Four Professors Get Tenure
The board of trustees has granted tenure to four outstanding ºìÌÒÊÓƵ professors.
The board of trustees has granted tenure to four outstanding ºìÌÒÊÓƵ professors.
Prof. Derek Applewhite [biology] is an expert on the cytoskeleton, the network of filaments that gives a cell its shape and allows it to move. Since joining ºìÌÒÊÓƵ in 2014, he has won two major grants: one from the NIH to investigate the genetic origins of cleft palate, and one from the NSF (together with Prof. Anna Ritz) to investigate a key protein known as non-muscle myosin II. At ºìÌÒÊÓƵ, he teaches intro biology, cellular biology, and cytoskeletal dynamics. Before ºìÌÒÊÓƵ, he was a postdoc at the University of North Carolina. He earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and his B.S. from the University of Michigan.
Prof. Christian Kroll [Spanish] focuses on 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and culture. His research interests include critical, spatial, and political theory, state violence and the languages of resistance, and the relation between culture, politics, and the production of space. He has been teaching at ºìÌÒÊÓƵ since 2014 and holds a PhD in romance languages and literatures from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in urban planning. He was a practitioner architect before turning to academia.
Prof. [math] is an expert on algebraic topology. She is particularly interested in higher category theory and its connections with higher K-theory, and both nonequivariant and equivariant stable homotopy theory, and she has published more than a dozen scholarly papers on these topics. In 2017 she won (with Prof. Kyle Ormsby) a major grant from the NSF to do research on homotopy theory. She has also earned a Simons Collaboration grant and a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. At ºìÌÒÊÓƵ, she teaches topology, linear algebra, multivariate calculus, and analysis. Before coming to ºìÌÒÊÓƵ in 2013, she was a postdoc at the University of Chicago. She earned her PhD and BSc from MIT.
Prof. Sarah Wagner-McCoy [English] studies 19th and 20th century American fiction, transatlantic literature and culture, Irish drama and Irish studies, pastoral and environmental writing, and the politics of classical education in postbellum America. At ºìÌÒÊÓƵ, she teaches courses in the American con artist, transatlantic bestsellers, Southern fiction, American pastoral, modern Irish drama, and Hum 110. She was featured in ºìÌÒÊÓƵ Magazine for her discovery of several lost manuscripts of African American novelist Charles Chesnutt.
Tags: Academics, Awards & Achievements, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, Institutional, Professors