Eight Macalester professors awarded tenure status

Eight Macalester professors have been awarded tenure. They are: Maria Fedorova, German Studies and History; Taryn Flock and Kelsey Grinde, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science; Tia-Simone Gardner, Media and Cultural Studies; Ariel James and Jean-Marie Maddux, Psychology; Phillip Rivera, Biology; and Anna Williams, Physics & Astronomy.

Professor Fedorova is a Russian/Soviet historian whose interests in the global history of food security, the history of science and technology, and agricultural history led to her first book on the history of agricultural exchange between Soviet Russia and the United States. She offers courses in the history department and in Russian Studies. Dr. Fedorova completed an M.A. at Washington State University and a Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara. At Macalester, she teaches courses in Russian and Soviet history and the transnational history of food and agriculture and Russian language.

Professor Flock is a mathematician who studies fundamental inequalities in harmonic analysis. In her research, she characterizes the conditions under which functions satisfy well-known inequalities and describes the extreme situations under which these equations become equalities. Born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and worked as a postdoc at the University of Birmingham, UK, and at UMass Amherst, before joining the faculty at Macalester. At Macalester, Flock teaches courses in Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Real and Complex Analysis.

Professor Grinde is a statistician specializing in data science, biostatistics, and statistical genetics. She earned a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of Washington. Grinde’s scholarship focuses on developing and applying statistical methods to better understand human health and genetics, and she has focused on populations with mixed ancestry and non-European populations that have been vastly underrepresented in genetics studies. She has collaborated on statistical projects with paleoecologists, gastroenterologists, cardiovascular researchers, and veterinary pathologists. Grinde teaches courses in statistical modeling, statistical machine learning, mathematical statistics, and statistical genetics.

Professor Gardner is an artist-researcher whose work is situated at the confluence of art, history, place studies, Black Feminisms, and power, and strives to understand the role of space in forging relationships. At Macalester, Dr. Gardner teaches courses that focus on theoretical debates in Black studies and visual studies, and others that engage students in research about the politics of space in the Twin Cities. She earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time‑Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota.

Professor James is a cognitive psychologist whose research program is in psycholinguistics and the science of language. In her research lab at Macalester, she collaborates with students to examine how people process sentences and address questions about the relationship between individual differences in language processing ability from multiple perspectives. James holds a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana‑Champaign. She teaches courses including Introduction to Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and a seminar on Intelligence.

Professor Maddux is a behavioral neuroscientist in the Psychology Department whose research focuses on the neural and psychological mechanisms behind learning and motivation, especially with the goal of understanding addiction to alcohol and nicotine. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and joined the faculty at Macalester after teaching for seven years at Lake Forest College. At Macalester, she teaches courses on behavioral neuroscience, including a seminar on the neuroscience of reward.

Professor Rivera is a biologist specializing in behavioral neuroimmunology. He earned an M.S. in Chemistry from New Mexico State University and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from UT Southwestern Medical Center. He joined the faculty at Macalester after teaching for six years at Hope College. His research program studies how the body’s immune system also plays a role in how we form memories, especially memories formed due to drug and alcohol use. He teaches introductory and intermediate courses in Cell Biology, and a senior seminar in Psychoneuroimmunology.

Professor Williams is an astrophysicist who earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She collaborates with students in her research of magnetic fields in distant galaxies, and her research projects have earned her observation time on several iconic telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope. She uses these observational studies to better understand how magnetic fields grow and evolve through cosmic time. Williams teaches a wide-range of courses throughout the physics and astronomy curriculum, including Modern Astronomy, Electromagnetic Theory, and Statistical Mechanics.