The University of Oregon has promoted 126 faculty members, including 54 career and 72 tenured faculty members, from across the university’s schools and colleges.
A list of all promoted faculty members is available online.
“I want to congratulate all of our outstanding faculty members on their promotions,” said Janet Woodruff-Borden, interim provost and executive vice president. “Our success as a university is tied directly to the high standards and excellence we see from our faculty in the classroom and in their scholarship and creative activity.”
Kate Kelp-Stebbins was promoted to associate professor of English. She came to the UO in 2018 from Palomar College in San Diego for the opportunity to be a professor of comic studies and said she was amazed and humbled by her promotion and what it represents.
“My hire was the first tenure-track research professor in comic studies in the nation,” she said, adding, “with great power comes great responsibility,” a nod to Spider-Man’s famous maxim.
English professor Ben Saunders established the UO’s comics studies program in 2012, the first program of its kind in the country. With Saunders, Kelp-Stebbins curated an acclaimed exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in 2021 called “The Art of the News: Comics Journalism.”
The exhibition was the basis for a book of the same name, co-edited with Saunders, which was nominated for an Eisner Award at this summer’s Comic-Con in San Diego. Kelp-Stebbins’ own monograph, “How Comics Travel,” also was nominated for an Eisner this summer.
Kelp-Stebbins said her hiring and promotion are “a testament that the UO is doing things that are innovative and conducting research that is rigorous and being recognized around the world.”
Ram Durairajan has been promoted to associate professor in the School of Computer and Data Sciences. A member of the UO faculty since 2017, he co-directs the Oregon Networking Research Group and leads a team of graduate and undergraduate students in federal, university and industry research projects totaling more than $5 million.
His research revolves around contributing to the creation of a “resilient Internet,” looking at the root causes of reliability, security and performance issues.
He said when he was near the end of his graduate studies, one of his mentors shared some wisdom about tenure that has stayed with him: “Promotion doesn’t just come from doing your job well; you must demonstrate that you can do more.”
“This promotion signifies UO's confidence in me and my ability to ‘do more,’ and I'm genuinely excited about the future opportunities it presents,” he said. “I'm eagerly looking forward to what lies ahead.”
Lucas Silva, a Philip H. Knight Chair, has been on the UO faculty since 2016 and has been promoted to full professor of environmental studies and biology. He is an ecosystem scientist by training with expertise in terrestrial ecology and biogeochemistry. He founded and directs the UO's Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Research Laboratory, where he led an interdisciplinary team focused on addressing fundamental questions in life sciences while also devising and testing scientific applications to improve environmental sustainability.
He said being a professor at the UO is an honor and a privilege. Early in his academic career he was just an average student, he said, but he pursued research questions “driven by wonder of the natural world, and it just so happened that I found myself in the right place at the right time to make some new discoveries.”
“I am grateful for the promotion and feel fortunate to have the chance to dedicate my life to the pursuit of ideas at an R1 institution,” he said. “I now see it as my duty to create new opportunities for others who, like me, may not have been expected to succeed in academia. For me, it's all about rising to this fortunate occasion and paying it forward by opening doors for future generations of curious minds and new discoveries.”
The promotions include faculty members across campus, including the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Design and Education, and the schools of Journalism and Communication, Music and Dance, and Law.