Lecturers and Research Faculty Receive Promotions

Nine faculty members from across the Arts and Sciences were promoted.

This year, nine lecturers and research faculty from across the Arts and Sciences were promoted. Seven lecturers were promoted to senior lecturer, and two research associate professors were promoted to research professor.

"Each of these scholars and creative professionals are accomplished experts in their field," says Elizabeth F. Smith, dean of the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences. "Through their inspiring teaching and research, they enrich our academic community immeasurably."

Dartmouth's largest academic unit, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences encompasses more than 40 academic departments, programs, and centers. The promotions took effect on July 1, along with those of 19 faculty in the Arts and Sciences who were awarded tenure and promotion.

The following individuals were promoted to senior lecturer:

Rachel Braude, Senior Lecturer of Music

Braude is a Grammy-award winning flutist and piccoloist who has been a prominent member of the Boston music scene for many years. She frequently performs with the Boston Ballet Orchestra,  Boston Pops Esplanade, Boston Pops Orchestra, and Boston Symphony, and currently holds positions with the Portland Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Boston Philharmonic, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Odyssey Opera. She is a longtime member of the prestigious Arizona Music Fest and regularly performs at the New Hampshire Music Festival.

Keith Coughlin, Senior Lecturer of Theater

Coughlin has worked as a performer, director, choreographer, and master class teacher across the country. A five-time New Hampshire Theatre Award winner for best choreography, he has directed and choreographed numerous local and national productions, earning him such accolades as the 2017 New Hampshire Theatre Award for best professional musical for West Side Story and the 2016 Moss Hart Award for Excellence in Professional Theatre for Crazy for You. Coughlin currently serves as the artistic director at the award-winning New London Barn Playhouse in New London, New Hampshire.

Jason Ennis, Senior Lecturer of Music

Ennis is a soloist, sideman, bandleader, and musical director with a diverse background in jazz, blues, Brazilian music, and classical guitar. At Dartmouth, he teaches jazz, world, and popular guitar styles, and directs a jazz guitar ensemble. The guitarist released his debut recording as a leader, Jota Sete, in June 2022. Ennis co-leads the world jazz trio La Voz de Tres, the collaborative trio Tone Forest, and is co-composer and musical director for En Diablada, an original music project by Chilean vocalist Natalia Bernal.

Vasanta Kommineni, Senior Lecturer of Computer Science

Kommineni is a computer scientist whose research focuses on compiler-related areas and developing teaching tools that support students in their learning. She teaches introduction to programming, computation, and compilers.

Sandra Mefoude Obiono, Senior Lecturer of French and Italian

A member of the Department of French and Italian for eight years, Mefoude Obiono specializes in Francophone texts from post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.

Charles Palmer, Senior Lecturer of Computer Science

Palmer is a cybersecurity researcher who teaches security and privacy, programming, and databases. He is building a new class on developing resilient and secure systems with the Rust language to prepare graduates for the growing demand for memory safety. Palmer is a distinguished research staff member at IBM Research, where he focuses on special projects relating to privacy and security, including the unique challenges facing federal governments. He also worked with I3P, a consortium based at Dartmouth of top cybersecurity research institutions across the United States.

Bryce Walker, Senior Lecturer of Classics

Walker is a scholar with research interests in satire and related genres in Latin literature. More specifically, he is interested in the intersections of didacticism and humor in the Roman satirists Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Walker's work also focuses on the pedagogy of second language acquisition with a particular lens on where and how the methodologies for teaching modern and classical languages both intersect and diverge.

The following individuals were promoted to research professor:

Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, Research Professor of Anthropology

Carpenter-Song is a medical and psychological anthropologist whose work contributes to flows of knowledge and practice between anthropology and medicine. Her scholarship attends closely to the lived experiences of those marginalized by mental illness, stigma, social exclusion, and poverty in the United States. Carpenter-Song's long-standing interests in the culture of biomedicine and commitment to applying anthropological approaches within medicine directly inform her research collaborations with colleagues in medicine, health services research, and public health, as well as her work co-leading the Dartmouth Healthcare Foundations program.

Yaroslav Halchenko, Research Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Halchenko aims to make neuroscience more open, efficient, and reproducible. He is the founding director of the Center for Open Neuroscience, which provides open software frameworks, platforms, data and methodologies for neuroscience and beyond.