Summer 2017 saw many new appointments to positions in the University administration. Below are summaries of seven appointments whose new roles began before the start of the 2017-2018 school year.
Director of Alcohol and Other Drug Harm Reduction Initiative (AODHRI)
Dr. Lynn Fiellin, an associate professor of medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Yale Child Study Center, has been appointed as director of the Alcohol and Other Drug Harm Reduction Initiative (AODHRI) at Yale College. She will be joined by Kimberly Hieftje, an associate research scientist at the School of Medicine, who will be the new associate director of AODHRI.
Fiellin founded and directed the play2PREVENT Lab at the Yale Center for Health and Learning Games, a program at the School of Medicine in which she and her team develop and evaluate evidence-based videogame interventions for health and education in youth and young adults. Kieftje serves as deputy director of the lab.
Fiellin earned her B.S. in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her M.D. from the Yale School of Medicine, and joined the Yale faculty in 2000. She has conducted extensive research in the areas of substance use disorders treatment and prevention, which has been supported by the National Institutes of Health for 15 years. Hieftje earned her B.S. and M.S. in applied health sciences and her Ph.D. in health behavior from Indiana University, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, working with Fiellin, and joined the School of Medicine faculty in 2011.
Interim dean for the arts in the Yale College Dean’s Office
Kathryn (Kate) Krier has been appointed interim assistant dean for the arts in the Yale College Dean’s Office. As interim dean, Krier will oversee the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (formerly the Digital Media Center for the Arts), the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Yale Bands, and the Glee Club as well as continuing to oversee Undergraduate Production, which supports all undergraduate dance, opera, and comedy productions.
Krier earned her M.F.A. in technical design and production from the Yale School of Drama and has since served as production manager, lecturer, and design adviser for the theater studies department, helping to oversee the senior project production season. She has managed Yale programs like the World Performance Project, the Shakespeare at Yale Initiative, and more, as well as serving on several university safety committees.
Morse College dean
Angela Gleason, a lecturer in the history department, has been appointed as the next dean of Morse College. Gleason joined the Yale faculty seven years ago after earning her B.A. in philosophy and history from Saint Joseph’s College and her M.Phil in medieval history and Ph.D. in history from Trinity College, University of Dublin. Her research here focuses on early medieval legal and social history, as well as modern sports history.
Gleason has worked extensively with undergraduates in a variety of positions: as assistant director of the Center for Language Study; a residential fellow of Old Campus and Swing Space; a Davenport College fellow; an advisory board member of the Native American Cultural Center; a co-founder and director of the Native American Language Project; and a member of the Faculty Committee on Athletics. In her free time, Gleason enjoys all manner of outdoor games and activities, as well as baking, puzzles, and learning to play the ukulele. She says she looks forward to joining the Morse community, especially because of her strong identification with the Morse mascot, a walrus, due to her family’s generations-long residence in cold, watery Maine.
Pierson College dean
Riché Barnes, formerly an assistant dean and faculty member at Endicott College in Massachusetts, has been appointed as the next dean of Pierson College. Barnes taught for 10 years and Endicott and Smith College after earning her B.A. in political science from Spelman College; her M.S. in urban studies from Georgia State University; her certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Emory Universiy.
Barnes has received many awards and fellowships for her research and writings on a broad range of issues that includes black and Latino families, schools, communities, and cities, black women’s roles as mothers, and more. Outside of the classroom, she has served as a faculty mentor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, a mentor for Rhodes Scholarship candidates, as the co-founder and director of the Association of Black Anthropologists Works in Progress Mentoring Program, as a member of the National Research Council’s Ford Foundation Panel of Reviewers in Anthropology, and more.
Originally from Georgia, Barnes enjoys baking, journaling, and exercising (including “jogging” marathons and dabbling in synchronized swimming). Her husband Darnel, the chair of the mathematics department at Deerfield Academy, an independent high school in Massachusetts, their children — daughter Nailah (17) and twin sons Nikhil and Nasir (14) — and their cat, Kitty, will join her in Pierson.
Assistant directors in cultural centers
Two new assistant directors recently joined two cultural centers: Carolina Davila in La Casa Cultural and Sheraz Iqbal in the Asian American Cultural Center.
Davila, a native of Puerto Rico via Boston, is a first-generation college student, receiving her bachelor’s degree in communication disorders with a minor in Spanish from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her master’s degree in higher education administration from the University of Pennsylvania. She comes to Yale after serving as a residence hall director at the University of Connecticut, where she oversaw a residential area housing 600-1400 students and the resident assistants and participated in several department and university committees.
Iqbal, also a first-generation college student, is a native of Long Island who earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Ithaca College and recently completed his master’s degree in higher education student personnel at the University of Florida, where he was recognized as Graduate Student of the Year. With his background in residential communities and student programming, Sheraz supported first-generation students at the University of Florida in a variety of roles in the offices of Student Leadership Development, First Year Florida, and more.
Senior executive assistant to the dean in the Yale College Dean’s Office
Julie Sweigard, a long-time member of the Yale administration, joined the Yale College Dean’s Office as senior executive assistant to the dean on July 10. Sweigard joined the Yale community in 2007 as an administrative assistant for the M.D./Ph.D. program director, the director of the START program, and the director of the office of student research. She moved to Human Resources as the lead staffing support specialist for the office of staffing and career development in 2012, then to the Office of the Provost and Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2014 as senior executive assistant.
In her new role, Sweigard will oversee all administrative support for the dean, from planning, scheduling, and communications to liaising with department chairs, directors of undergraduate studies, faculty, staff, and more.
