Alumni Notes

Kecia Albright Ali (Ph.D. Religion ’02) has published Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Harvard University Press). She is an assistant professor of religion at Boston University.

Natalie Carnes (Ph.D. Religion ’11) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Baylor University.

Derek S. Chang (Ph.D. History ’02) has published Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press), which chronicles the lives of African Americans and Chinese Americans and the white missionaries who ministered to them. He is the director of Asian American studies and an associate professor of history and Asian American studies at Cornell University.

Caroline Cozza (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has accepted a postdoctoral position at the Evidence Based Treatment Center in Seattle, WA.

Prue Cuper (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has accepted a postdoctoral position at Duke University Medical Center.

Erin Darby (Ph.D. Religion ’11) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee.

Lesley Shannon Curtis (Ph.D. Romance Studies & Certificate in Feminist Studies ’11) is a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

Amrika Deonarine (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’11) is a postdoc with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Alexis Franzese (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Elon University.

Christopher Hans (Ph.D. Institute for Statistics & Decision Sciences ’05) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Statistics at The Ohio State University

Matt Heaton (Ph.D. Statistical Science ’11) has accepted a position as a postdoctoral scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO.

Christine Hendren (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’10) has taken a position as a Risk Assessor/Decision Analyst with RTI International.

Zachary Hendren (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’11) has accepted a position as a Research Environmental Engineer with RTI International.

Nathan K. Hensley (Ph.D. English ’09) is an assistant professor of English at Macalester College.

Hisani Horne (Ph.D. Pathology '10) has recently finished a Master’s of Public Health degree at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD (May 2011). She completed the degree as a part of her post-doctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Since then, she has returned to the institute and joined the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, where she will be working with Drs. Jonine Figueroa and Mark Sherman on breast cancer studies. She will also be working with Dr. Kevin Gardner in the Center for Cancer Research at the NCI.

Liangbo Hu (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’08) has accepted a position as a tenure track Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Toledo, Ohio. For the past three years he has been a post-doc with the Engineering Division at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.

Jonathan Huddleston (Ph.D. Religion ’11) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University.

David Jassby (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’11) is Executive Director of Center for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology (CEINT).

Megan McCrudden Klenk (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has accepted a postdoctoral position at the Durham VA hospital working on post-traumatic stress disorder.

Jennie Lacy (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California-San Diego in the Eating Disorders Treatment and Research Program.

Pontus Leander (Ph.D. Psychology) has accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Melisa Libertus (Ph.D. Psychology), a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, was featured in a news release in a recent issue of Developmental Science (You can count on This: Math Ability is Inborn, Johns Hopkins Psychologist Finds).

Gwenn Allison Miller (Ph.D. History ’04) has published Kodiak Kreol: Communities in Early Russian America (Cornell University Press), which examines the evolution and significance of the ethnically mixed community of Kodiak Island from the 1780s to the 1820s. She is an assistant professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross.

Chiranjit Mukherjee (Ph.D. Statistical Science ’11) has accepted a position as a postdoctoral scholar in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Jarad Niemi (Ph.D. Statistical Science ’09) recently moved from his position as Assistant Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara to Iowa State University as Assistant Professor

Paul O’Keefe (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has received an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship that is funded by the NIH and will be working with Carol S. Dweck in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

Frederick Owusu-Nimo (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’11) has accepted a position as lecturer at Kwame Nkrumah University Science & Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.

Kristen Peairs (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has accepted a postdoctoral position at Duke University, working with the Talent Identification Program.

Justin Pogacnik (Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science ‘11) has accepted a position as a Research Scientist for the Institute for Earth Science in Auckland, NZ.

Fabio Rigat (Ph.D. Institute for Statistics & Decision Sciences ’04) recently moved from his position as Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Warwick (UK) to Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics (Siena, Italy) as head of pre-clinical research Biostatistics. Dr Rigat will maintain an affiliation with the Statistics department at Warwick as Associate Fellow.

Maureen Ritchey (Ph.D. Cognitive Neuroscience ’11) joins the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California Davis this fall as a postdoctoral associate with Charan Ranganath and Andy Yonelinas.

Thomas D. Rogers (Ph.D. History ’05) has published The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (UNC Press). He is assistant professor of Africana studies and Latin American Studies at UNC-Charlotte.

Rawad Saleh (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’10) is a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University.

Minghui Shi (Ph.D. Statistical Science ’11) has accepted a position as a Quantitative Marketing Manager I with Google.

Prabhakar Shrestha (Ph.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering ’11) received an award for his presentation on how aerosols affect local climatology at the Atmospheric Chemistry Conference of the American Meteorological Society. Prabhakar is now doing postdoctoral work at Bonn University in Germany.

Carolyn Sikes (Ph.D. Psychology ’88) has retired from Pfizer, Inc. after almost twenty years with the company in various management roles. She is now Vice President of Clinical Affairs with Neos Therapeutics, Inc, a Texas company specializing in proprietary formulations in the CNS area.

Kyle Smith (Ph.D. Religion ’11) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto.

Vivasvan Soni (Ph.D. Literature ’00) has published Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Cornell University Press). He is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University.

Stephen Sours (Ph.D. Religion ’11) is a Pastor with Christ United Methodist Church.

Amy C. Spaulding (Ph.D. Slavics ’96) has launched Sleepy Hollow Books, a children’s book publishing company, which recently published the fantasy novel Yuri’s Brush with Magic. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Corina Stan (Ph.D. Literature & Certificate in Feminist Studies ’10) is Assistant Professor of Literature at Leiden University College in The Hague, Netherlands, and is directing the Brill-Nijhoff Writing Institute.

Eric Vance (Ph.D. Statistical Science ’08) traveled to Mozambique in Southern Africa this summer to work as an “on-the-ground” statistician on a project to evaluate the impact of installing hand pumps in rural villages without access to clean water. Dr. Vance is the director of LISA (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis), which provides statistical advice, analysis, and education to Virginia Tech researchers on more than 300 projects annually.

Vinod Venkatraman (Ph.D. Cognitive Neuroscience ’11) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business.

Victoria Willard (Ph.D. Psychology ’11) has accepted a postdoctoral position at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN.

Three recent graduates of the Duke University Graduate Program in Religion are beginning tenure-track positions this fall. Natalie Carnes (Ph.D. Religion ’11) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Baylor University, Jonathan Huddleston (Ph.D. Religion ’11) is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University, and Kyle Smith (Ph.D. Religion ’11) is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Historical Studies, with a graduate appointment in the Department for the Study of Religion.