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To the �Ա���Ƶ Community:

I am honored to announce that at their meeting on January 27, 2024, the Board of Trustees formally and enthusiastically approved two resolutions: that the faculty members listed immediately below be granted continuous tenure and be promoted to the rank of associate professor, and that the associate professors in the following list be promoted to full professor. These promotions will all take effect July 1, 2024. I am including in this announcement the professional biographies of each promoted faculty member, which were crafted by their division directors for the board’s consideration. They offer a nice sense of this new tenure cohort’s many and varied accomplishments.

Promotions to Associate Professor with Continuous Tenure

Ryan Chase, Assistant Professor of Music (BM, Mannes College of Music; MM, DM Indiana University)
Ryan Chase holds a DM in Composition from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. He initially taught as a visiting assistant professor at �Ա���Ƶ and was hired into a tenure-track position in 2018. Ryan’s courses in the department include Composition: Digital Music Studio, Harmony courses, Criticizing Music, and a new course he advanced, Music for Multimedia. He also teaches the Science of Music as a CORE Scientific Perspectives offering. Ryan spends many hours in and outside of the classroom working with students as they realize their musical potential. His devotion to fostering an inclusive music department is highlighted by his recent initiative to hold open “jam” sessions on Friday afternoons and acquire a range of instruments to have on hand for students to use. His technological expertise guided his design and outfitting of a state-of-the-art digital music studio, a signature feature of Bernstein Hall. Ryan’s compositional work, described as “deftly explored contrasts of mood, from bombastic to introverted” (New York Times) spans a wide range of audiences and genres — from TV and radio to the concert hall — and has garnered considerable attention including high profile commissions, numerous recordings and national performances, Emmy nominations, and the distinguished Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 
 
Charles Higgins, Assistant Professor of Economics (BS, Pennsylvania State University; PhD University of Oregon)
Charles (Rich) Higgins came to �Ա���Ƶ as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 2014. He is a macroeconomist, with publications in Economic Modeling, the Journal of Macroeconomics, and Macroeconomic Dynamics (forthcoming). His research, beginning at the time of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, focuses on the financial sector and its effects, on business cycles; he also writes on the techniques of constructing economic models. He has taught Intermediate Macroeconomics, Money and Banking, Fed Challenge, Advanced Macroeconomics, and Introduction to Statistics. He has taught the Introduction to Macroeconomics in the College-in-Prison program at Mohawk Correctional Facility. He has served on the Committee on Information Technology, the Faculty Research Council, the Student Conduct Board, and as men’s lacrosse academic liaison.
 
Lauren Philbrook, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences (BA, Williams College; MS, PhD Pennsylvania State University)
Lauren Philbrook came to �Ա���Ƶ in 2018 with expertise in human development and family studies. Her area of specialty is sleep. Her research program investigates contextual influences on youth sleep and the interplay of sleep with other bioregulatory processes toward developmental outcomes. Her studies also consider the linkage between sleep and family, socioeconomic, and race-based stress to maladjustment. She has published widely in leading journals including Behavioral Sleep Medicine, Journal of Family Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Emerging Adulthood, Developmental Psychobiology, and The Journal of Genetic Psychology: Special Issue on Sleep and Development. She is branching out into areas of child, sleep stress, and learning, as well as sleep and stress in college students. She is a faculty liaison for the cross-country and track and field team, and a co-coordinator of the NASC Division Colloquium Series. She serves on the Committee on Admission and Financial Aid, is a member of the Satisfactory Academic Progress Committee, and is the Faculty Coordinator of the PBSC Department Steering Committee. She has taught Introduction to Psychological Science, Child Psychology Sleep Psychology, as well as a Core Sciences course on sleep.
 
Brenda N. Sanya, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies (BA, Gordon College; MA, Simmons University; PhD University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign)
Brenda N. Sanya came to �Ա���Ƶ in 2017 as the A. Lindsay O’Connor Visiting Assistant Professor in the Educational Studies Department, and in 2018 became an assistant professor. She has published articles in such journals as Curriculum Inquiry, Gender and Education, Feminist Africa, and others, as well as book chapters in numerous edited books from Rowman and Littlefield, Peter Lang, Routledge, and Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). Her scholarship has ranged from feminist and civic education in Kenya, to an archival and ethnographic study of the “Old Cloisters” school in Barbados, to her ongoing project on the meaning of citizenship and the formation of immigration law. She has taught The American School, Pedagogies and Publics, Democracy and Education, and Core Black Migrations. She is the Faculty Liaison for the softball team, participated in the external review of the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS), has been a member of the �Ա���Ƶ Arts Council, the Library Advisory Committee, and several university-wide search committees, and has also worked in advising new faculty members.

Promotions to Full Professor

Carolina Castilla, Richard M. Kessler Associate Professor of Economics (BS, MS, Universidad de las Americas, Puebla; PhD The Ohio State University)
Carolina Castilla came to �Ա���Ƶ in 2011 as an assistant professor of economics. A development and behavioral economist, she has published widely in Health Economics, World Development, Journal of International Development, and Journal of Development Studies, to name the most recent. Her scholarly interests include gender and household bargaining between partners over decisions about money and the allocation of household resources. Recently, she has begun to expand her work to include intimate partner violence, a serious problem within developing countries. She is currently a part of research teams in Kenya and India. She has taught Intermediate Microeconomics, Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Applied Econometrics, the Seminar in Policy Evaluation, and the Honors Seminar. She has served on the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, the Committee on Academic Advising, the Committee on Budget and Financial Planning, and the Institutional Review Board.
 
Michael M. Loranty, Associate Professor of Geography (BS, West Virginia Wesleyan College; PhD, SUNY University at Buffalo)
Michael (Mike) Loranty came to �Ա���Ƶ in 2012 as an assistant professor of geography. His work has appeared in an extensive list of wide-ranging journals, most recently in The Cryosphere, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, Environmental Research Letters, and Frontiers of Environmental Science, to list only a very few of his many articles. He has worked on heterogeneity in Arctic vegetation (centered in Siberia) and climate feedback processes, and on wildfire in Siberian larch forests and their ecological effects. Since he will be unable to return to Siberia for his research soon, he is working on smaller projects that examine the ecological impacts of animal habitats, using drone and satellite imagery, as he transitions to a new region of study.  He has taught Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Research Methods in Geography, Environmental Data Science, Introduction to Remote Sensing, and Core Appalachia. He has recently started a term as Director of the Environmental Studies Program and has also served on the Sustainability Council, as a member of the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute Executive Committee, the Committee on Athletics, the University Property Committee, and the Faculty Nominating Committee.
 
Daisaku Yamamoto, Associate Professor of Geography and Asian Studies (BA, University of Colorado, Boulder; MA, Simon Fraser University; PhD, University of Minnesota)
Daisaku (Dai) Yamamoto came to �Ա���Ƶ in 2009 as an assistant professor of geography with a joint appointment in Asian studies. He has published widely in major journals in the fields of economic geography, regional resilience, and tourism. He has described the 2011 East Japan Earthquake, followed by the tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as marking a turning point in his scholarship. Since that time, he has contributed to and co-edited two collections, Unraveling the Fukushima Disaster (2016) and Rebuilding Fukushima (2017), and has extended his work to studies of nuclear power plants and their economic, environmental, and regional effects. He has also provided access to the English-speaking world of the Japanese environmental approach known as Life Environmentalism. He has taught Deep Asia, Is the Planet Doomed?, The Global Economy: Geographic Dimensions, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Sustainable Livelihoods in Asia, among others. He has served as Director of the Asian Studies Program, as Chair of the Off-Campus Study Group Committee, and in several campus-wide committees. He has been a director of the Japan Study Group.

As I hope is clear, our newly-promoted colleagues are all very accomplished professionally and together have made significant contributions to our academic curriculum and intellectual community, as well as to their respective scholarly communities. Please join me in congratulating them on their well-deserved promotions.

With best regards,
Lesleigh

Lesleigh Cushing
Provost and Dean of the Faculty
Murray W. and Mildred K. Finard Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion