The Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics is pleased to recognize the accomplishments and activities of its faculty, staff, students and alumni:
Cameron Beatty, who taught courses for Iowa State’s Leadership Studies Program from 2013 to 2016, will be inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 26. He is currently an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Florida State University. Induction into the Collegium of Scholars honors individuals at various career stages and across a wide spectrum of influence who have shown commitment to the adaptive faithful servant-scholar moral cosmopolitan leadership tradition and selfless service to humanity in tribute to King. On Jan. 21, Beatty moderated a conversation with Karamo Brown, the culture expert on Netflix’s “Queer Eye” television series as part of Martin Luther King Jr. week at Florida State University. Beatty earned a Ph.D. in higher education administration from Iowa State in August 2014.
Monic Behnken, director of the Leadership Studies Program and associate professor in the Department of Sociology, together with a collaborative team of researchers, was recently awarded a grant by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s GAINS Center for Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation. Out of fifty applications for the grant, Behnken’s team earned one of only ten grants that were awarded. Behnken submitted a proposal to have GAINS Center staff conduct Sequential Intercept Mapping workshops to help Story County develop a comprehensive, community-wide strategic plan for addressing opioid use. Behnken was honored on the 2017 Women Impacting ISU calendar, which is coordinated by the Catt Center each year.
Crystal Brandenburgh, the center’s Archives of Women’s Political Communications intern, presented “Carrie Chapman Catt and the Nineteenth Amendment” at the Ames Public Library on Feb. 18 as part of their Your Historians collaboration with the Iowa State University Department of History. She is the first undergraduate student to present in this series. Brandenburgh is an Elizabeth Hoffman and Brian R. Binger Legacy of Heroines scholar and is from Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Dianne Bystrom, Catt Center director emerita, gave a presentation about the Iowa Caucuses on Jan. 27 to the Greater Omaha Pachyderm luncheon group. On March 6, she presented a break-out session on “How Leaders Can Overcome the Impostor Syndrome” at the “Women Lead 2020: Claim Your Power” conference at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Morgan Fritz, sophomore in political science, and Jacob Schrader, junior in economics and political science, were elected Iowa State Student Government president and vice president, respectively, on March 5. Fritz currently serves as the Collegiate Panhellenic Council senator and previously served as a legislative ambassador during her first year at Iowa State. She is a member of Alpha Delta Pi sorority, worked as a Cyclone Aide and served as a sophomore adviser for President Wendy Wintersteen’s leadership class. Fritz is a Katherine Bruntlett Annin Legacy of Heroines scholar through the Catt Center and is from Lake Mills, Iowa. She also served on the 2020 Women Impacting ISU calendar selection committee. Schrader has been a Student Government Senator for three years and is currently serving as vice speaker. He was a member of the Vote Everywhere student organization in 2018-2019, a group advised by center director Karen Kedrowski; has interned for Governor Reynolds and Senator Grassley; and served on the 2019 Women Impacting ISU calendar selection committee. Schrader is from Sioux Center, Iowa.
Dr. Lauren Hughes, a Helen Jensen Howe Legacy of Heroines scholar in 2000-2002, began new roles in February 2020 as state policy director of the Farley Health Policy Center at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and associate professor of family medicine in the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine. In these roles, she leads efforts to generate and translate evidence to inform the design and implementation of evidence-based health policy at the state and national levels and educates the next generation of primary care clinicians to be the leaders the future health care system needs. She previously served as deputy secretary for health innovation in the Pennsylvania Department of Health, where she created and led statewide strategies to improve the health and health care delivery for all Pennsylvanians, with a special emphasis on transforming rural hospital payment and delivery systems and combating the opioid and heroin epidemic. Dr. Hughes served as the national president of the American Medical Student Association in 2009-2010 prior to completing her residency at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has volunteered through AmeriCorps in a federally qualified health center in Berkeley, Calif., worked for Iowa Senator Tom Harkin in Washington, DC, and studied medicine and health systems in Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania and Botswana. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Robert Graham Center, ABC News Medical Unit in New York City, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, and The Commonwealth Fund. In 2016, she received the Women Leaders in Medicine Award from the American Medical Student Association and the Early Career Achievement Award from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, and in 2018, she was selected as a Presidential Leadership Scholar. Dr. Hughes is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar the University of Michigan, where she earned an MSc in health services research. She also holds a medical degree from the University of Iowa, an MPH in health policy from The George Washington University, and degrees in zoology and Spanish from Iowa State University.
Karen Kedrowski, Catt Center director, presented “Suffrage History and What’s Not Done” to the Iowa State University Retirees Association on Jan. 23, and she was the keynote speaker for 50-50 in 2020’s Blueprint for Winning Academy on Jan. 24, presenting “Striving for Madam President.” Kedrowski was on a panel discussing the Bertelsmann Foundation’s documentary “Uncivil War: U.S. Elections Under Siege” at the Flix Brewhouse in Des Moines on Jan. 31. She was the keynote speaker for the University of Northern Iowa student government candidate training program You’re Next, where she presented a version of “Suffrage History and What’s Not Done.” Kedrowski spoke informally on suffrage history and the Iowa Caucuses at the Feb. 7 meeting of the Drinking Liberally club in Ames, where she also promoted the 19th Amendment Centennial Commemoration Kickoff event that was held Feb. 14 at Iowa State. She also spoke on “Women’s Suffrage History in the US and Iowa” for the Friends of the Maquoketa Public Library on Feb. 22.
Kedrowski presented “The Intersection of Race and Sex: Race and the Women’s Suffrage Movement” at the Iowa State Thomas L. Hill Conference on Race and Ethnicity (ISCORE) preconference on March 4 and the “Toward a Universal Suffrage: African American Women in Iowa and the Vote for All” display at ISCORE on March 6.
In the lead up and aftermath of the Iowa Caucuses in January and February, Kedrowski was interviewed by 900CHML radio (Hamilton, Ontario), CJOB radio (Winnipeg), ABC News, the Boston Globe, the Boston Post, the Christian Science Monitor, Fox News, Gazeta Wyborcza (Warsaw, Poland), Global News (Toronto), the Huffington Post, Iowa Public Radio, i24 News (France), Le Journal Dimanche (France), the New York Post, Reuters, River to River, the Straits Times (Southeast Asia) and Voice of America.
On March 10, Kedrowski will present on Carrie Chapman Catt at the State Historical Museum of Iowa’s lunch-and-learn and on suffrage history at the Story County American Association of University Women meeting.
Abby Mankins, senior in political science, was accepted into graduate school at Iowa State University in the higher education and student affairs program. Mankins will graduate this May and is a Helen Jensen Howe Legacy of Heroines scholarship recipient. She is from Des Moines, Iowa.
Elizabeth Settles, an Elizabeth Hoffman and Brian R. Binger Legacy of Heroines scholar in the 2017-2018 academic year, started a new position with Iowa State University in January. Settles serves as the program assistant for women’s and gender studies, leadership studies and communication studies. Settles graduated in May 2018 with a degree in communication studies and a certificate in leadership studies. She is from Ames, Iowa, and traveled to Sweden in 2017 as part of the Global Leadership Study Abroad program.
Toni Sleugh, junior in biology and environmental sciences, was appointed to serve as an undergraduate student representative on the newly-created University Sustainability Committee. This committee is charged with developing a set of actionable recommendations that will increase energy efficiency, energy conservation and use of renewable energy with the goal of moving Iowa State toward carbon neutrality. Sleugh is chapter chair of Climate Reality, a student ambassador in the Dean of Students Office and a Helen Jensen Howe Legacy of Heroines scholarship recipient. She is from Carmel, Indiana, and is one of three undergraduate students to serve on the 20-person committee.
Kate Tindall recently joined the Iowa State University Alumni Association as director of marketing and communications. In her new position, she works with brand implementation and messaging for ISU Alumni Association membership, events and programs. She oversees online marketing and communications, content and strategy — including the www.isualum.org website, social media channels and broadcast emails. Tindall graduated from Iowa State with degrees in journalism and mass communication and political science in May 2015. She worked at the Catt Center as the Archives of Women’s Political Communication intern during the 2013-2014 academic year and was a Jane Greimann Legacy of Heroines scholar from 2013 to 2015.
Kathryn Walker, a Carrie Chapman Catt Legacy of Heroines scholar in 2018-2019, began a new position as special assistant in the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. In this role, she supports senior agency staff, including the deputy assistant administrator for legislative affairs, USAID national security adviser and director of the Office of Legislative Affairs. This entails producing materials for congressional hearings, staffing them at meetings and taking on special projects pertaining to national security. Walker also has started graduate studies at George Washington University to pursue a master’s degree in its legislative affairs program, specializing in national security and budget. At Iowa State, Walker also served as an Andrew Goodman Foundation ambassador, who are supervised through the Catt Center. She graduated from Iowa State in 2019 with a degree in political science.
Kelly Winfrey, assistant professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication and coordinator of research and outreach for the Catt Center, presented “Women & Leadership: Overcoming Obstacles” to the Iowa State chapter of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority on March 9 and is presenting the lecture “The Road to Women’s Suffrage” to the Polk County Bar Association on March 10. She has been invited to guest lecture about gender and political campaigns at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas on April 15. Winfrey also received a grant from Engineering-LAS Online to upgrade her online course, LD ST 333: Women & Leadership, with new content, including interviews with prominent women in leadership.