Dean Steven Fluharty announced the appointment of Doris Wagner as the Robert I. Williams Term Professor of Biology. The appointment recognizes Dr. Wagner’s “distinguished scholarship and outstanding service to the Department and School of Arts and Sciences.” Dr. Wagner has published more than 60 papers on the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of changes in cell identity and function. Her recent work includes a hormone switch that couples and regulates the duration of two successive stages in the path to reproductive competence in plants, identifying a chromatin-remodeling complex that contributes to auxin regulated flower development and the first demonstration of a DNA-sequence based mechanism for Polycomb recruitment in Arabidopsis and has been published in Science, eLife and Nature Genetics. She is an elected member and now president of the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee, has led an international initiative to promote plant epigenetics and epigenomics (EPIC) and has organized a number of workshops and symposia on plant development and epigenetics. Dr. Wagner served as Graduate Chair of Biology, 2008-2009 and 2011-2014. She is currently a member of the University’s Graduate Council.