Fall 2025 Faculty Highlights
Due to an outstanding record of teaching and service in Global Health Studies, Dr. Beatriz Reyes was promoted in September 2025 to Associate Professor of Instruction. She has since been named a co-Director of Undergraduate Studies for our over 400 majors and minors, and helped our unit make important curricular decisions so we can continue to develop excellent learning experiences for our students.
We were also able to host as Radulovacki Visiting Scholar Illinois’ first professionally trained Indigenous 
chef, Jessica Walks First (Menominee, pictured left), to teach an experiential class, “Indigenous Foodways: Cultivating Mind, Body, and Soul,” complete with cooking lessons with Indigenous ingredients! Chef Walks First’s pop-up business, Ketapanen Kitchen, is Chicago’s only Indigenous Pop-Up Kitchen and catering company. As covered in The Daily Northwestern, in November, Chef Walks First gave a talk to a large audience, “Journey to Healing: Exploring Intersections of Indigenous Foodways, Culinary Practice, and Personal Wellness,” during which she explored her personal history and the critical role food has played in it. Chef Walks First’s work at Northwestern was even recently featured in ICT News, the USA’s main national Indigenous news publication!
Meanwhile, our inaugural Radulovacki Visiting Scholar of 2021, Dr. Ivan Djordjević (pictured right), has won, together with colleagues, the 2025 European Union Grand Prize for Citizen Science for the project: HEROINES: Heritage of Emancipation—Empowering Roma Women through Building Networks, and Dr. Djordjević, was also interviewed about the project. We are tremendously grateful to the Radulovacki family for their support over the years in bringing such dynamic visiting faculty to campus to enrich our students’ learning opportunities, and the wider GHS community!
Dr. Noelle Sullivan participated in a roundtable with fellow scholars at the American Anthropological Association 2025 annual meeting in New Orleans in November, “The Afterlives of U.S. Aid in Africa,” discussing the wider implications of the end of USAID, and what opportunities might be to build responsive, equitable, well-resourced and strong health systems in the aftermath.
And finally, GHS bid farewell to Dr. Charlayne Mitchell (pictured right), who decided to move on from Northwestern. We at GHS are so grateful to have had Dr. Mitchell as our close colleague in the program for the 
last four years. Since joining the GHS faculty, Dr. Mitchell contributed to our mission of helping students understand the social and political determinants of health, and developed stellar new courses exploring the connections between racism, nutrition, politics, history, and health disparities in ways that deeply enriched the GHS community. A pedagogical innovator, Dr. Mitchell was highly sought after by fellow faculty across the university to learn about student-centered course design, and she made noteworthy contributions to research methodologies by centering Black feminist perspectives on research ethics and approaches in her publications. Dr. Mitchell has been a highly sought after mentor to students within and beyond GHS, and has made an indelible mark on our students. Dr. Mitchell will always be a treasured member of the GHS family. We are incredibly grateful for her contributions to our GHS community over the years, and wish her all the best.