Transitions: New President Selected at Wagner College, U. of Texas at San Antonio Names New Technology Chief

Chief executives

Appointments

Scott Alsobrooks, vice president for economic and community development at Pearl River Community College, has been named president of East Mississippi Community College. He will replace Randall Bradberry, who has served as interim president since Thomas Huebner left to become president of Meridian Community College.

Jack Buono, former president of the ExxonMobil subsidiary SeaRiver Maritime Inc., became superintendent of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy last month.

Amanda K. Lee, chief of staff and vice president for academic affairs at Union College, in Kentucky, and former president of of Cape Fear Community College, has been named president of Bladen Community College. She will succeed William Findt, who plans to retire in January.

Joel W. Martin, provost and dean of the faculty at Franklin and Marshall College, will become president of Wagner College on July 1. He will succeed Richard Guarasci, who plans to retire after having been at the helm since 2002.

Brad L. Mortensen, vice president for university advancement at Weber State University, has been named president. He will replace Norm Tarbox, who has served as interim president since Charles A. Wight stepped down in May. Wight now leads Salisbury University.

Retirements

Elizabeth Crowther, president of Rappahannock Community College since 2004, plans to retire on June 30.

Chief academic officers

Appointments

Robert A. Wilson, acting provost at Cedar Crest College, has been named to the post permanently.

Retirements

Jeffery E. Olson, senior vice president for academic affairs at Utah Valley University, plans to retire at the end of the academic year.

Other top administrators

Appointments

Laura Bishop, vice president for development and alumni relations at Oral Roberts University, has been named vice president for advancement.

Tim Dolan, vice principal for advancement at the University of Sydney, in Australia, will become vice president for advancement at the University of Hawaii and chief executive of the university’s foundation on February 1.

Valerie Downing, acting vice president for institutional advancement at Cedar Crest College, has been named to the post permanently.

Kendra Ketchum, chief technology officer for the IT shared-services department at the University of North Texas system, has been named vice president for information management and technology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Mary-Alice Ozechoski, vice president for student affairs and traditional enrollment at Cedar Crest College, has been named vice president for enrollment management and student affairs.

Bill Thirsk, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Marist College, will become chief digital and information officer at Brown University in February.

Retirements

Eric Rivera, vice president for student affairs at San Diego State University, plans to retire this month.

Deans

Appointments

Steve Goddard, senior associate to the executive vice chancellor, a professor of computer science and engineering, and chair of the computer-science and engineering department at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, will become dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa on June 1.

Sherine O. Obare, associate vice president for research and a professor of chemistry at West Michigan University, has been named dean of the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and North Carolina A&T State University.

Italo Subbarao, senior associate dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at William Carey University, has been named dean.

Charlene Wolf-Hall, vice provost for academic affairs at North Dakota State University, has been named founding dean of the College of Natural Sciences at South Dakota State University.

Resignations

David Jaffe, dean of the Eugene M. and Christine E. Lynn College of Communication and Design at Lynn University, plans to step down and return to the faculty in the fall of 2019.

Department chairs

Appointments

Aviva Abosch, a professor of neurosurgery and neurology and director of the Center for Neuromodulation and Neural Restoration at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, will become professor and chair of the department of neurosurgery at the University of Nebraska Medical Center on July 1.

Tanya Darby, an assistant professor of lead trumpet at University of North Texas, will become chair of the brass department at Berklee College of Music next semester.

Shawn Dale Felton, a clinical associate professor at Florida International University, has been named chair of the department of athletic training.

Lauren Kearns, a professor of dance at Elon University, has been named chair of the department of performing arts.

Ronald Krueger, a professor of ophthalmology in the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, has been named professor and chair of the ophthalmology and visual-sciences department, and director of the Stanley M. Truhlsen Eye Institute at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Other administrators

Appointments

Shawnté Elbert, director of the Office of Health and Wellness Promotion at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, will become associate dean of health and wellness at Central Washington University on January 2.

Laurel Fulkerson, a professor of classics at Florida State University, has been named associate vice president for research.

Mark C. Jefferson, director of community engagement and equity at Harvard University Law School, has been appointed assistant dean of community engagement and equity.

Susan Kraft Mann, director of budget and fiscal analysis for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, has been named assistant vice chancellor and director of budget and fiscal analysis.

Clarence McKinney, associate head coach and running-backs coach at the University of Arizona, has been named head football coach at Texas Southern University.

Rachel Miles, digital scholarship librarian at Kansas State University, has been named research-impact librarian at Virginia Tech.

Christina E. Sanchez, associate director of the Office of International Programs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has been named associate provost for global engagement at California Lutheran University.

Melanie Sinche, director of education at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, in Connecticut, has been named director of the Career Development Center and executive director of the Women’s Leadership Center at the University of Saint Joseph.

Aja Burrell Wood, a faculty member at City College of City University of New York, has been named managing director of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at Berklee College of Music.

Resignations

Abraham Kim, executive director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana, stepped down to become executive director of the Council of Korean Americans, in Washington, D.C.

Faculty

Appointments

Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has been named an associate faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education in the Graduate School of Education and director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania, will become a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University at New Brunswick in September. She will also lead the Samuel D. Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity and Justice.

Heather Needham, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, has been named a clinical assistant professor at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Isobel Ojalvo, a Dicke Fellow in physics at Princeton University, will become an assistant professor of physics in the winter of 2019.

Zucai Suo, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State University, has been named a professor of biomedical science and chair in translational research at the Florida State University College of Medicine.

Changes in rank

Professors’ new ranks follow.

Princeton University

Waseem Bakr, assistant professor of physics, to associate professor

Rosina Lozano, assistant professor of history, to associate professor

Prateek Mittal, assistant professor of electrical engineering, to associate professor

Benjamin Moll, associate professor of economics and international affairs, to professor

Barry Rand, assistant professor of electrical engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, to associate professor

Naveen Verma, associate professor of electrical engineering, to professor

Awards

Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies

Joseph McGuire, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, received the 2018 Anne Marie Albano Early Career Award for Excellence in the Integration of Science and Practice.

Ricardo Muñoz, a professor of clinical psychology at Palo Alto University, received the 2018 Outstanding Mentor Award.

Linda Carter Sobell, professor and associate director of clinical training in the department of clinical and school psychology at Nova Southeastern University, and Mark B. Sobell, professor and associate director of clinical training in the department of clinical and school psychology at Nova Southeastern University, received the 2018 Career/Lifetime Achievement Award.

Shannon Wiltsey Stirman, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, received the 2018 Mid-Career Innovator Award.

Children’s Literature Assembly

Quintin R. Bostic II, a doctoral student at Georgia State University, received the 2018 Bonnie Campbell Hill National Literacy Leader Award for “supporting professional development trainers in selecting and using children’s literature in multicultural education.”

Kathryn Will-Dubyak, an assistant professor of literacy in the division of elementary, early childhood and early childhood special education at the University of Maine at Farmington, received the 2018 Bonnie Campbell Hill National Literacy Leader Award for “developing partnerships and professionals on the quest to nurture the love of literacy.”

National Endowment for the Humanities

Josephine Lee, a professor of English and Asian-American studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities exploring the “relationship between yellowface and blackface acting and representation in 19th and 20th-century American theater,” and Satoko Shimazaki, an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California studying the “impact of new recording technologies on Japanese kabuki theater in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries,” are among more than 80 college professors and independent scholars who won National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. The NEH announced the fellowship recipients this week, among 253 humanities projects to which the agency awarded a total of $14.8 million in grants. A full list of the grant awards, many of them given to colleges, can be found here.

Deaths

Susan Ervin-Tripp, professor emerita of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, died on November 13. She was 91. Ervin-Tripp was a pioneer in studying the cognitive psychology of bilingualism and was a Guggenheim fellow in 1974. She started at Berkeley in 1958 as a visiting assistant professor, and earned a tenured position in 1959. She retired in 1999.

Leo Estrada, associate professor emeritus of urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs, died on November 3. He was 73. Estrada started at the university in 1977 and retired earlier this year.

Adolf Grünbaum, founder and chair of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, died on November 15. He was 95. Grünbaum was a professor of philosophy from 1960 to 2003. He also served as a professor of history and philosophy of science and a professor of psychiatry. During his long career he wrote 12 books, including Philosophical Problems of Space and Time (Knopf, 1963).

Steven J. Kautz, associate dean of academic and student affairs in the College of Social Science at Michigan State University, died of lung cancer on November 22. He was 59. Kautz taught at Emory University from 1989 to 1999, then joined the faculty at Michigan State in 2000. In addition to associate dean, he was also an associate professor of political science and co-director of the Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy. He has written multiple articles on American political theory, as well as the book Liberalism and Community (Cornell University Press, 1995).

John B. Thomas, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University from 1962 to 1990, died on September 13. He was 93. Thomas arrived at Princeton in 1955 as an assistant professor. He served as a mentor to many students and wrote a widely-used textbook, An Introduction to Statistical Communication Theory (Wiley, 1969).

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