EVE DE ROSA

EVE DE ROSA, associate professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology, has been elected dean of the faculty at Cornell University, effective on July 1. Her election marked the first time Cornell’s faculty has selected a woman and person of color to the position. De Rosa will serve a three-year term and replace Charles Van Loan, who has served as faculty dean since 2016. The dean of faculty represents the interests of the faculty to Cornell’s trustees, administration, students, employees, and alumni. The dean also ensures the faculty is fully informed about campus issues and the concerns of each university constituency. De Rosa was recruited to Cornell as a Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Sesquicentennial Fellow. She plans to focus on building mentorship structures that will support faculty recruitment, retention, development, and belonging. De Rosa also plans to shepherd the faculty’s current focus on anti-racism scholarship and activities. She brings to the role experience with bridging disciplines and colleges. As Dean’s Fellow for Racial and Social Justice in the College of Human Ecology, De Rosa created an initiative, Pathways to Social Justice, to hire a cohort of scholars to advance scholarship and sustained community engagement that addresses social justice. As a comparative cognitive neuroscientist — a neuroscientist working in the social sciences — De Rosa has an interdisciplinary focus. In her research, she takes two related approaches. One is cross-species, examining neurochemistry in the brains of rats and relating it to how attention and learning works, and fails, in humans. The other approach focuses on the lifespan, examining developmental changes from young children to older age and the neurochemistry of age-related changes in cognition, and potential interventions for neurocognitive aging. In her work, she uses blood-flow mapping from fMRI to generate hypotheses of brain function that can then be more fully tested by altering brain chemistry in rats. Representing her holistic perspective, her most recent research in rats and humans hopes to generate digital biomarkers derived from the neurochemistry of the brain-heart connection that predict and track dementia. De Rosa joined Cornell’s faculty in 2013 as associate professor. She was assistant and then associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto from 2003-2013. At Vassar College, she acquired a liberal-arts perspective and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology-psychology in 1991. She then worked as a research assistant at Harvard University’s School of Medicine, where she further developed an interest in research. De Rosa trained in animal neuroscience and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Harvard in 2000. She then trained in human neuroscience as a postdoctoral fellow Stanford University’s School of Medicine, from 2000-2003.