Six Women Named to New Faculty Positions in Higher Education

Anupama Kaul was appointed professor of metallurgical and materials engineering at the University of Texas El Paso. She will also serve as associate dean for research and graduate studies in the university’s College of Engineering. Dr. Kaul was program director in electronics, photonics, and magnetic devices at the National Science Foundation. From 2002 to 2011, she worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

Professor Kaul is a graduate of Oregon State University, where she majored in physics. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

Amy Pruden, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, is taking on new duties as director of interdisciplinary graduate education and associate dean of the Graduate School. Professor Pruden joined the faculty at Virginia Tech in 2008 after teaching for six years at Colorado State University.

Professor Pruden holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati.

Jacquelyn Taylor was promoted to associate professor and awarded tenure at the Yale School of Nursing. She is the first woman of color to be promoted through the ranks to a tenured position in the 90-year history of the nursing school. Prior to coming to Yale, Dr. Taylor served as a faculty member and coordinator of the Pediatric Nurse Practitioner program at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Taylor holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in nursing from Wayne State University in Detroit.

Alyssa Hamre is a new assistant professor of physics at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has been an adjunct instructor at the university since 2012. Her research focuses on space plasma physics.

Hamre holds a bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College in Illinois and a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota.

Blanche B. Cooke was appointed assistant professor at the Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. For the past eight years, she has been an assistant U.S. Attorney in Nashville, Tennessee, specializing in drug and sex trafficking prosecutions.

Cooke is a graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the University of Michigan Law School.

Mary Ellen Morris is a new lecturer and director of master’s degree programs in the Graduate School of Management at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire.

Morris is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, where she majored in finance. She holds a master’s degree in finance from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.