Eight Women Promoted and Granted Tenure at Highly Rated Williams College

Williams College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has announced the promotion of 16 faculty members to the rank of associate professor. They were also granted tenure. Eight of these promotion went to women.

Cecilia Aldarondo, a documentary film director, writer, and producer was promoted to associate professor of art. Her first feature, Memories of a Penitent Heart, deals with the buried family conflict around her uncle’s 1987 death from AIDS. Her most recent feature film, You Were My First Boyfriend is an artistically daring coming-of-age story that both explores questions of memory and re-imagines the mythical visual language of the American high school movie. At the college, in addition to teaching introductory and advanced courses on documentary filmmaking, Aldarondo has taught such courses as “Art in Times of Crisis” and “HIV + AIDS in Film and Video.” Dr. Aldarpndo holds a Ph.D. in comparative studies from the University of Minnesota.

Alice Bradley is an expert in the cryosphere, that is, the frozen parts of the Earth. Among other topics, she has published papers on dynamics of sea ice and annual cycles of freezing and thawing in the Arctic. Dr. Bradley has taught at all levels of the geosciences curriculum, giving majors and non-majors alike an understanding of climate science, and she is known for making complex material accessible to all students, creating fun assignments and giving great lectures. Dr. Bradley is a graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Kathryn (Katie) Hart is a biochemist working in the area of protein stability. Her work seeks to understand how specific changes in a protein’s sequence are selected via evolution. Her scholarship has been funded in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hart serves on the executive board of BioBuilder Educational Foundation, a nonprofit organization that strives to increase interest, understanding and engagement in STEM fields by transforming current bioengineering research into teachable modules. Dr. Hart is a graduate of Haverford College in Pennsylvania. She earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Anne Jaskot is an observational astronomer focusing on questions related to the formation and evolution of galaxies. She uses satellite-based telescopes to study the reionization properties of nearby and early galaxies. Dr. Jaskot also serves her discipline in a wide variety of roles, including as the Williams representative for the Massachusetts Space Grant Program and the Apache Point Observatory, and via her membership in the NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory Science Sub-Group. Dr. Jaskot is an alumna of Williams College and earned a Ph.D. in astronmy and astrophysics from the University of Michigan.

Catherine Kealhofer is a physicist who studies ultrafast processes in condensed matter. She seeks to understand microscopic processes in materials by shining ultrafast electron pulses on those materials and studying how they diffract. To this end, she has constructed an ultrafast electron diffraction apparatus at Williams, the first at a small college. She and her students published work on a new and more accurate model of how the angles at which electrons diffuse from a tungsten nanotip are influenced by factors such as the wavelength of the laser used. Dr. Kealhofer is a graduate of Princeton University in New Jersey. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Sophie Saint-Just is a scholar of Francophone and Creolophone Caribbean film and literature. Her scholarship draws on a range of theoretical approaches, including cultural theory, postcolonial theory and migration, Caribbean diaspora and film studies to examine the work of such Haitian and French Caribbean filmmakers as Euzhan Palcy, Fabienne and Véronique Kanor, Guy Deslauriers, Marie-Claude Pernelle, and Raoul Peck. Dr. Saint-Just is co-editor of Raoul Peck: Power, Politics and the Cinematic Imagination (Lexington Books, 2015). Dr. Saint-Just holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from La Sorbonne in Paris. She earned a second master’s degree in French and a Ph.D. at the City University of New York.

Pallavi Sen is an artist working in a broad range of media, from painting, prints and textiles, to video, landscapes and gardens. She joined the faculty at Williams College in 2018. Sen has exhibited works in galleries in Massachusetts, Mexico City, Bombay and New Orleans, among other locations. She has recently served as the Dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in New York City. She has entirely redesigned the college’s print shop to move away from toxic materials and created a new natural dyes lab. Professor Sen earned a master of fine arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Shikha Singh is a theoretical computer scientist focusing on algorithms and data structures. She is particularly interested in analyzing the applicability and versatility of existing models used to solve algorithmic problems, and asking whether they can be adapted – using practical insights – to develop simpler and faster algorithms. Dr. Singh’s teaching includes “Introductory Computer Science,” as well as upper-level courses on algorithm design and analysis, and algorithmic game theory. Dr. Singh holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. She earned a Ph.D. at Stony Brook University of the State University of New York System.