Three Women Who Have Been Appointed to Endowed Chairs

Liliya Yatsunyk was appointed to the James H. Hammons Chair of Chemistry at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her research program is focused on unusual DNA structures which may act as therapeutics for cancer and other diseases. Her lab strives to determine the structural details of DNA and DNA-ligand complexes and understand the reasons behind the structural diversity of DNA.

Dr. Yatsunyk joined the faculty at Swarthmore College in 2007 and was promoted to full professor in 2020. She is a graduate of Chernivtsi State University in Ukraine and holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Arizona.

Tara Zahra was appointed the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, migration, the family, nationalism, and humanitarianism. Her latest book is Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (W.W. Norton, 2023).

A former MacArthur Fellow, Professor Zahra is a graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Sonya Grier was named to the Eminent Scholar Chair in Marketing at the Kogod School of Business of American University in Washington, D.C. The endowed chair was made possible by a sizeable gift from the Kogod family, establishing three new chairs for the school’s faculty. Dr. Grier has been on the faculty at American University since 2006 after teaching for a decade at Stanford University.

Dr. Grier holds a bachelor’s degree in political science, an MBA, and a Ph.D. in marketing, all from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.