Kathryn Graff Low, professor of psychology and associate dean of the faculty, has been appointed interim dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs, President Clayton Spencer announced today.

Low, whose appointment begins on July 1, will serve during the 2017–18 academic year pending the search for a new, permanent dean. Low succeeds Matthew Auer, who departs �ֲ���ý on June 30 to become dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia.

“I am very grateful that Kathy has agreed to serve in this vitally important role during this transition year,” said Spencer. “Kathy is a widely respected member of the senior faculty, and because of her current role, she is uniquely situated to carry forward the work of the Dean of the Faculty’s Office.”

Kathryn Graff Low will serve as interim dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs during 2017-18. President Clayton Spencer. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Spencer added, “I very much look forward to working with Kathy over the next year to advance the priorities of the faculty and to continue to strengthen the resources supporting the academic core of the college.”

“I am deeply honored to serve �ֲ���ý in this way,” Low said. “I look forward to working with faculty colleagues to map out a plan for the year that will keep faculty processes moving forward and allow us, as appropriate, to continue to advance strategic priorities. The faculty are at the heart of the academic experience at �ֲ���ý. I welcome the opportunity to work with this group of dedicated colleagues to provide an exceptional liberal arts experience that is consistent with our mission and history.”

In her current role as associate dean of the faculty for the sciences and social sciences, Low’s responsibilities include oversight of academic assessment, research compliance, departmental reviews, and Title IX compliance. She also serves as the Office of the Dean of Faculty’s director of faculty research and scholarship, overseeing the distribution of internal faculty grants; management of student research and other grant funds; and research mentoring, including training in responsible conduct of research.

In previous years, Low served as chair of the Department of Psychology and has served on a wide range of faculty committees related to personnel, educational policy, curriculum, and the academic calendar. She oversaw the successful completion of the college’s interim accreditation report, and participated in recent institutional planning efforts.

Before assuming the associate dean position, Low was also responsible for new faculty development activities, and she has successfully mentored faculty during their transition to �ֲ���ý. In her current role, she is responsible for hiring visiting faculty and assists with faculty orientation and programming. This year, she is also co-leading the STEM diversity initiative, an effort designed to support all students, particularly those from underrepresented groups, for success in STEM fields.

A member of the �ֲ���ý faculty for 27 years, Low has expertise in areas related to women’s health and sexual health, including sexual function, sexually transmitted infections, body image and weight, and cardiovascular disease. She has also published on college student mental health and well-being. A licensed clinical psychologist in Maine, Low has served on the staff of St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center and Central Maine Medical Center.

Respect for Low’s teaching and research runs deep at �ֲ���ý, typified by work with her former thesis student Nicolette Robbins ’11 that yielded groundbreaking research on asexual coming-out experiences. Robbins calls Low a model professor, clinician, and researcher who “always has a million things going on but she always makes time. Not many people have the opportunity to get that close and feel so supported by a professor.”

Low earned a bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College, master’s from Harvard University, and doctorate from Stanford University. Appointed to the �ֲ���ý faculty in 1990, she was promoted to full professor in 2003 and has served as chair of the Department of Psychology.

The search committee for the next permanent dean will be formed this spring, with elections in April and the search will begin early next fall.

What started as a way for Nicolette Robbins ’11 to spend her final Short Term has become groundbreaking research on what it’s like to come out as an asexual person.

Robbins is the lead author of “A Qualitative Exploration of the ‘Coming Out’ Process for Asexual Individuals,” published in September in the journal

In the creation of this new knowledge, �ֲ���ý friendship and mentorship run deep: Robbins’ coauthors are her thesis adviser, Professor of Psychology Kathy Low — who Robbins says “always gives me a chance to learn from her” — and her classmate and friend, Annie Query.

Nicolette Robbins ’11 uses the findings from her senior thesis in psychology to publish groundbreaking research on the experiences of coming out as asexual.

Asexuality is defined as when someone experiences little or no sexual attraction, and is thought to describe perhaps 1 percent of the population.

Thanks to years of research, we know quite a bit about the LGBTQ coming-out experience. But no similar research has been done on the asexual side. Now, thanks to Team Robbins, we know that the two experiences are psychologically comparable — with one major exception, having to do with the Internet.

The similarities include what happens first, “feeling different at puberty,” says Robbins, who is a research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine looking ahead to graduate school.

“That’s a ubiquitous experience in the realm of alternative sexuality, feeling different, confused, that something is wrong. These are common experiences.”

Other similar themes include the impulse to come out as asexual as an act of self-expression and a way to achieve “identity salience,” a term that describes how our various self-identities (parent, churchgoer, employee, gay person) tend to get along.

While homosexuality is a known and accepted type of sexuality, asexuality isn’t quite there yet. So for someone to come out as asexual, the person first has “to discover that this is even a legitimate option,” Robbins says.

This is where the Internet comes in.

For someone discovering the concept of asexuality, everything from learning terminology to finding a community typically occurs online. People who start to explore their asexual identity tend to find “direct online interaction with other asexuals to see if the identity is an apt fit,” a process that Robbins calls “pivotal.”

The online aspect makes the asexual coming-out experience “unique,” Robbins says. Indeed, the Internet has played a “crucial role in legitimizing asexuality and building a community.”

“The Internet has always helped to facilitate the emergence of different types of sexuality and allowed those people to feel that they are not alone,” Robbins adds.

New information that can “inform interventions, programming, therapy and other kinds of interactions with individuals who identify as asexual.”

From her experience as both a researcher and clinician, Low says the new research helps to further “legitimize the orientation” of asexuality, and it gives teachers, counselors, and clinicians information to “inform interventions, programming, therapy and other kinds of interactions with individuals who identify as asexual.

“If I were doing therapy with an adolescent who was asexual, I might search the published literature to learn more, and turn up this article, which describes what at least one sample of asexual individuals report experiencing.”

Robbins got the idea to pursue asexuality as she pondered her senior thesis. She had set the bar pretty high. “I wanted to look at something totally new.”

Her mind kept going back to one of Low’s psychology courses, “Women, Culture, and Health,” and she recalled how Low had created a safe place in class to talk about “things people don’t talk about” in the realm of sexuality.

“I thought I could do it all.”

Around the same time, Low had seen a call for research on asexuality from another scholar. She mentioned it to Robbins, who “looked into it. At the time there were only about seven publications on asexuality.”

So Robbins launched herself into a broad thesis project, hoping to survey a sample of asexuals; study the relationship between asexuality, sexual aversion, and sexual desire; and gain a better understanding of the coming-out experience for asexuals.

“I thought I could do it all,” she says.

But the topic may have met her “totally new” criterion a bit too well. Robbins couldn’t find enough answers to get her started.

“We couldn’t even answer the question ‘How many asexuals are there?’ Every study we looked at used different criteria to recruit their sample. The prevalence went all the way from 0.03 percent of the population to 1 percent.”

So Robbins pulled a Hannibal of sorts, finding a way by making her own.

She created her own statistically valid questionnaire and obtained 169 coming-out narratives from subjects recruited from online communities dedicated to asexuality.

“I don’t like the idea of creating something that assigns identity.”

In the end, the experience of creating the questionnaire, not the narratives themselves, formed the major part of Robbins’ final thesis. And while Robbins is proud of the thesis — it won her the department’s Drake Bradley Prize in Statistics — she’s ambivalent about the questionnaire.

“I do believe it is useful for researchers, but I don’t like the idea of creating something that assigns identity. I don’t like the idea of not letting people be the ultimate authority of their own sexual identity.

“For me, I don’t know if assigning an official label is helpful when really what I want to get across to the public is that asexuality is so diverse.”

Indeed, an asexual person can have no romantic feelings (aromantic asexual), or they can have romantic feelings but not sexual ones (romantic asexual). Within that realm, they may be heteroromantic, homoromantic, panromantic, demisexual, demiromantic, and more.

“Rather saying that a person is more asexual or less asexual than someone else,” she says, “it’s more helpful to say that they are just asexual in a different way.”

With her thesis completed, Robbins used her final Short Term to take a good look at the narratives. Annie Query, her friend and fellow psych major who has since earned a master’s in social work from the Smith College School of Social Work, helped review and rate the narratives.

The successful publication reflects Robbins’ “exceptional tenacity.”

“We then came together and discussed the emergent themes we had found,” Robbins says.

Professor of Psychology Kathy Low credits Robbins’ “exceptional tenacity” for the achievement of turning her senior thesis into a published article. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine looking ahead to graduate school, Robbins says that Low has “helped me achieve pretty much every single step from college to now.”

For her part, Low says the successful publication of the research reflects Robbins’ “exceptional tenacity.” While many seniors create publishable work, many have “difficulty returning to thesis and editing it down to manuscript length.”

Robbins, however, “really took the initiative with this, and it is a real accomplishment to be first author on a paper like this just a few years out of �ֲ���ý.”

A biennial �ֲ���ý survey shows that around 85 percent of graduating seniors say they’ve developed a close and personal relationship with at least one faculty member.

Robbins personifies that stat.

“Kathy always has a million things going on but she always makes time,” Robbins says. “When I wanted to aim for the top journal, she supported it even though she thought was a longshot” because of the qualitative nature of the research.

Low helped Robbins line up summer research work at �ֲ���ý, and just last summer suggested that two present their research at the International Congress of Behavioral Medicine in Amsterdam.

“Not many people have the opportunity to get that close and feel so supported by a professor,” she says. “I had the greatest experience at �ֲ���ý and I think a lot of that was the psychology department.”

Another faculty member, Professor of Psychology Amy Douglass, invited Robbins to co-present research at the 2011 American Psychology and Law Society Conference in Miami. Robbins had helped Douglass on the research, but still, “she didn’t have to take a chance on me as an undergraduate. But she did.”

At Yale, where she’s working on an Alzheimer’s study, Robbins has found that her undergraduate experience is distinctive, “having written a thesis and still having strong relationships with my �ֲ���ý professors — and getting the chance to publish a paper with my thesis adviser.”

Now applying to graduate school in clinical psychology — with a nifty new credential on her resume — Robbins says Low exemplifies a “type of career I might want to have. She’s a professor, clinician, and researcher.

“That’s the Holy Grail for me.”

What mental health issues affect child refugees? How can physicians in Maine treat diseases typically found in Africa? What cultural barriers come between refugees from Africa and their American healthcare providers?

These are among topics at issue Oct. 15-17 as �ֲ���ý College hosts African Refugee Health: Best Practices, a regional conference also sponsored by, and presenting from, St. Mary’s Health System and the Central Maine Medical Family in Lewiston, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Following a poster presentation of public health research, conference registration begins at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 15, on the ground floor of the college’s Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). The keynote presentations (see below) and a are open to the public at no cost, but advance tickets are required.

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Attendance fees for the conference workshops vary, but undergraduate students and �ֲ���ý faculty may attend at no cost and scholarships are available for African attendees. To register for the paid presentations, to obtain tickets for free events or to learn more, visit or contact Brenda Pelletier at this bpelleti@bates.edu.

Offering keynote presentations at 6:30 p.m. Friday are Dr. Patricia Walker, medical director at HealthPartners Center for International Health in Minnesota and co-editor of the pioneering textbook Immigrant Medicine; and Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, which handles refugee health at the federal level.

Closing the conference with a keynote address at 11 a.m. Sunday is Dr. Richard Mollica, director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma and author of Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World.

The public events take place in the Olin Arts Center at �ֲ���ý, 75 Russell St. Presenting research in health, public health and medicine, the poster session precedes the conference at 4 p.m. on the 15th in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall.

Conference background

The conference’s nearly three dozen presenters include healthcare workers from across the country and beyond; faculty in diverse disciplines from �ֲ���ý and other colleges; and interpreters, social workers, counselors and other experts in breaching cultural factors that impede refugee access to healthcare. (See bios of conference presenters.)

The roster is “unique in that we’ve tapped the expertise of the population we are trying to serve by recruiting African healthcare providers and refugees” as presenters, explains Dr. Alice Haines, a conference organizer. A primary care physician in Lewiston, Haines has worked with African patients here and at a refugee camp in Daadab, Kenya, that hosts hundreds of thousands of mostly Somali refugees.

She adds, “We’re pleased to partner with CDC for this event, and hope it will provide tools to help clinicians and public health professionals better serve refugees in their communities.”

The conference also stands out because it will provide both clinical and public health perspectives on the issue of refugee healthcare. “The physicians alone, the nurses alone, the anthropologists and public-health people alone can’t do this,” says �ֲ���ý psychology professor Kathryn Low, another conference organizer.

“It takes everybody to solve the problem” of providing healthcare to people who are poor, may not speak or read English and who remain unaccustomed to Western medicine and society.

Haines and Low put the event together with Walker, an internationally recognized expert on refugee and immigrant healthcare. The three “wanted to add to the understanding of the distinctive medical and mental health needs of African refugees,” says Haines, “and celebrate the knowledge and effort amassed in Maine, particularly in Lewiston and Auburn,” over years of African settlement in the state.

The mechanisms of healthcare for immigrants and refugees “have had to be invented as we go along,” she says. “I think this community has done pretty well at welcoming them.”

Public health in the �ֲ���ý curriculum

Low is the coordinator of the college’s new general-education concentration in public health, which ranges across the disciplines from anthropology and biology to politics and women and gender studies. Reflecting the college’s ethos of community engagement, the concentration is distinctive for an institution of �ֲ���ý’ size and, with its emphasis on local engagement, unique among the college’s peers in New England.

Public health as taught at �ֲ���ý “has a very strong social justice piece,” Low says. “People shouldn’t face obstacles to getting care.”

The Maine Community Foundation and the Office of Minority Health at the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention are also providing support for the conference.

Kathryn Graff Low, associate professor of psychology at �ֲ���ý and a member of the Bowdoin College Class of 1978, won the Bowdoin Alumni Council’s 2004 Distinguished Educator Award, presented at the Brunswick college’s reunion in early June. Given annually, the award was established in 1964 to recognize outstanding achievement in education by a Bowdoin alumnus in any field and at any level of education.

Low joined the �ֲ���ý psychology department in 1990 and was recently granted a full professorship effective in August. A clinical psychologist, she specializes in clinical health psychology, women’s health, psychotherapy and cardiovascular disease

The awards were created by the Vermont-based Pizzagalli company, one of the country’s largest privately held general contractors, to support and encourage college faculty members who have demonstrated a commitment to be the very best at their chosen endeavors, whether in pursuit of their academic careers or a personal goal.

In announcing her prize, Angelo Pizzagalli, co-chairman of the company, informed Graff Low: “It is very clear from the information submitted with your nomination that your peers at �ֲ���ý College hold you in very high regard. Perhaps, as we go through life and its challenges, knowing we have the respect and admiration of our colleagues is the very best reward of all.”

In nominating Graff Low for the award, her colleague John Kelsey, professor of psychology and chair of neuroscience at �ֲ���ý, wrote: “Kathy is a charismatic teacher, a successful researcher and research mentor, and she is a brilliant, insightful and caring colleague.”

Graff Low’s research interests include clinical health psychology, women’s health, psychotherapy and cardiovascular disease. Over the last several years, she has received an American Heart Foundation grant to continue her dissertation research on the personality correlates of cardiovascular disease in women. She also has received a Howard Hughes Institute grant for studying cardiovascular reactivity, hostility and personality variables in women, and a Mellon Foundation grant to study women participants in health and psychological research. Graff Low has published in several areas of women’s health, including gestational nausea and heart disease.

A sought-after teacher and mentor, Graff Low has co-authored 12 papers with her �ֲ���ý students, encouraging their attempts to develop and publish their own research. She initiated paper and poster sessions for �ֲ���ý psychology seniors, held twice annually, and founded the department’s journal of student research.

Graff has been an important leader in the �ֲ���ý community, where for several years, she served as chair of the student conduct committee. Her able service in that role led to the formation of a new position, “judicial educator,” which she now fills. Graff Low also is president of the New England Psychological Association that will hold its next annual convention at �ֲ���ý College.

A graduate of Bowdoin College, Graff Low earned her Ed.M. in counseling from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in counseling and health psychology from Stanford University.