Transitions: New President at Eastern Nazarene College, Saint Leo U. Selects Chief Academic Officer

Chief executives

Appointments

Gregory Anderson, interim vice president for instruction at Mt. San Antonio College, has been named president of Riverside City College. He had been president at Saddleback College but resigned in April after less than six months at the helm, citing “personal circumstances.”

Darin Brush, vice president for external engagement and economic development at Davis Technical College, will become president on January 1. He will replace Kim Ziebarth, who has served as interim president since Michael J. Bouwhuis’s retirement.

Jack Connell, provost and dean of the faculty at Houghton College, has been named president of Eastern Nazarene College. He will succeed Corlis McGee, who plans to step down and become a professor of economics at Trevecca Nazarene University, where she previously taught.

Deborah J. Bushway, interim president and chief executive of Northwestern Health Sciences University since June, has been named to the posts permanently.

Mantosh Dewan, a professor of psychiatry and former director of undergraduate education at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, will become interim president on December 23. He will replace Danielle Laraque-Arena, who plans to step down.

Patty Hughston, vice president for instruction and workforce development at Coastal Alabama Community College, has been named interim president.

Gene Smith, vice president for academic and student services at Wayne Community College, has been named president of Brunswick Community College. He will succeed Susanne Adams, the college’s first female president, who plans to retire in January.

Chief academic officers

Appointments

Mary T. Spoto, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and acting vice president for academic affairs at Saint Leo University, has been named vice president for academic affairs.

Michael Thurston, a professor of English language and literature at Smith College, will become provost and dean of the faculty in July.

Other top administrators

Appointments

Ben Barnes, Secretary of the State of Connecticut in the Office of Policy and Management, has been named chief financial officer at the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities.

Jay Browning, principal consultant and owner of the professional leadership development training firm, Browning Advisors LLC, has been named vice president for advancement at Montgomery County Community College.

Aaron I. Bruce, chief diversity officer at San Diego State University, will become the first vice president and chief diversity officer at Art Center College of Design on December 3.

Colleen Coppla, assistant vice president for institutional advancement at Florida Atlantic University, will become vice president for development at Montclair State University on October 24.

Thomas Crady, interim vice president for enrollment and dean of admission at Cornell College, in Iowa, has been appointed to the post permanently.

Jon Darsee, former executive vice president for health policy and payer relations at iRhythm Technologies Inc. and a part-time economic development consultant at the University of Iowa, became the university’s first chief innovation officer on October 19.

Michele Gibson, senior associate dean of administration and finance at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, will become vice president for administration and finance at Union College, in New York, on January 14.

Patricia Jackson, interim vice president for alumni affairs at the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health at Dartmouth College, will become vice president for development at Brown University on December 3.

José-Luis Riera, interim vice president for student life at the University of Delaware, has been named to the position permanently.

Art D. Rodriguez, dean of admission and student financial services at Vassar College, will become vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at Carleton College on July 1.

Resignations

Ray Greenberg, executive vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Texas system, plans to step down on March 1.

Deans

Appointments

Deborah Gorman-Smith, interim dean of the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, has been named to the position permanently.

Keith Jackson, interim dean of the College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University, has been named to the post permanently.

Anand R. Marri, vice president and head of outreach and education at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a professor of social studies and education research at Columbia University’s Teachers College, will become dean of the Warner School of Graduate Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester in January.

Sylvester Williams, an associate professor of business law at Elizabethtown College, will become dean of the College of Business and Management at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania on January 1.

Catherine Witt, an associate professor and coordinator of the neonatal nurse practitioner program at Regis University, will become dean of the university’s Loretto Heights School of Nursing in January.

Resignations

Kenneth Audus, dean of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Kansas, plans to step down in June.

Peter E. Sargent, dean of the Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts at Webster University since 1994, plans to step down and return to the faculty at the end of the academic year.

Department chairs

Appointments

Doug Jacobson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University, has been named faculty leader of the university’s new cyber security engineering program.

Massimo Loda, a professor of pathology at Harvard University’s Medical School and chair of the department of oncologic pathology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, will become chair of the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and pathologist-in-chief at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center on February 1.

Mark A. Yarhouse, professor and chair of psychology at Regent University, will become chair of psychology at Wheaton College, in Illinois, in July.

Other administrators

Appointments

Cristine D. Boyd, former chief public affairs and media relations officer at Hiram College, has been named director of media relations at the University of Akron.

Delores Richardson Harris, deputy director of human resources at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, has been named director of employee relations and affirmative action officer at North Carolina Central University.

Pam Heatlie, associate vice provost for academic and faculty affairs, senior director for institutional equity and Title IX coordinator at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has been named director of the Office for Institutional Equity at the University of Michigan at Dearborn.

Donna Lynne, lieutenant governor and chief operating officer of Colorado, will become senior vice president and chief operating officer at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and chief executive of ColumbiaDoctors on January 15.

Jennifer McCreight, an associate professor of education at Hiram College, has been named director of the college’s School of Education, Civic Leadership and Social Change.

James D. Melville Jr., a former U.S. ambassador, most recently to Estonia, has been named associate dean of international and community outreach in the School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs and executive director of the Center for the Global Alliance for South Carolina at the College of Charleston.

Keith Moore, assistant dean of the Elmer R. Smith College of Business and Technology and director of the Master of Business Administration program at Morehead State University, has been named registrar.

Christopher Ryan, an associate professor of art and director of the Gelbke Fine Arts Center Gallery at Hiram College, has been named director of the college’s School of Arts, Humanities and Culture.

Resignations

Richard DeCapua, associate dean of students and faculty at Boston College, stepped down to become director for the U.S. at OneClass, an online educational technology platform for university students.

Faculty

Appointments

Lisa Grabert, a former senior staff member for health policy on the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, has been named to a joint position as a visiting professor and health policy researcher at Marquette University and a research professor at Georgetown University.

Bimal Viswanath, a researcher at Nokia Bell Labs, in Stuttgart, Germany, who has done postdoctoral at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has been named an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech.

Awards

American Mathematical Society

Xiuxiong Chen, a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University, Simon Donaldson, a faculty member in the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University, and Song Sun, an associate professor of math at the University of California at Berkeley, will receive the 2019 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry for their work “Kähler-Einstein Metrics on Fano Manifolds, I, II and III,” published in 2015 in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, a professor of mathematics at Pomona College, will receive the first Mary P. Dolciani Prize for Excellence in Research for his research in operator theory, complex analysis, matrix theory, and number theory.

National Book Foundation

Sigrid Nunez, a lecturer in the creative writing program at Boston University, received the 2018 National Book Award for her novel The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018).

Jeffrey C. Stewart, a professor of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, received the 2018 National Book Award for nonfiction for his book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Deaths

Richard F. Gross, president of Gordon College from 1976 to 1991, died on November 21. He was 87. Gross oversaw the college’s merger with Barrington College in 1985 and the doubling of full-time faculty members and academic majors during his tenure.

Jan Kozma, professor emerita of Italian at the University of Kansas, died on November 9. She was 72. Kozma established the university’s study-abroad program in Florence and Rome in 1978 as an assistant professor. She became a full professor in 1992 and retired in 2014. For her work in the field of Italian language and literature, including The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia’s Fiction (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), she was named a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Mark A. Mathews, president of California Lutheran University from 1972 to 1980, died on October 27. He was 92. As a faculty member at the university, he organized a classroom seminar in 1970 that became an ongoing annual event, the Mathews Leadership Forum. After his tenure as president, he returned to the faculty until his retirement in 1990.

Jerome S. Parker, former president of Delaware County Community College, died on November 20. He was 71. Parker began at the college in 1977 as assistant to the vice president for administration. He later became executive assistant to the president for planning, research and external relations, dean of management systems, planning and enrollment management, vice president for community and corporate education, then serving as president from 2003 until his retirement in 2017.

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