Growing up, Jenny Knight’s mind concentrated on how things worked. Plants and animals were fascinations; by the time she was a college student, she zoomed in on the workings of the brain. “I was a biology major with a concentration in neuroscience and then went on to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience,” she said. “I just got fascinated by how this incredibly complex system, our brain, governs everything we do." A professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology at CU Boulder, Knight last year was named a President’s Teaching Scholar at CU.
For Cathy Bradley, collaboration embodied an integral part of her first major leadership position. As a department chair tasked with setting up a new department at Virginia Commonwealth University, she quickly realized she needed to build connections with other university departments to ensure her incoming faculty would have collaborators and mentors, and form productive teams.