Associate professor and coordinator of UTSA's Russian program, Dr. Nummikoski was named interim chair of the language department at the University of Texas, San Antonio beginning with the Spring Semester 2002 and chair the following fall. A member of the UTSA faculty since 1988, she is author of Troika: A Communicative Approach to Russian Language, Life, and Culture, a Russian textbook first published by John Wiley and Sons, New York, in 1996. Since that time, Dr. Nummikoski has added an interactive website to support the text and is working on a second-year Russian textbook with the working title of Sputnik. She received three degrees from Helsinki University in Finland and earned her Ph.D. in foreign language education (Russian) at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991.