Vassar Celebrates Eight Faculty Members Granted Full Professorships

Jodi Schwarz

Academic History

An expert on climate change’s impact on coral– plankton relationships, Professor Schwarz has also proven to be a multidisciplinary collaborator (co-creating our Bioinformatics course with Computer Science Professor Marc Smith) and a leader in institution-wide initiatives such as the HHMI–funded Grand Challenges program. She earned her BA in history at Oberlin College, a BA and MS in marine science at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a PhD in zoology from Oregon State University.

At Vassar, she has helped develop and direct several programs that aim to create impactful and supportive learning environments for all students, such as Vassar’s Grand Challenges program, Urban Research Summer Institute (URSI), and the interdepartmental Biochemistry Program. She has taught and co-taught courses on a wide range of topics, including Genetics and Genomics, Bioinformatics, Corals and Climate Change, the Human Gut Microbiome, Symbiotic Interactions, and Life in the Sea. Her coral symbiosis research lab has taken her and her students to conduct research in Japan, Taiwan, Bermuda, and California. And her research on inclusive teaching has led to a recent collaboration working with faculty at DIS Study Abroad to incorporate universal design approaches into their courses.

My Vassar Experience

I have always been interested in questions about the “how and why” of things. As a history major at a liberal arts college, I was interested in how and why social and political movements arose from their historical contexts. I am still fascinated by “how and why,” but now I focus on how and why biological phenomena arise from evolutionary and ecological contexts. I love that my career in science was really just a transfer of the skills and perspectives I learned as a history major. That is what a liberal arts education offers. So now, as a professor, I enjoy creating opportunities for students to tackle thorny problems using different approaches and to consider how the knowledge and skills they learn in one context can be transferred to completely different contexts. I am deeply inspired by the diverse ways that students express their creativity. It has been such a privilege to be at Vassar.

Megan Gall

Academic History

Professor Gall is a highly published expert on sensory ecology and animal behavior—hearing and noise—and she studies how animals communicate through acoustically mediated behaviors. She teaches biology and neuroscience and has served in high-profile roles such as the faculty secretary and faculty parliamentarian. She earned her BA from Pomona College, her MS from California State University at Long Beach, and her PhD from Purdue University. Before joining the Vassar faculty in 2013, she was conducting post-doctoral research at Georgia State University. She describes herself as a sensory ecologist: “I am interested in the ways that the environment shapes animal sensory systems and behaviors. I’m particularly interested in the reciprocal relationships between sound, the physical environment, auditory processing, and behavior. My recent research with Vassar undergraduate students has investigated how human-mediated environmental change influences auditory processing, communication, and predator-prey interactions in owls and a number of songbird species. These ideas permeate my courses from Introductory Neuroscience and Behavior to my senior seminar in Neuroscience and Behavior.”

My Vassar Experience

When I was on the job market, I saw an ad for “a physiological ecologist who can contribute to Neuroscience and Behavior.” I thought, “T hat’s me!” I enjoyed teaching and research, and I wanted to continue to be in the lab and field, rather than sit behind my desk and write grants. I saw Vassar as the perfect place to closely integrate my research and teaching. I remember leaving the preliminary interview for this job and thinking, “These faculty members and students are great! Interested, interesting, and curious.” During my time at Vassar, I’ve had the opportunity to work with fantastic colleagues and mentor amazing students. I’ve maintained connections with many of my former students and continue to collaborate with them. I’ve also appreciated the opportunities to help shape the future of Vassar through my service work as a director of Neuroscience and Behavior, a member of the Dean of Faculty search committee, and secretary to the faculty, among others.

Jennifer Kennell

Academic History

Professor Kennell’s courses include molecular biology, genetics, and biochemistry, and she helps lead an external collaboration with the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP)—keeping Vassar’s genetics education at the forefront of a very fast-moving discipline. Her research is in developmental genetics, using fruit flies as a model system. Students who work in her lab often head off to research careers of their own. She serves across many elected and appointed committees.

Kennell earned her BA in biology from Luther College and her PhD in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, she joined the Vassar faculty in 2008. In her research lab at Vassar, Kennell and her students have studied the role of a class of functional RNAs called microRNAs in the development and metabolism of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Kennell served as Director of the URSI Program (2017-2019), Biochemistry Program (2019-2022), and the Beckman Scholars Program (2022-2024) in addition to serving on the Faculty Appointment and Salary Committee from 2022-2024. She has contributed to the Drosophila community by helping organize workshops for faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions at the Annual Drosophila Research Conference and is currently serving as the Director of Regional Nodes for the GEP.

My Vassar Experience

Vassar has provided me [with] the opportunities that I was seeking to work closely with students in classes and in my research laboratory. But I have also really enjoyed interacting with and learning from my colleagues, both in and outside of my department, in ways that I don’t think are as common at larger, more research-focused institutions. From orientation with our incoming cohort of new faculty to serving on various committees to attending faculty happy hours, we have so many opportunities to meet faculty from across campus, with a diversity of research interests and perspectives on teaching. I feel like I’ve grown so much since coming to Vassar, not only as a biologist but also as a teacher and a mentor. And I owe that to my wonderful students and colleagues.

Candice Lowe Swift

Academic Background

A cultural anthropologist who studies such diverse human enterprises as food culture and higher education culture, Professor Lowe Swift’s courses are found throughout Vassar’s multidisciplinary programs. Her campus leadership has been extensive, especially as it relates to the origins of Vassar’s Engaged Pluralism Initiative.

Lowe Swift took a circuitous route to her current profession as an applied and community-engaged anthropologist. With studies and experiences in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, and working with Jewish and Bosnian refugees in Chicago, she decided to become an anthropologist who would engage questions about how social, racial, and national differences were imagined, experienced, and co-produced—in Mauritius and in exchanges across the Indian Ocean more broadly. After earning her PhD in anthropology from Indiana University, Bloomington, she joined Vassar’s faculty in 2005. She was a lead researcher on the country’s application to UNESCO to inscribe Le Morne Brabant Mountain on the World Heritage List as a symbol of resistance to slavery (the site was inscribed in 2008).

My Vassar Experience

I love working with the students here. I appreciate being able to teach the courses that I teach, and I cannot imagine having better colleagues than I have had over my 20 years here. I most enjoy teaching courses on research methods and on Indian Ocean worlds that center Afro-Asian encounters. At Vassar, I have been able to do some exciting things, such as take students to India and Eastern Africa for a class or to work with me on a research project. I co-designed an interdisciplinary living-learning community with colleagues from Geography, Biology, and Residential Life. In general, I feel so lucky to be a part of students’ journeys as they take steps towards realizing their dreams, and to work across the silos in our community to meet the College’s mission and strengthen relations between the College and society at large.

Most recently, Vassar has provided me with a base for working with students and faculty from other colleges and universities. The inter-institutional collaborations that I have been involved in have expanded my capacity for thinking about how we are being called to evolve in this particular historical moment, and how we, in higher education, might respond to that call.

Thomas Parker

Academic History

Professor Parker serves as Chair of French and Francophone Studies and has also directed the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris. He specializes in early modern literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. He earned his PhD at Columbia University. In addition to the French language, Tom teaches and writes at the intersection of French and francophone culture and the environment. Recent courses include Blue Rwanda, a travel course that brings Vassar students to the University of Global Health Equity in Kigali, Rwanda.

Parker is the author of a new book, due out in June, titled Partanatures and Culinary Cultures: An Alimentary Ecology. The book embarks on a gastronomic odyssey, redefining foods we thought we knew and revealing the extraordinary stories of ordinary ingredients and the cultural forces shaping our diets. The book begins with a simple premise: to eat is to assimilate the outer world into the inner body, both physically and mentally. He reveals how culinary staples are not only elements of identity formation, but also instruments of cultural disruption when their true nature emerges and challenges our preconceptions. Parker explores how certain foods—bread, oysters, pigs, cheese, and wine—can both create and destabilize narratives, unsettle assimilation, and decenter Western culinary traditions. Parker is broadly interested in the humanities, including an examination of how water affects us as both a means of survival and as a threat.

My Vassar Experience

When I was a student at NYU, I met a Vassar student who was visiting my dorm, and he was the smartest person I’d met And so after that, it rang a bell for me, and when I completed my PhD, I applied to Vassar and never left. I discovered [that] students here are smart and more creative than my colleagues in grad school, open to new experiences, and willing to try new things.

Adam Lowrance

Academic History

Professor Lowrance is, in his own words, “a pure mathematician,” meaning that he focuses on “mathematics motivated by other mathematics and without concern for applications to other fields of study.” His scholarly expertise is called knot theory, a subfield of topology, which is the mathematical study of shapes that can be stretched and deformed. He is a highly published scholar. He also teaches at all levels in the Mathematics Department and has served on multiple committees, including as the budget member of the Faculty Policy and Conference Committee.

Lowrance earned his BA from Amherst College and his MS and PhD from Louisiana State University. He joined the Vassar faculty in 2012 after completing a postdoctoral position at the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the mathematical theory of knots, and he has coauthored research articles with 19 current or former Vassar students.

My Vassar Experience

Vassar was the right choice for me because of its strong support for both teaching and scholarship. I enjoy the opportunity to work with talented students throughout their undergraduate studies. Once at Vassar, I quickly felt like part of the community because of the welcoming and supportive environment cultivated by my wonderful colleagues in the Mathematics and Statistics Department and across the College.

Hiromi Dollase

Academic History

Professor Dollase teaches Japanese language and culture courses at all levels and also in Vassar’s Asian Studies and Media Studies programs. She is a scholar of Japanese literature, with a focus on 20th- century girls’ magazines, women’s literature, and Manga. She has served as the Chair of the Chinese and Japanese Department and a number of other elected and appointed roles on campus. She earned her BA and MA degrees in English at Baika Women’s College in Osaka, Japan. After earning a second MA in English from Illinois State University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Purdue University, she joined the Vassar faculty in 2003. She is the author of Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls’ Magazine Fiction (SUNY Press, 2019). She has also co-edited three books on manga.

My Vassar Experience

My PhD dissertation was a comparative study of young women’s culture and literature in the U.S. and Japan at the turn of the 20th century. When I had the opportunity for a campus interview at Vassar, I was thrilled because I had often come across the name “Vassar” in old women’s and girls’ magazines during my research in Japan. Vassar is also the alma mater of one of my favorite writers, Jean Webster. I still remember how excited I was when I first saw the beautiful Vassar campus and the gorgeous Alumnae House, where I stayed. I felt as though I had stepped into the world of 19th–century American literature that I had been so familiar with. Every time I walk on the Vassar campus on a quiet day or a beautiful night, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to work here.

I love Vassar’s liberal arts education and its inclusive intellectual community. I also enjoy being part of multidisciplinary communities. Vassar continuously provides opportunities that help me grow as both an educator and a scholar. Teaching Vassar students is truly rewarding. I enjoy the small class sizes, which allow me to engage closely with students. Vassar’s emphasis on both teaching and research is wonderful, and I am committed to contributing to the best educational environment possible.

Eréndira Rueda 

Academic History

Professor Rueda’s courses are multidisciplinary in nature and bring Vassar students face-to-face with issues of race and class in America’s education system. She frequently collaborates with Vassar’s Office of Community-Engaged Learning. Rueda’s scholarship is centered in the sociology of education, where she focuses on childhood, immigration, and historically underrepresented students. She served as co-chair of multiple committees and served a three-year term as Director of Vassar’s Latin American and Latinx Studies Program.

Rueda earned her BA in sociology from the University of California at San Diego and her MA/PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. She joined the Vassar Sociology Department in 2007 and has taught courses that focus on the sociology of education, immigration, and childhood. Her research has contributed to scholarship that 1) recognizes student agency and the ways that youth shape the world around them in active and invaluable ways, 2) focuses on the importance of belonging for student success, 3) encourages educators to operate from an asset-based perspective when addressing students’ academic needs, and 4) highlights the responsibility of institutions to develop relevant and effective supports that allow students to thrive, not just survive, until graduation. The concept of belonging is at the core of most of her scholarship.

My Vassar Experience

I have found Vassar to be a place where I can do work that I find tremendously meaningful. I have been able to engage in work that informs College practices and fosters institutional change, and I have been able to do that in collaboration with students. I’ve had the freedom and support to be creative and engage in the kind of collaborative teaching and research that I find most fulfilling: I’ve been able to do research that impacts the College with teams of first-generation/low-income students for nearly a decade, engage in curriculum development alongside my students, and co-teach with amazing colleagues. All of these endeavors have allowed me to contribute to fostering a sense of belonging among underrepresented students on campus, which has been a core commitment for me since I arrived at Vassar. And along the way, all of those opportunities for collaboration have facilitated a sense of belonging for me as well, which is why I’m still at Vassar, nearly 20 years after thinking that my time here might only be a brief sojourn!