen as the director of the new Institute for Brain Development in White Plains, New York. The institute, scheduled to open in 2012, is a collaboration of New York Presbyterian Hospital, the Columbia University Medical Center, and the Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Lord will also become a member of the faculty at the Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Here is news of recent grants for higher education programs relating to women:
Bonnie Thornton Dill, chair of the women’s studies department at the University of Maryland, was named dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the university. When she begins her new duties on August 1, she will become the first woman to hold the post.
Susan Calovini was named vice president for academic and student affairs and dean of the college at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Evansville in Indiana.
Barbara Wells, professor of sociology and chair of the social sciences division at Maryville College in Tennessee, was named interim vice president and dean of the college. Professor Wells has taught at Maryville College since 1998.
Julie Wong was named vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. Since 2008 she has served as vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Colorado. Previously, Dr. Wong was associate vice president and dean of students at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Dru Marshall was appointed provost and vice president for academics at the University of Calgary. The appointment is effective on August 1. For the past four years, she has been deputy provost at the University of Alberta. Dr. Marshall is a recognized expert in exercise physiology and women in sports.
Susan L. Graham, the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor Emerita of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, was elected as a member of the Harvard Corporation. The corporation, equivalent to a board of trustees, is being expanded from seven to 13 members over the next several years.
Deborah Nelson, associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, was appointed deputy provost for graduate education, effective September 1.
Carol Rowlands was promoted to associate dean of admissions and financial aid for operations and research at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She has served as the college’s director of admissions since 1998.
Patricia Whitten Hollingsworth was named director of health engagement at Indiana University in Bloomington. The appointment is effective on July 11. Hollingsworth was director of the health enhancement program at Ball State University.