Seven Women Taking on New Teaching Assignments

Francine Huff was selected to hold the Knight Chair in Student Achievement at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. The Knight Chair is a five-year appointment. Huff is a former bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the events of September 11, 2001.

Professor Huff is a graduate of Northwestern University and holds a master’s degree in communication and information studies from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Heidi Hutner, associate professor of English at Stony Brook University in New York, was named director of the Sustainability Studies Program at the university. She served as interim director for the past year.

Dr. Hutner is the author of the several books including her forthcoming project Polluting Mama: An Ecofeminist Memoir. An earlier work was Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (Oxford University Press, 2001). Dr. Hutner holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Pamela B. Teaster is a new professor in the department of human development at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. For the past 12 years, she has served on the faculty of the College of Public Health at the University of Kentucky. She is the lead author of the book Public Guardianship: In the Best Interests of Incapacitated People? (Praeger, 2010).

Professor Teaster holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tennessee. She earned a Ph.D. in gerontology at Virginia Tech.

Phyllis Dennery was named chair of the department of pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She will begin her new role on April 15, 2015. Currently, Dr. Dennery is chief of the division of neonatology and newborn services at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Dennery received her medical degree at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and completed a fellowship in neonatology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Katherine Ott is a new assistant professor of mathematics at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Since 2008, she has served as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Kentucky,

Dr. Ott is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.

Rebecca Calisi-Rodriguez was named assistant professor of biology at Barnard College in New York City. She was conducting postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Calisi-Rodriguez is a graduate of Boston College, where she majored in psychology. She earned a master’s degree in biology at the University of Texas at Arlington and a Ph.D. in integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Shalanda H. Baker is a new associate professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii Manoa. She is an expert on energy law. Professor Baker previously taught at the University of San Francisco and the University of Wisconsin.

Professor Baker is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and the Northeastern University School of Law. She also holds a master’s degree in law from the University of Wisconsin.