Candidates for Faculty Senate 2024-2025

Katie Batza, Associate Professor and Chair, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, CLAS

Katie Batza (any pronouns) is an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Chair of that department. Their work builds upon their training as an American historian to examine the intersection of health, sexuality, and politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An interdisciplinary scholar, Batza’s publications span from historical monographs and journal articles in publications focusing on history, gender and sexuality, public health, medicine, and beyond to public facing work including a scholarly podcast and collaborations with the National Park Service’s LGBTQ Theme Study. Their work has been funded by the NEH, ACLS, Harvard Schlessinger Library, The Whiting Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, Point Foundation, Mellon Foundation and numerous internal grants and fellowships. In addition to having served in every leadership role within the WGSS department, Katie has served as an Honors Faculty Fellow, a Senior Administrative Fellow, a faculty fellow for the Sexuality and Gender Diversity Center, co-convener of the Gender Seminar at the Hall Center for the Humanities, and chair of the Sexuality and Gender Diversity Faculty Staff Council.

Masoud Darabi, Associate Professor, Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, School of Engineering

Dr. Masoud Darabi is an associate professor of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) at the University of Kansas. Masoud has been with KU for the past 10 years. He received his B.S. and M.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology in Iran, and his PhD from Texas A&M University. He worked in the construction industry for five years before starting his PhD. He has published more than 50 peer reviewed journal articles. He would be delighted to serve as a senator for faculty senate at the University of Kansas and believes he would be able to make meaningful contributions considering his diverse background.

Jennifer Delgado, Associate Teaching Professor, Physics and Astronomy, CLAS

Jennifer Delgado is currently an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She started at KU in 2013 as a short-term lecturer and then served as Lab Director from 2015-2019. Her research focuses on improving equity and quantitative reasoning outcomes in introductory physics and astronomy courses and labs. As someone with experience with large and small enrollment courses, she is interested in serving on Faculty Senate as KU enters an expected period of rapidly changing enrollment.

Poppy DeltaDawn, Assistant Professor, Visual Art, School of the Arts, CLAS

Poppy DeltaDawn is a visual artist and educator making work that is guided by material. Her current research includes the communication and transition between ancient and modern technologies of labor as they relate to cloth production, land cultivation, and lineages of knowledge. She and her practice have been written about in Site Unseen, Hyperallergic, and Maake Magazine, among other publications. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, both in Fiber. Prior to beginning her current appointment of Assistant Professor of Visual Art in Textiles and Fiber in the Visual Art Department, DeltaDawn was a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022-2023 in the Fiber and Material Studies Department, and has also taught in the Fiber & Material Studies departments at Tyler School of Art, and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Misty Heggeness, Associate Professor, School of Public Affairs and Administration, CLAS; Co-director, Kansas Population Center; Associate Research Scientist, Institute for Policy & Social Research

Misty L. Heggeness is co-director of the Kansas Population Center, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration, and an associate research scientist in the Institute for Policy & Social Research. She settled in at the University of Kansas (KU) after 12 years in the federal government where her last position was as a principal research economist and senior advisor to the U.S. Census Bureau. She also held positions as a career researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Labor. Prior to arriving at KU, Dr. Heggeness taught a course on policy analysis and evaluation at the University of Maryland. Her expertise is in program evaluation, high-skilled workforce, poverty and inequality, and she is a leading national expert on gender and the economy. Her research has been highlighted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Economist, and Science, and her upcoming book titled SWIFTYNOMICS: Women in Today's Economy will be published in 2025 (University of California Press). Dr. Heggeness is also the recipient of a U.S. Department of Commerce Bronze Medal for her work leading analytical teams to respond to the administration's request to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census and the recipient of an NIH Honors Award for her work analyzing the scientific workforce to help improve NIH policies. Through a roughly $800,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Dr. Heggeness is currently building a dashboard of economic statistics on the care economy to better inform policy and decision-makers on the economics of care, and she continues advancing cutting-edge research on women in today's economy.

Jason Matejkowski, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Programs, School of Social Welfare

Jason Matejkowski, MSW, PhD joined KU and the School of Social Welfare in 2012. In addition to numerous school- and university-level committees and taskforces, he has served as a member of the Faculty and University Senate (2015-2018) and with the Faculty Senate Committee on Standards and Procedures for Promotion and Tenure (2017-2020; chair, 2018-2019). His research focuses on the integration of health service models, in general, and those models that target adults who have a serious mental illness and who are involved in the criminal legal system, in particular. He is co-director of the Integrated Health Scholars Program, which has increased access to care and reduced health disparities in high need/demand communities in the State of Kansas and has supported access to education for more than 220 clinical specialization MSW students at the University of Kansas through provision of $10,000 student scholarships.

Megan Sheldon, Lecturer, Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS

I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Working at KU for the past seven years, I want to serve on the Faculty Senate to give voice to Lecturers on campus within University Governance. Being from Lawrence and a proud KU graduate (BA, BS, MA, PhD), I have spent most of my life engaged with the university, and as such I am extremely aware of the (changing) goals and challenges KU has had over many years. My teaching interests center on Spanish language, transatlantic cultures, gender and sexuality studies and US Latinx studies.  My research broadly focuses on queer and diaspora studies, specifically in relation to the Hispanic community, and my articles have appeared or are forthcoming from top journals in my field.