Yale University :: Women Faculty Forum

Steering Committee

Constance E. Bagley, Professor in the Practice of Law and Management, Yale School of Management
Victoria Brescoll, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Yale School of Management
Inderpal Grewal, Professor and Chair, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Glenda Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies
Jo Handelsman, Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology; Frederick Phineas Rose Professor; Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor
Valerie Horsley, Assistant Professor of Mollecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, Yale School of Medicine
Paula Kavathas, Associate Chair of Academic Affairs, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Immunobiology and Genetics
Carolyn M. Mazure, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology
Shirley McCarthy, Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and Obstetrics & Gynecology
Priya Natarajan, Professor of Astronomy and Physics (Chair)
Catherine Panter-Brick, Professor Anthropology
Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law
Reva B. Siegel, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law and Professor of American Studies
Jody L. Sindelar, Professor and Chair, Division of Health Policy and Administration, School of Public Health
Joan Argetsinger Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
Meg Urry, Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Constance E. Bagley, Professor in the Practice of Law and Management, Yale School of Management

Constance E. Bagley is Professor in the Practice of Law and Management at the Yale School of Management. She received SOM’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009 and the Senior Faculty Award of Excellence from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business in 2006. Her articles include "Winning Legally: The Value of Legal Astuteness," which was published in the Academy of Management Review in April 2008. Professor Bagley is the author of Winning Legally: How Managers Can Use the Law to Create Value, Marshal Resources, and Manage Risk (Harvard Business School Press 2005), the coauthor with Diane Wilkins Savage of Managers and the Legal Environment: Strategies for the 21st Century (South-Western Legal Studies in Business 6th ed. 2009), and the coauthor with Craig A. Dauchy of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law (Cengage Learning 3rd ed. 2008). She is Vice President of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Wharton School’s Zicklin Center for Ethics Research at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the board of directors of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Professor Bagley received her J.D., magna cum laude, from the Harvard Law School and her A.B., with Honors and Distinction, from Stanford University.
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Inderpal Grewal, Professor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Most recently she has taught at University of California, Irvine, where she was director of Women’s Studies and of the PhD Program in Culture and Theory. Her research interests include transnational feminist theory; gender and globalization, human rights; NGO’s and theories of civil society; theories of travel and mobility; South Asian cultural studies, and postcolonial feminism. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press, 1996) and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press, 2005), and (with Caren Kaplan) has written and edited Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women’s Studies (Mc-Graw Hill 2001, 2005) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational: Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Currently she is working on a book length project on the relation between feminist practices and security discourses. She is also co-editing (with Victoria Bernal, UC Irvine, Anthropology) an edited collection entitled “The NGO Boom: Critical Feminist. Practices.” email

Jo Handelsman, Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Dr. Jo Handelsman is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 and served on the UW faculty from 1985 until moving to Yale in 2010. Her research focuses on the genetic and functional diversity of microorganisms in soil and insect gut communities. She is one of the pioneers of functional metagenomics, an approach to accessing the genetic potential of unculturable bacteria in environmental samples for discovery of novel antibiotics and other microbial products.

In addition to her research program, Dr. Handelsman is nationally known for her efforts to improve science education and increase the participation of women and minorities in science at the university level. She co-founded the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute at UW-Madison, which has designed and evaluated interventions intended to enhance the participation of women in science. Her leadership in women in science led to her appointment as the first President of the Rosalind Franklin Society and her service on the National Academies' panel that wrote the 2006 report, "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering."

Dr. Handelsman is co-author of three books about teaching: Entering Mentoring, Scientific Teaching, and Biology Brought to Life. She co-edits the series, Controversies in Science and Technology. She is a fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology, Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the AAAS; member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering; Director of the Center for Scientific Teaching at Yale; and co-Director of the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology. She was elected to serve as president of ASM 2013-14; has received numerous awards in recognition of her mentoring, teaching, and research contributions; and in 2009, Seed Magazine named her "A Revolutionary Mind" in recognition of her unorthodox ideas. In 2011, she was one of 11 individuals selected by President Barack Obama to receive the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring and recently co-chaired a working group that produced the report to the President, “Engage to Excel: Producing One Million Additional College Graduates with Degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” about improving STEM education in postsecondary education. email

Paula Kavathas, Associate Chair of Academic Affairs, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Immunobiology and Genetics

Paula Kavathas joined the Yale faculty in 1986 and is Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Genetics and Immunobiology. Her research focuses on the immune response to the bacteria /Chlamydia Trachomatis/ and on a receptor called CD8 that is important for killer T cell function. In addition, to her graduate school teaching activities, she teaches a Yale undergraduate course "Immunology and Microorganisms." She served as Chair of the American Association of Immunologists Committee on the Status of Women from 1998-2001 and published an article on the slow progress in the advancement of women in Immunology (Nature Immunology 2:985, 2001). She is founder and director of the Science Education Outreach Program, established in 1995 and has served on NIH study sections for the past 15 years as member and chair. She received the Liza Cariaga-Lo Award for Diversity in Scholarship and Service from the graduate school in 2009. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Wisconsin and postdoctoral work at Stanford University. email

Carolyn M. Mazure, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology

Carolyn M. Mazure is a Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Yale School of Medicine. She directs Women's Health Research at Yale, which initiates and supports research in diverse areas of women's health, and leads several NIH-funded research initiatives at Yale on women and health.

Dr. Mazure joined the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 1982 after completing her postdoctoral training at Yale University. She has been the Clinical Director of the Adult Inpatient Psychiatry Program and the Chief Psychologist for the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital. As a clinical researcher, her investigative efforts have focused on depression and addictive disorders, with a particular interest in examining gender-related factors in health and disease.

Professor Mazure has testified to Congress on the importance of women's health research, has served as a Public Health Fellow on the Government Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, and has developed an NIH-funded partnership with The George Washington University to teach researchers how to communicate with legislators about science. She served on the planning committee for The First White House Conference on Mental Health, chaired the American Psychological Association's Summit on Women and Depression, and received the National Organization for Women's Elizabeth Blackwell Award, the Marion Spencer Fay Award from the Institute for Women's Health and Leadership in 2007, and the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Leadership Award for Scholarship in 2008. email

Priya Natarajan, Professor of Astronomy and Physics

Priya Natarajan is currently professor in the Department of Astronomy with a joint appointment in the Department of Physics at Yale, and serving as Chair of the Yale Women Faculty Forum. She is also currently serving as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Astronomy. Dr. Natarajan is a cosmologist and has undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics from M.I.T. She pursued her graduate studies in theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in England, where she was a member of Trinity College and was elected to a Title A Research Fellowship that she held from 1997 to 2003. Prior to coming to Yale, she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow for a few months at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Canada. She is also interested in the history and philosophy of science as well as technology and public policy. She was enrolled in the MIT Program in Science, Technology & Society and the MIT Program in Technology and Public Policy from 1991 to 1994. She was a Whitney Humanities Fellow at Yale (2006-07) and a resident faculty fellow of Saybrook College.

Priya Natarajan was awarded the Radcliffe Fellowship in 2008-09 and was the Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe visiting professorship at the Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship that she will be taking up during the academic year 2010-11. Priyamvada currently serves on the Yale College Science Council and has served as Co-Chair of the WFF Working Group on Sexual Misconduct.

Professor Natarajan's research interests pertain to exotica in the Universe. Some particular areas of expertise include mapping dark matter and dark energy using the phenomenon of gravitational lensing; understanding the growth and evolution of black holes through cosmic time; and the formation of the first black holes in the Universe. Her key contributions to cosmology include (i) the first measurement of the mass function of dark matter substructure in observed lensing clusters; (ii) novel constraints on the nature of dark matter from cluster lensing; (iii) the prediction of the effect of intrinsic galaxy spin correlations on weak lensing surveys; (iv) consequences of dark matter self-annihilation for galaxy formation; (v) new channels or the formation of seed black holes; (vi) calculation of the alignment time-scale for black hole spins with their inner accretion disks and (vii) the use of gamma-ray bursts as probes of star formation at high redshift.

Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches and writes about federalism, procedure, feminism, and local and global interventions to diminish inequalities and subordination.

She is the coeditor (with Seyla Benhabib) of the book, Migrations and Mobilities: Gender, Citizenship, and Borders – recently published by New York University Press; currently, she is at work on a series of articles related to federalism, localism, and transnationalism including Law as Affiliation, “Foreign” Law, Democratic Federalism, and the Sovereigntism of the Nation State, (Int’l J. Const. L. 2007), Don't Sign Kyoto, Don't Cite Foreign Law: Sovereigntism, Federalism, and Transnational Organizations of Government Actors (TOGAs), (Ariz. L. Rev., forthcoming 2008), and Law's Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism's Multiple Ports of Entry (Yale Law Journal, 2006).

Another major project relates to the relationship between adjudication and democracy. A forthcoming book (with Dennis Curtis) is called Representing Justice: Adjudication’s Rise and Fall as Seen from Renaissance Iconography to 21st Century Courts. Published chapters include From "Rites" to "Rights of Audience: The Utilities and Contingencies of the Public's Role in Court-Based Processes (with Dennis E. Curtis) in the book Representation of Justice (Peter Lang, ed. 2007); and Whither and Whether Adjudication? (Boston University Law Review, 2006). Related essays are Judicial Selection and Democratic Theory: Demand, Supply, and Life Tenure (Cardozo Law Review, 2005); and Trial as Error, Jurisdiction as Injury: Transforming the Meaning of Article III (Harvard Law Review, 2000).

Professor Resnik is also engaged in problems of women's inequality. She co-founded Yale’s Women Faculty Forum and just co-chaired an international conference on women and men in globalizing universities. She was a member of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias Task Force and has both researched and written about the role gender plays in adjudication. Her articles on these subjects include Categorical Federalism: Gender, Jurisdiction, and the Globe (Yale Law Journal, 2001); Asking About Gender in Courts (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1996) and The Effects of Gender: The Final Report of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias Task Force (July 1993).

Professor Resnik has chaired the Sections on Procedure, on Federal Courts, and on Women in Legal Education of the American Association of Law Schools. She is a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges and the founding director of Yale’s Arthur Liman Public Interest Program and Fund. The Liman Program currently supports graduate Fellows who are employed in post-law school public interest jobs for a year as well as undergraduate Fellows from Barnard, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Spelman, and Yale -- all of whom spend a summer doing public interest law related work. In addition, the Liman Program sponsors a reading group and a yearly colloquium at Yale Law School.

Judith Resnik is also an occasional litigator; she argued the United States Supreme Court case involving women's admission to the Rotary Club. Professor Resnik has testified many times before congressional and judicial committees. In the winter of 2007, she submitted testimony to the U.S. Senate in support of the Sunshine in Litigation Act of 2007.

In 2001, Professor Resnik was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2002, a member of the American Philosophical Society, where in 2005 she delivered the Jayne Lecture. In 2008, she received the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation Outstanding Scholar of the Year Award. Professor Resnik is a graduate of Bryn Mawr and NYU Law School. In 2006, she returned to Bryn Mawr to give the commencement speech. email

Reva B. Siegel, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law and Professor of American Studies

Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale University. Professor Siegel’s writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality, and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. She is currently writing on the role of social movement conflict in guiding constitutional change, addressing this question in recent articles on reproductive rights, originalism and the Second Amendment, the "de facto ERA," and the enforcement of Brown.

Professor Siegel's publications include On The Road to Roe v. Wade: How Americans Talked About Abortion in the Years Before the Supreme Court's Landmark Ruling (with Linda Greenhouse, forthcoming 2010); The Constitution in 2020 (edited with Jack Balkin, 2009); Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (with Brest, Levinson, Balkin & Amar, 2006) and Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (edited with Catharine A. MacKinnon, 2004).

Professor Siegel received her B.A., M.Phil, and J.D. from Yale University, clerked for Judge Spottswood Robinson on the D.C. Circuit, and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is active in the American Society for Legal History, the American Association of Law Schools, the American Constitution Society, in the national organization and as faculty advisor of Yale’s chapter. email

Jody Sindelar, Professor and Chair, Division of Health Policy and Administration, Yale School of Public Health

Jody Sindelar is Professor and Chair of the Division of Health Policy and Administration at the School of Public Health at Yale University. Professor Sindelar serves on the executive board at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale. She is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Professor Sindelar is Immediate Past President of the American Society of Health Economists. She serves on several advisory and editorial boards. She holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and has taught at the University of Chicago.

Professor Sindelar has been the Principal Investigator on multiple grants with funding from NIAAA, NIDA, NIA and RWJF among others, with full funding over the last twenty years. Professor Sindelar’s primary research area is in the economics of substance abuse including smoking, alcohol and illicit drugs. Her specific current research focus is on behavioral economic interventions for addressing health habits and addictions such as smoking and illicit drugs. She is currently PI on two 5-year grants: one on stress, self-control and addiction, and the other analyzing the roles of socioeconomic factors, health habits, and work-life on aging. Professor Sindelar collaborates with psychiatrists, psychologists, and others on economic and policy issues relating to substance abuse. She has published in numerous economics, health services, addiction and policy journals.

Joan Argetsinger Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry

Joan Steitz has been on the Yale faculty since 1970, where she has taught primarily undergraduates, even though her lab is located in the Medical School. She served as Chair of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from 1996-1999. Her research focuses on the roles of small RNA-protein complexes in gene expression in mammalian cells, a subject that has connection to autoimmune disease. Current service includes membership on the scientific advisory boards for the Max-Planck Insitut fur Biophysikalische Chemie (Gottingen) and for Rockefeller University, as well as for several schools/institutes at Harvard. She is a member of several editorial boards. Dr. Steitz obtained her BS from Antioch College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. email

Meg Urry, Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Meg Urry joined the Yale faculty in 2001 as the first female tenured faculty member in the history of the Yale Physics Department and as Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 2007 she became Chair of the Department. Her scientific research focuses on how supermassive black holes, and the galaxies surrounding them, evolve over cosmic time. Her group has studied the multiwavelength emission (at radio to X- and gamma-ray wavelengths) of accreting black holes in order to understand their energetics, structure and evolution. At Yale Professor Urry introduced an innovative, interactive method for teaching introductory physics and created an undergraduate course on frontiers of astrophysics research.

Professor Urry came to Yale from her position as a tenured member of the senior scientific staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and her B.S. from Tufts University. Professor Urry is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on several committees of the National Academy of Science's National Research Council.

Meg Urry has worked to increase the participation of women in science, having chaired the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy for the American Astronomical Society; edited their publication, STATUS; headed the U.S. delegation to the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) meeting on Women in Physics in Paris, France; and organized three national meetings on women in astronomy in 1992, 2003, and 2009. She and her husband, physicist Andrew Szymkowiak, have two daughters, Sophia (15) and Amelia (18). email