Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 6, 2000Volume 29, Number 5



Two of the three women who joined the University as assistant provosts are pictured here with Bjong "Wolf" Yeigh, who was appointed an assistant provost last fall. The women are (from left) Emily Bakemeier, Karen Lamb and Erica Ehrenberg (not pictured). They will work as a team with deputy provosts to handle University academic, budgetary and policy matters.



Three join team in Provost's Office

Three new assistant provosts have joined the Yale staff, bringing multifaceted professional and academic experience to their new roles.

They are Emily P. Bakemeier, an art historian by training who most recently worked as assistant to the director of Princeton University's Center for Faculty Development; Yale College alumnus Erica Ehrenberg, a specialist on ancient Near Eastern art who taught at New York University; and Yale Law School graduate Karen Lamb, who most recently worked as the director of the Office of Career Services at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

The three will team with Deputy Provosts Pierre Hohenberg, Diana E.E. Kleiner, Charles Long and Stephanie Spangler, Associate Provost Lloyd Suttle, as well as Assistant Provost Bjong "Wolf" Yeigh, in working with Provost Alison Richard on the University's wide array of academic, policy and budgetary matters.

The appointments are part of a reorganization in the Provost's Office that began last fall with the goal of enhancing the way the office serves the Yale community, according to the Provost. Yale's fourth assistant provost, Wolf Yeigh, who was appointed last year, complements the expertise brought to the office in recent months. A specialist in structural stability and reliability, tribology, and science and technology policy, he joined the Provost's Office a year ago to work in concert with Deputy Provost Pierre Hohenberg on matters related to Yale's various science departments, including the University's science and engineering building projects and renovations.

"We took longer than we had anticipated in making the newest appointments, but the result is an outstandingly talented group of assistant provosts who share a wonderful capacity for the teamwork so necessary to handle the complex and wide-ranging tasks undertaken by this office," says Richard.

"Each of our new staff members has broad experience," she adds, "yet they all have strong expertise in the specific areas in which they will work, and demonstrated skillfulness at simultaneously handling a multitude of diverse projects. Our office is already showing the positive effects of their appointments, which bring us to a level of staffing at which we can carry out our work more effectively."

Brief summaries about the assistant provosts follow.


Emily Bakemeier

Emily Bakemeier works most closely with Deputy Provost Charles Long on academic, budgetary and policy issues concerning the Faculty of Arts of Sciences. Long and Bakemeier's work specifically covers the humanities and many social science departments, including economics and politics, as well as academic support units such as the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Bakemeier will also have primary responsibility for the Language Study Committee and the Social Science Research Fund, among other duties.

"Although this is her first full-time administrative post, Emily has a surprising depth and breath of experience in higher education, both at Princeton and Dartmouth," says Long. "She brings a keen intelligence, high energy and a commitment to quality that we are pleased to have the office."

For the past 12 years, Emily Bakemeier has been at Princeton University, where she began an administrative career while working toward her M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees in art history. She earned a M.F.A. in 1989 and recently completed work for her doctorate, which will be conferred this year.She specializes in the study of 16th- and 17th-century French portraiture.

As assistant to the director of the Center for Faculty Development from 1992 to 1996, Bakemeier coordinated programs providing mid-career renewal opportunities to college faculty and teacher training to graduate students. At Princeton, she also held posts as special assistant to the acting dean of students and special assistant to the associate dean of the Graduate School.In addition, she sat on the Priorities Committee, which advises the president on the operating budget of the University.

Bakemeier has long been active at Dartmouth College, from where she graduated in 1982 with distinction as a double major in English literature and art history. Since graduating, she has served on committees and boards in the areas of public affairs, finance, admissions and development, among others. Currently chair of the Committee on Trustees, she was the first woman and youngest president ever of the Dartmouth Alumni Council. She was awarded the Young Alumni Distinguished Service Award from Dartmouth College as well as a Class of 1982 Service Award.

From 1988 to 1993, Bakemeier was president of Educational Travel Associates, Inc. in Princeton, New Jersey, a company she founded and owned that organized and conducted educational travel programs abroad for art museums. She is a founding member of The CLAUS Project in Princeton, an organization formed to coordinate and provide holiday gifts to disadvantaged children.


Erica Ehrenberg

In partnership with Deputy Provost Diana Kleiner, Erica Ehrenberg will shape and implement the administrative, academic and budgetary policies related to the arts and religion at Yale, an area of responsibility that includes the Schools of Art, Architecture, Drama, Music and Divinity, the Institute of Sacred Music, the new Center for Media Initiatives, and the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, among other departments or units. Major projects she and Kleiner are currently working together on are Yale's arts area plan, "music campus" plan and Divinity School renovations. Ehrenberg also serves on a new Yale College committee examining the arts in the college.

"Erica is supremely and uniquely qualified for her new role as her training and expertise touch on almost all of the parts of Yale she will come in contact with. She is an outstanding teacher and scholar, and has worked in some of the most important museum collections in the nation. Her special expertise in Near Eastern art and archaeology helps her to be conversant with the programmatic enterprise of the Divinity School as well as with that of the art schools."

Ehrenberg was an adjunct assistant professor of art history and archaeology since 1989 at New York University, where she developed the curriculum for ancient Near Eastern art and won an Outstanding Adjunct Teaching Award. She also was an adjunct faculty member at the New York Academy of Art in 1999. After graduating from Yale College with distinction in archaeology, she went on to receive M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in New York City.

In addition to teaching, Ehrenberg has extensive museum experience. As a lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1989, she gives talks on ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek and Roman art. She also served twice as the Hagop Kevorkian Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. In 1996-97 she was the Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 1994 she was a visiting scholar at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. During her undergraduate years at Yale, Ehrenberg also worked in New York as an assistant in the tribal arts and antiquities department at Christie's and at both the Museum of the American Indian and the Brooklyn Museum.

Ehrenberg has taken part on excavations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Greece, and lectures regularly in the United States and abroad. Along with numerous articles, she has published a book based largely on pieces in the Yale Babylonian Collection and is currently editing a volume of collected papers. She also edited a biannual newsletter for the New York Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and was a consultant to Charles Scribner's Sons on a multi-volume reference work on Near Eastern and Egyptian civilizations.


Karen Lamb

Karen Lamb works most closely with Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler on academic, policy and budgetary matters pertaining to biomedical and health affairs at the University, overseeing in these realms the Schools of Medicine and Nursing and Yale University Health Services, among other units. In this capacity, Lamb serves on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Steering Committee, Conflict of Interest Committee, the Advisory Committee on Resources for Students and Employees with Disabilities and university safety committees, and is a member of the Task Force on Research Compliance.

"It's been a great pleasure to welcome Karen back to Yale -- thanks to her many fans at the Yale Law School who helped us to recruit her. Karen's rich record of professional and managerial accomplishment, supported by her keen intelligence and superb analytic skills, has enabled her to hit the "provostial ground" running, especially with regard to the many research compliance and regulatory areas for which we are responsible."

A graduate of Tufts University, Lamb joined the Los Angeles office of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker as an associate following her graduation from the Yale Law School. She returned to Connecticut to work for the Norwich firm of Brown, Jacobson, Tillinghast, Lahan & King, P.C., where she later became a principal of the firm. Her major practice areas included commercial real estate transactions and financing, business and corporate matters and banking. She was also an adjunct professor at the University of New Haven's Southeastern Branch in Groton.

Lamb left the practice of law to pursue a career in academic administration. She is the former director of the Yale Law School's Career Development Office. She has also worked as an associate research scholar at the Yale Law School and was a Senior Olin Fellow at the Yale School of Management. She was appointed director of the Office of Career Services at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1999.


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Three join team in Provost's Office

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Letter from the Provost: Support for Teaching with Technology at Yale

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F&ES to host centennial celebration weekend

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Works of School of London artists showcased in exhibit

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Peabody to mark Columbus Day with programs on the Caribbean

Howard Hughes Medical Institute funds biomedical sciences at Yale for 14th year

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