Three members of the Lawrence University faculty have been granted 2024 tenure appointments.
President Laurie Carter and the college’s Board of Trustees, based on recommendations by the faculty Committee on Tenure, Promotion, Reappointment, and Equal Employment Opportunity, approved the granting of tenure to Ann Ellsworth (music), Julie Rana (mathematics), and Andrew Sage (statistics). All three will be promoted to associate professor at the start of the 2024-25 academic year.
“I am very happy indeed that these three colleagues have been awarded tenure,” said Peter Blitstein, provost and dean of faculty. “These distinguished faculty members together represent the kind of teacher-scholars who make Lawrence a leading national liberal arts college and conservatory.”
Ann Ellsworth
A horns professor in the Conservatory of Music since 2018, Ellsworth delivers excellence as a teacher, soloist, recording artist, and chamber musician. She attended the Eastman and Juilliard schools, with further study in Oslo and St. Petersburg, Russia.
Her versatile recordings have included solo projects—EUPHORIA, Rain Coming, Late Night Thoughts, and Leningrad—and ensemble work such as 2022’s music project with the Lawrence Graduate Bayreuth Tuben Quintet.
Ellsworth has toured internationally as a member of Kristjan Jarve’s Absolute Ensemble, the Manhattan Brass, the Danish Esbjerg Ensemble, and numerous other musical and artistic configurations. An advocate of new music, she was a founding member of the New Music and Culture Symposium.
Ellsworth pushes musical boundaries and brings that same curiosity and excitement to her teaching.
Julie Rana
A member of the mathematics faculty since 2017, Rana has excelled in classroom teaching and research. Much of her scholarly focus has been in algebraic geometry, especially moduli spaces, singular algebraic surfaces, deformation theory, and computational methods.
In 2021, Rana was awarded a two-year grant of $192,905 through the National Science Foundation’s Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) program. The first-time grant was awarded to only 21 pre-tenure faculty across the country. A portion of the grant allowed Rana to work on research in algebraic geometry related to moduli spaces, collaborating with math scholars in Europe, Chile, and elsewhere in the United States. It also allowed her to hire multiple students for summer research work in an area of math known as graph theory.
Rana has played lead roles in developing math curriculum and support mechanisms aimed at making Lawrence’s mathematics, computer science, and data science programs more inclusive and accessible.
She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Marlboro College.
Andrew Sage
Sage joined the Lawrence faculty in 2018. With scholarly work in statistical machine learning, applied statistics, sports analytics, and statistics education, he has brought innovative teaching and research to the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Department.
Sage has been a key part of that department’s growth, including the 2020 launch of a data science minor.
He has worked with colleagues to develop new courses in rapidly advancing areas such as data science, machine learning, and Bayesian statistics. He also has worked across disciplines to bolster data-driven courses and research in other departments.
Sage has a bachelor’s degree from the College of Wooster, master’s degrees from Iowa State and Miami University, and a Ph.D. from Iowa State.
Ed Berthiaume
Ed Berthiaume is director of public information at Lawrence University.
