KNOXVILLE — Two professors at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, recently graduated from the Higher Education Resource Services (HERS) Summer Institute, the premier residential professional development program dedicated to advancing women leaders in higher education administration.
Joan Heminway, College of Law distinguished professor, and Cynthia Peterson, professor and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology (BCMB), attended the institute June 20-July 15 at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. The summer institute is a 34-year partnership between Bryn Mawr College and HERS.
Responding to the current environment for higher education globally, the summer institute focused its program this year on “Women’s Leadership in Times of Crisis: Leveraging Our Responses for Institutional Renewal.” More than 50 senior officers from colleges and universities, national organizations and accrediting associations — many HERS alumnae or board members — served as faculty.
The participation of Heminway and Peterson in the HERS Summer Institute at Bryn Mawr was sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor. They were selected to represent UT through a process facilitated by the Chancellor’s Commission for Women and are among a number of female faculty members and administrators from UT Knoxville who have been sponsored to participate in the HERS Summer Institute.
The 49 participants selected for this year’s summer institute represented 34 institutions in the United States, as well as a delegate from Micronesia.
Heminway came to the College of Law at UT Knoxville in 2000 after nearly 15 years in private practice in Boston. with a multinational law firm. Her areas of specialty include corporate governance, corporate finance and securities regulation. She is a frequent source for state and national media in these areas, and her scholarship appears regularly in law reviews and journals. In particular, her scholarship regarding Martha Stewart’s legal troubles has garnered considerable national attention.
Heminway is a fellow of the UT Knoxville Center for Business and Economic Research, the Corporate Governance Center and the Center for the Study of Social Justice, and is a member of the American Law Institute. She is president-elect of the UT Knoxville Faculty Senate.
Peterson has been at UT Knoxville since 1992, arriving after earning a doctorate in biochemistry from Louisiana State University and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California-Berkeley. In addition to being the head of BCMB, Peterson directs the joint UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) program in genome science and technology.
Peterson has an active research lab that works on the structure and function of proteins that interact to regulate formation and breakdown of blood clots. Her research funding has come from the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association and the National Science Foundation (NSF). She recently was awarded several million dollars from these agencies for graduate training programs at UT Knoxville that focus on work at the interface of computational and biological science. Peterson also is an associate director of the National Institute of Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), which was established by the NSF at UT Knoxville in 2008.
For more information about HERS Summer Institute, visit http://www.hersnet.org.