Saint Joseph's Names Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chairs
Five faculty members in humanities, STEM, business, education and social sciences, and the health professions were awarded the Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chair position for the 2026-28 academic years.
Five Saint Joseph’s University faculty members have been named Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chair holders for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 academic years. The University established the Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chair in 2000 to support high-quality research that would enhance the University’s reputation and have a positive impact on the local and regional community. It is supported through an endowment from alumnus William Dirk Warren, BS ’50.
The chair holders are:
- Angela Bingham, PharmD, BCPS, BCNSP, BCCCP, clinical associate professor of pharmacy practice (Nursing & Health Professions)
- Thanigavelan Jambulingam, PhD, professor of food, pharma and healthcare (Business)
- Christopher E. Kelly, PhD, professor of sociology and criminal justice (Education & Social Sciences)
- Jenny Spinner, PhD, professor of English, writing and journalism (Humanities)
- Kris Tapp, PhD, professor of mathematics (STEM Disciplines)
Faculty will research a wide range of topics, from the future of police interrogation and artificial intelligence, to math’s influence in elections, emergency cardiovascular care education and how essayists have written about menopause.
New chair holders were selected through a competitive process overseen by the University’s deans and approved by the Office of the Provost. The appointments reflect the University’s dedication to lifelong learning and supporting faculty members as they shape the next generation of industry leaders.
Below, learn more about the new Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chair holders and their research:
Nursing & Health Profe
ssions
Angela Bingham, PharmD, BCPS, BCNSP, BCCCP
Clinical Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice
Bingham’s research advances interprofessional health professions education by addressing national workforce preparation gaps in nutrition support and enhancing emergency cardiovascular care education through evaluation of training models and learner outcomes. Her nutrition support education research examines curricular practices, preparation for professional credentialing, and best practices that equip health professions learners for collaborative, team-based nutrition care. Complementing this work, her emergency cardiovascular care education research investigates instructional approaches in resuscitation training and their influence on learner performance, psychological stress and readiness to respond in emergencies.
Aligned with the national priorities of the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition and the American Heart Association, this research is positioned to inform instructional practices and professional training nationwide. By generating evidence to inform curricular innovation and scalable interprofessional learning models, her scholarship will strengthen clinical preparedness and advance safe, collaborative and evidence-based care across health professions. Building on her nationally recognized leadership in nutrition support, critical care and simulation-based education, Bingham’s research will benefit learners, practitioners and patients at Saint Joseph’s University and beyond.
Business
Professor of Food, Pharma and Healthcare
Jambulingam’s research and teaching sit at the intersection of pharmaceutical marketing strategy, healthcare marketing research, pricing and supply chain management. His work examines how organizational structure, interfirm relationships and regulatory dynamics shape performance in highly regulated healthcare markets. Drawing on a background in pharmacy, marketing and industry experience in sales and product management, he integrates managerial relevance with rigorous analytical and conceptual modeling.
His scholarship frequently bridges disciplines, combining insights from marketing, economics, management and operations, to explain how firms compete, collaborate and create value in complex healthcare ecosystems. A recurring theme in his research is the role of trust, fairness, and coordination across pharmaceutical supply chain partners, along with the strategic consequences of policy and regulatory interventions. His work has contributed to both theory development and executive decision-making by offering frameworks that clarify pricing dynamics, channel relationships and commercialization strategy.
He currently focuses on emerging challenges and opportunities in biopharma, including AI’s role in health technology assessment, evolving pricing and affordability pressures and resilience in pharmaceutical supply chains. He is particularly interested in how AI and advanced analytics are reshaping evidence generation, market access, competitive intelligence and risk management. He actively brings these themes into the classroom to ensure students are prepared for careers across pharma, biotech and healthcare.
E
ducation & Social Sciences
Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
Kelly has been studying police interviewing and interrogation for more than 15 years. Having received approximately $1 million in federal funding, Kelly has been at the forefront of understanding what investigators do in the field and what effects those methods have on overcoming suspect resistance, assessing credibility and gaining reliable information, including admissions and confessions.
In addition to working closely with large police departments in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Kelly’s work has a global reach. He has worked with law enforcement and national security practitioners or presented his research in Canada, Europe, Central Asia, Mexico and Latin America. Since 2023, Kelly has been the director of the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group (iIIRG), an organization dedicated to connecting researchers and practitioners to advance humane, ethical and effective interviewing practices worldwide.
As chair, Kelly plans to write about the future of interrogation by immersing himself in the legal and philosophical history of the state’s power to question people who may possess incriminating information, including the periodic reintroduction of torture into the practice. Despite momentum being on the side of reform efforts to abandon psychological manipulation in favor of interviewing based on science and ethics, this nascent movement is far from guaranteed to take root across the United States and elsewhere, and Kelly will be thinking deeply on how to ensure human rights for those being questioned by agents of the state.
Humanities
Professor of English, Writing and Journalism
Spinner’s research will focus on menopause in essays from the late 18th century — when the first guidebooks for women experiencing menopause began to appear in France — to the present. In earlier centuries, women in literature appeared primarily in one of three stages of life: maid, mother or shrew. Rarely did the woman situated between “mother” and “shrew” draw attention. In fact, menopause was often construed as a dreaded disease. Only in the last decade has the topic of menopause — narrated by people experiencing it — begun to occupy public spaces more prominently and positively, not only in mainstream media but also in “menopause memoirs,” anthologies, podcasts and personal essays.
Author of a 2018 groundbreaking book on the history of women essayists, “Of Women and the Essay,” Spinner has developed an international reputation for her scholarship on women essayists, publishing widely on the subject. That work often examines moments in the essay’s history in which women pushed against the genre’s boundaries. In focusing on essays about menopause, she hopes to situate such writings in the historical development of the essay genre itself and to tease out how the prevailing form of the day impacted writing through the centuries, paying particular attention to historically marginalized writers.
She will trace the subject of menopause in personal essay writing from the periodical essay of the 18th century, the familiar essay of the 19th century, the genteel essay at the turn of the 20th century, and the modern essay in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ultimately, her work seeks to better understand how essayists across racial and sexual identities have written about menopause, and how the essay has enabled — or constrained — their efforts to render menopausal life and bodies visible and meaningful.
STEM Disciplines
Professor of Mathematics
Tapp’s research applies mathematics to the study of elections and democratic processes. He combines tools from statistics, graph theory, combinatorics and machine learning to analyze ranked-choice voting systems and evaluate the fairness of electoral district maps. His work has contributed to court cases challenging gerrymandered maps, and he has served as an expert witness in redistricting litigation.
Tapp is the author of three textbooks and more than 30 research articles. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Mathematical Society, the American Institute of Mathematics and the Data and Democracy Lab. In 2025, he received the Tengelmann Distinguished Teaching and Research Award.
