Institute Insider

Methawat Chanla will join the Compstaff team as the desktop support supervisor. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Macalester College and has been employed at the University of Minnesota's Office of the Vice President for Research as an info tech professional since November 2007. Methawat begins March 24.

Yingling Fan has been hired as an assistant professor in urban planning. Fan joins the Institute from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation was titled "The Built Environment, Activity Space, and Time Allocation: An Activity-Based Framework for Modeling the Land Use and Travel Connection," and she was recently nominated for the 2008 Graduate Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award. She will join the regional planning and policy area this fall.

Dawn Fish has been named the new senior director of development for the Humphrey Institute. Fish has worked in fundraising and communications at nonprofit organizations for nearly 20 years. From 1998 to 2005 she worked as director of development at the University's Minnesota Medical Foundation. She also worked for Resources for Child Caring in Saint Paul and Scholarship America in Edina. Currently, she is the executive director of the John T. Petters Foundation in Minnetonka. She holds a master's degree in organizational leadership from the College of St. Catherine and a bachelor's degree in communication from Metropolitan State University. Fish will begin April 1.