John Thabiti Willis has been named the inaugural Kesho Scott Endowed Chair in African Diaspora Studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. He comes to his new role from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he is an associate professor of history. He previously served as director of the college’s Africana studies program. He currently holds an appointment as an affiliate faculty member at the Africa Institute in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Dr. Willis is a scholar of the global experience of African people. Using an interdisciplinary approach, he researches the cultural and social factors that have shaped the history of Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions. He is the author of Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town (Indiana University Press, 2018).
An HBCU alumnus, Dr. Willis received his bachelor’s degree in accounting from Clark Atlanta University. He holds a master’s degree in African and African American studies from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a Ph.D. in African history from Emory University in Atlanta.
Squire Booker has been named the Richard Perry University Professor in the department of chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences and the department of biochemistry and biophysics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. For the past 25 years, he has served on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University, where he held the titles of Evan Pugh University Professor and Eberly Distinguished Chair in Science.
In his research, Dr. Booker focuses on elucidating the chemical mechanisms by which enzymes containing iron-sulfur clusters catalyze chemical reactions. He is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Booker earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Austin College in Texas and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
