College of Liberal Arts and Sciences names MacGillivray, Marra, Reno to top faculty honor

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has named three professors as Collegiate Fellows, the college’s highest faculty honor, in recognition of their distinguished teaching, research, and service.

Leonard MacGillivray of the Department of Chemistry; Kim Marra of the Departments of Theatre Arts and American Studies, with affiliate faculty status in Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies; and Mary Hall Reno of the Department of Physics and Astronomy will serve renewable five-year appointments as CLAS Collegiate Fellows.

"It is my great privilege to name Professors MacGillivray, Marra, and Reno to our college's most prestigious faculty honor," said Interim Dean Joe Kearney. "These three Collegiate Fellows have distinguished themselves internationally in their disciplines and have helped many students at all levels develop meaningful careers and fulfilling lives. We are grateful for their service and pleased to recognize their outstanding records of achievement."

Len MacGillivrayLen MacGillivray, who joined the UI faculty in 2000, is professor of Chemistry and holds a secondary appointment in the College of Pharmacy. He is a first-generation college student who earned his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. His current research involves designing organic solid-state materials for applications in organic synthesis, materials science, and pharmaceutics. MacGillivray’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and industry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society (ACS), and serves as the local coordinator of the ACS's U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad. He has published more than 200 manuscripts; conducted peer reviews of hundreds of journal manuscripts, grants, and contracts; holds six U.S. patents; and is a co-editor of the International Union of Crystallography Journal. He also has been awarded the 2019 Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the UI Graduate College.

Kim MarraKim Marra, who earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and joined the UI faculty in 1990, is professor of Theatre Arts and American Studies, with affiliate faculty status in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. A Collegiate Teaching Award recipient, she teaches and conducts interdisciplinary research in theatre and performance history, pursuing feminist and queer analyses of how embodied performances function in various cultural contexts. Her prize-winning books and articles have examined the leading impresario-actress relationships that shaped modern Broadway, closeted LGBTQ potentates in pre-Stonewall U.S. theatre history, and the pull of horses across various theatrical and social stages in Manhattan circa 1900. A former board member of the American Society for Theatre Research, Marra is currently associate editor of the Animal Lives Series of the University of Chicago Press and co-director of the Summer Institute in Human-Animal Studies jointly sponsored by the international Animals and Society Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has served as DEO of American Studies and as a member of the Collegiate Consulting Group and CLAS Executive Committee. She was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 2010.

Mary Hall RenoMary Hall Reno is a professor of Physics and Astronomy. A graduate of Reed College with a PhD in physics from Stanford University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Center and a visiting faculty member at the Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados in Mexico City before she joined the faculty at Iowa in 1990. Her research is in theoretical particle physics with a focus on neutrino interactions and detection, for which she was recognized as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Funded by Department of Energy and NASA grants, her research exploits the connections between measurements in particle accelerator experiments and calculations of high energy interactions of cosmic rays and cosmic neutrinos. Reno served as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa (2009-2014), and her service to the profession includes serving as a member and chair of the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics (2007-2009).


The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.