Koretsky named new dean of WMU's Lee Honors College
KALAMAZOO—Dr. Carla M. Koretsky, professor of geosciences and associate dean of Western Michigan University's Lee Honors College, has been named dean of the Lee Honors College, effective July 1.
Koretsky has served as honors college associate dean since 2012. She was one of three finalists for the position who were identified in early April and who made formal presentations on campus during the final few weeks of the spring semester.
"During her time as associate dean, Dr. Koretsky has shown leadership and developed a real rapport with the students who are part of our honors college," says Dr. Timothy J. Greene, WMU provost and vice president for academic affairs. "She has really shown herself ideally suited to the role of dean, and her interactions with the search committee and during the public presentations reinforced the reputation she has established."
Koretsky will replace Dr. Nicholas Andreadis, who will retire from WMU at the end of the 2012-13 academic year.
Dr. Carla M. Koretsky
Koretsky came to WMU in 2000 and has been a faculty member in the environmental studies program as well as the geosciences department. Koretsky received the University's Emerging Scholar Award in 2007, was associate chair of the geosciences department in 2006, helped to establish a new interdisciplinary geochemistry major and was the geosciences graduate advisor from 2004 to 2012.
An active researcher, Koretsky focuses on aqueous geochemistry and biogeochemistry, seeking to integrate field, laboratory and modeling studies of mineral-water-biological interactions near the earth's surface.
She has been awarded more than $1.1 million in external grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy and American Chemical Society. Those grants included a prestigious NSF CAREER Award. Her research has appeared in some 130 journal articles and abstracts, and she has presented her research findings at conferences and invited lectures around the world.
Since joining the WMU faculty, Koretsky has advised, supervised and trained scores of undergraduate and graduate students, including Lee Honors College students, and she has served on more than 20 graduate student committees.
Koretsky also has been an ad hoc and panel reviewer for national and international journals as well as for such funding agencies as the NSF, the Department of Energy, NASA and the Office of Naval Research. She has served as editor-in-chief of Geochemical Transactions and is currently editor-in-chief of the international journal Chemical Geology.
Koretsky came to WMU after a three-year stint as first a postdoctoral scientist and then a research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to that, she served as a lecturer in geography and geology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and as a graduate research assistant at Johns Hopkins University. She earned a bachelor's degree cum laude in earth and planetary sciences from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992 and a master's and doctoral degree in earth and planetary sciences from Johns Hopkins in 1995 and 1998, respectively.