2026-2027 Class of Fellows

Darrin Hicks is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Denver, where he directs the Debate Across the Curriculum program and is a fellow of the John and Sandy Miller National Academy for Freedom of Expression and Pluralism. He is a process designer with extensive experience in institutional governance, faculty deliberation, and community collaboration. His research focuses on argumentation, conviction, and democratic deliberation, and he is editor of Argumentation: An International Journal of Reasoning.

Ronald Walter Greene is a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. His research and teaching explore the communicative techniques and technologies institutions advocate to improve democratic citizenship. He is concerned with how institutions use debate, discussion, and persuasion to judge, guide, and improve political relationships. In 2026, he was inducted in the University of Minnesota’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers and serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee of the College of Liberal Arts.

Emily Nagisa Keehn is the Assistant Dean for Law Student Affairs at the University of San Diego (USD) School of Law, where she leads Law Student Affairs and Academic Success and Bar Programs. She oversees student life, academic advising, well-being, accommodations, and bar success initiatives, and teaches Contemplative Practice of Law, a course focused on mindfulness, ethics, and professional resilience. Prior to joining the law school, Keehn served as Assistant Dean of Graduate Programs at USD’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies. She is a recipient of the university’s Sister Sally Furay Exemplary Staff Award.

Prior to USD, Keehn worked in international human rights research and advocacy. She was the academic director for Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program and a supervising attorney in its International Human Rights Clinic. She spent several years in South Africa working for UCLA School of Law and Sonke Gender Justice, helping shape national policy and impact litigation related to criminal justice, health, and gender equality, and she is a published scholar in these areas. Her portfolio of human rights work in prisons was recognized with the “Investing in the Future Health Award” by South Africa’s Mail & Guardian.
She holds a BA in Anthropology from UC San Diego and a JD from UCLA School of Law, and is a member of the State Bar of California.

Dustin N. Sharp is a Professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego and the Executive Director of the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. He is the author of Rethinking Transitional Justice for the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Justice and Economic Violence in Transition (Springer, 2014), and has published dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. His recent work explores how human rights and transitional justice might be reimagined with greater realism, restraint, and moral depth amid today’s crises of liberalism and legitimacy. Before joining the Kroc School, Sharp worked at Human Rights Watch where he designed and implemented research and advocacy strategies in Francophone West Africa. He also served as an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of State, representing the United States in multilateral treaty negotiations, and as a law clerk to Judge Carlos Lucero on the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Earlier in his career, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Guinea. He holds a BA in English from the University of Utah, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a PhD in law from Leiden University.

Dan Lane is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara and director of the UCSB Digital Political Inequality Lab. Working at the intersection of political communication, intergroup communication, and communication technology, his current interconnected lines of research examine how digital media shape our relationship to political life.

Dr. Heather McCambly is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the School of Education and is a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology. She is also a Fellow with the Alliance for Higher Education. Her research examines how higher education structures and funding systems reproduce or challenge racial inequities, and on the political, philanthropic, and organizational forces that shape equity efforts across U.S. colleges and universities. Her most recent work focuses on historically patterned mechanisms of racial backlash in higher education policy.

Román Liera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University and the Graduate Program Coordinator of the Higher Education M.A. program. He is a qualitative researcher who studies the intersection of race, organizations, equity, and institutional change in higher education. The College Futures Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Academies of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship have funded Dr. Liera’s research program. His scholarship has appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, AERA Open, Educational Researcher, Review of Higher Education, and the Journal of Higher Education, among others. His scholarship has also received national recognition through the 2025 AERA Educational Change SIG Emerging Scholar Award and the 2025 Diverse Issues in Higher Education Emerging Scholar Award. As a public scholar, he regularly advises administrative and faculty leaders at elite four-year universities, public four-year universities, community colleges, and minority-serving institutions on equity-minded change initiatives, including hiring, faculty professional development, and graduate student socialization, and graduate admissions. He began his higher education trajectory at Los Angeles Pierce College before earning his B.A. in Psychology from San Diego State University, an M.A. in Higher & Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and his PhD in Urban Education Policy from the University of Southern California.

Nicole Ngaosi is currently a doctoral candidate in the Program in Higher Education Leadership & Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Ngaosi's research interests focus on the intersections between shared governance, diversity initiatives, and institutional partnerships to enact organizational change. Currently, her dissertation examines how restrictive legislation and other legal pressures shape diversity-related academic content in postsecondary curricula.

Prior to attending UT, Ngaosi dedicated her full-time Student Affairs professional roles to supporting student retention at UCLA. At the UCLA Community Programs Office, the campus’ multicultural center, her portfolio oversaw a portion of the university's basic needs operations as well as its unique readmission pipeline program and affinity-based peer counseling efforts. Her work drew heavily on her background as a student organizer and her service on various university and systemwide committees.

Sachin Pendse is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT) within the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he serves as the founding director of the Lab for Technology, Mental Health, and Society (the TeMHSo Lab). He uses methods from human-computer interaction (HCI), computational social science, and clinical psychology to investigate how societal factors and technology design interact to influence mental health experiences, with a specific eye to how exchanging mental health support might ease outgroup animosity (both online and offline). He received his PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, and his bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and International Relations from Brown University.

Zalman Rothschild is Assistant Professor of Law and Horn Family Distinguished Research Scholar in Law and Religion at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He holds a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. from New York University. Previously, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, a law clerk to Judge Jane Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss. His scholarship has appeared in Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Law Review Forum, and Yale Law Journal Forum, and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

His popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. He has testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on religion and public schools. In 2023 and 2026, the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools awarded him the Harold Berman Award for Excellence in Scholarship. While in practice, he received the American Bar Association’s “On the Rise—Top 40 Young Lawyer” award.

Ali Watts, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the School of Counseling, Higher Education, Leadership & Foundations at Bowling Green State University. She teaches courses related to systemic inequities in higher education, socio-cultural foundations of U.S. colleges and universities, administration and governance, critical philanthropy studies, and legal issues in higher education and student affairs. Her recent research has focused on strategies for building resistance capital through reimagined approaches to shared governance, labor organizing, civic education, and play-based pedagogy. In particular, she is interested in destabilizing siloes within higher education organizations that inhibit coalition-building between academic, administrative, and student affairs educators—recognizing that surviving current attacks (and ‘dreamstorming’ a more just and liberatory future) likely requires a radical reconceptualization of the campus community and its politics of organization.

Ali holds a PhD in Higher Education from Penn State University, a master’s in Higher Education Administration from Boston University, a master’s in English literature/Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Georgia, and a bachelor’s in English Literature from Colgate University. Prior to pursuing faculty life, Ali spent over a decade working in graduate admissions, residential education, and leadership development. Across these roles, her work has remained committed to addressing racial equity gaps and epistemic injustices, as well as efforts to disrupt the ‘thoughtless university’ and the neoliberal press toward rote vocationalism.