Six Knox Faculty Members Awarded Tenure

Knox College has granted tenure to six faculty members: Craig Choma, Jeremy Day-O'Connell, Sarah Day-O'Connell, Esther Penick, Carol Scotton, and Mark Shroyer.

Jeremy Day-O'Connell, Sarah Day-O'Connell, Penick, Scotton, and Shroyer also were promoted to the rank of associate professor. Choma already held that rank.

"This group of faculty could not represent any better the kind of talents and dedication that Knox brings to the education of its students," said Lawrence Breitborde, dean of Knox College and vice president for academic affairs.

Choma, associate professor of theatre, teaches set and lighting design and theatre technology. He joined the Knox faculty in 1996.

He has designed several Chicago theatrical productions, including the Vitalist Theatre Company's most recent productions of The Night Season and A Passage to India. He also delivered a presentation, "Collage, Metaphor & Fusion: Collaborating Across the Disciplines," at the International Conference on the Arts & Humanities in 2009.

A Knox College graduate, Choma earned two M.F.A.s from Carnegie Mellon University -- one in scenic design and the other in lighting design, both for the theatre. Read his profile.

Jeremy Day-O'Connell, associate professor of music, teaches music theory, analysis, and musicianship. He joined the Knox faculty in 2004.

He received a highly coveted Fulbright Scholar Fellowship in 2009 to study the musical aspects of spoken language at the University of Edinburgh. A recipient of Knox College's Philip Green Wright-Lombard College Award for Distinguished Teaching, he is the author of Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, he earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University. Read his profile.

Sarah Day-O'Connell, associate professor of music, has been at Knox since 2005. She teaches courses in music history and culture.

She was named an alternate for the 2011-12 American Association of University Women postdoctoral fellowship, of which only six were awarded across disciplines nationally. Her scholarship has appeared in collections of essays, reference works, and journals including Eighteenth-Century Music. In 2009, she was a prize winner in the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies' Innovative Course Design Competition.

A graduate of Oberlin College, she earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University. Read her profile.

Penick, associate professor of biology, teaches neuroscience. She joined the Knox faculty in 2005.

She has been central in helping Knox establish a neuroscience major through the support of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant awarded to the college. She has co-authored research articles that have been published in Nature, Science, The Journal of Physiology, Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and The Journal of Neurophysiology.

A graduate of St. Louis University, she earned a Ph.D. in cellular and clinical neurobiology from Wayne State University.

Scotton, associate professor of economics and business and management, teaches management principles, labor economics, and economics of public health. She has been on the Knox faculty since 2005.

Before coming to Knox, Scotton spent 15 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, where she worked on HIV-prevention program evaluation and emergency preparedness. Her most recent publication is "Valuing Risk Reductions: Incorporating Risk Heterogeneity into a Revealed Preference Framework," which she co-authored for Resource and Energy Economics. Read her profile.

A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, she earned an M.Ed. in adult education program management and a Ph.D. in economics from Georgia State University.

Shroyer, associate professor of physics, joined the Knox faculty in 2005. His scholarly interests include magnetic characterization of materials and using nuclear quadrupole double resonance spectroscopy to probe semiconductor defects.

His most recent publication is "Nuclear Quadrupole Double Resonance Spectrometer with Magnetic Property Measurement System Direct Current Superconducting Quantum Interference Device Detector and Automatic Tuning," which he co-authored for Review of Scientific Instruments.

A graduate of Truman State University, he earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics from Oregon State University. Read his profile.

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 48 states and 51 countries. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.