Category: Programs

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 Ph.D. 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.

Susan Balter-Reitz is a Professor of Communication at Montana State University Billings. Balter-Reitz has been studying the limits of the First Amendment for the last three decades, and she has published broadly on issues related to Freedom of Expression. Her work is informed by argumentation theory and conceptions of the public. Balter-Reitz has twice been nominated for the Franklyn Haiman award given by the National Communication Association to honor distinguished scholarship in Freedom of Expression; the work she collaborated on with Michael Bruner won this award in 2015.

Michael Lane Bruner (a.k.a. M. Lane Bruner), formerly at Georgia State University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is a retired Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy with a well-established reputation for research in freedom of speech and civic engagement. Bruner’s work, spanning more than three decades, focuses in part on legal rulings and legislation that appear on the surface to protect and expand free speech and citizen engagement that in fact undermine the very public reason upon which sound legal and policy decisions are based. Bruner regularly consults on policy development and communication with policy professionals at the city, county, and state levels.

Over the last decade, Balter-Reitz and Bruner have been concerned with the attacks on public colleges and universities under the guise of protecting free expression. Examples include their 2011-2012 work, on the Westboro Baptist Church’s influence on Supreme Court rulings related to free speech and public spectacle, their 2016-2017 research on the cynical manipulation of university free speech rules by provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulous, and their most recent work on the passage of FORUM Acts in the United States.

D. Chase J. Catalano served as an assistant professor at Western Illinois University in the College Student Personnel Program for four years prior to coming to Virginia Tech. Chase’s previous student affairs work includes positions in fraternity and sorority life, residence life, and admissions. Prior to his faculty position, he served as the director of the LGBT Resources Center at Syracuse University for five years.

Chase identifies as a trans scholar; he identifies as trans masculine and studies trans identities and experiences in higher education. His research and publications address topics of trans(*)ness, social justice, queerness, and masculinities. Chase is an ACPA Emerging Scholar (class of 2018) and is also the program leader for the Ph.D. program in Higher Education.

He is a co-editor for Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, 4th edition (Routledge, 2018) and co-author and co-editor of Gender-Aware Practices: Intersectional Approaches to Applying Masculinities in Student Affairs (New Directions for Student Services). Beyond his various book chapters, he published articles in Equity & Excellence in Education, Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), and Journal for Diversity in Higher Education.

Anna Chang, MD is a physician in geriatric and palliative medicine and professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. She is director of the Clinical Microsystems Clerkship, a course for early medical students on foundational clinical skills and health systems improvement. Dr. Chang directs Tideswell Emerging Leaders in Aging, a leadership development program for those who lead programs to improve the lives of older adults in the U.S.

Calvin Chou, MD, PhD is a practicing general internist and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. As faculty with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare (ACH), he is recognized internationally for leading workshops in relationship-centered communication, feedback, conflict, and remediation in health professions education. He is co-editor of the books Remediation in Medical Education: A Midcourse Correction, and Communication Rx: Transforming Healthcare Through Relationship-Centered Communication.

Margaret (Meg) McNamara, MD is a general pediatrician with over 30 years of experience and professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco. She is recent program director of the UCSF pediatric residency, and past chair of the national Association of Pediatric Program Directors executive committee. She is committed to training the next generation of pediatricians to advance the clinical care of children and scientific research to benefit children’s health.

Antonio Duran (he/him/él) is an associate professor of higher and postsecondary education in The Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. His research broadly examines how historical and contemporary legacies of oppression influence college student development, experiences, and success at institutions of higher education (especially historically white institutions [HWIs] and Hispanic-serving institutions [HSIs]). Connected to this central thread, he is also interested in how scholar-practitioners use the above knowledge in their practice. He primarily uses critical frameworks (e.g., intersectionality, queer of color critique, quare theory, jotería studies) to complicate the field’s understanding of racism, heterosexism, trans oppression, and other forms of marginalization on college campuses.

Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, Duran found a love for higher education during his years as an undergraduate student at New York University. It was at NYU that he first encountered questions of what it meant to be a first-generation queer Latino cisgender man in educational settings and in society broadly. He discovered that educators could create environments for students to explore who they were and to learn how they can contribute to a more socially just world. After his time at NYU, he was lucky to receive his master's degree in student affairs in higher education from Miami University and his doctorate in higher education and student affairs from The Ohio State University.

Bryan Gentry is a communications director at the University of South Carolina with more than 15 years of experience in higher education communications and marketing. He worked at two private colleges in Virginia before joining South Carolina's flagship university. He has worked on award-winning projects including a viewbook that received a national CASE Circle of Excellence Award and a brand video that received three Telly Awards. As chair of the Heterodox Academy Campus Community at the University of South Carolina, he organizes speaker events and other programs to foster a culture of constructive dialogue, free speech and academic freedom. He has presented at the Heterodox Academy national conference and is a contributing writer to the Open Inquiry initiative of Discourse Magazine.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Southern Virginia University and a master's in business administration from the University of Lynchburg. Prior to his work in higher education, he was a reporter for daily newspapers in Virginia and North Carolina.

Catherine Hartman is an Assistant Professor of Community College Leadership and Faculty Scholar at the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research. Catherine’s research focuses on community college student persistence and engagement, community college student transfer to four-year schools, and community college leadership. Prior to joining NC State, Catherine worked at the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. She has also held appointments at the Center for Community College Student Engagement, the Charles A. Dana Center, and William & Mary.

Catherine earned associate degrees in liberal arts and social sciences from Tidewater Community College as well as a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Master of Education in Higher Education Administration from William & Mary. She also received a Ph.D. in Higher Education Leadership and Policy from The University of Texas at Austin.

Afshan Jafar’s research and teaching interests include globalization, transnational women's movements, the Muslim diaspora, gender, media, and the body. Professor Jafar regularly teaches, Introduction to Sociology; Gender, Culture, and the Body; Sex Gender, and Society; Sociology of Globalization.

Professor Jafar was the 2021 recipient of the Helen B. Regan Faculty Leadership Award. The award recognizes “faculty members who exemplify the College's commitment to shared governance, democratic process and campus community development.” She was the 2015 recipient of the Feminist Activism Award presented by Sociologists for Women in Society. She was also the 2014 recipient of the the Helen Mulvey Faculty Award at Connecticut College presented to an assistant professor who “regularly offers classes that challenge students to work harder than they thought they could and to reach unanticipated levels of academic achievement”.

She is the author of “Women’s NGOs in Pakistan” (2011) and the co-editor of (with Erynn Masi de Casanova) of "Global Beauty, Local Bodies" (2013) and "Bodies Without Borders" (2013). Her scholarship has appeared in Teaching Sociology, Gender & Society, Social Problems, Academe, and Gender Issues. Her public scholarship has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Review of Books, Inside Higher Ed, and Ms. Magazine, among others.

Dr. Mohebali is a material scientist, educator, and humanist. His interdisciplinary research broadly focuses on social justice in education and decolonization. Originally from Iran, he studies how systems of oppression operate locally, nationally, and globally through higher education with the goal of disrupting dynamics of power across contexts. Milad draws from a wide range of methodologies, data sources, and theoretical perspectives in his three strands of research:1) He examines how racism and coloniality function in higher education as an institution. He approaches this work by drawing and contributing to the sociology of higher education. 2) He investigates the experiences of material hardship and precarity among college students with the goal of informing policy and practice. 3) He studies difficult dialogues around systems of oppression and how such dialogue can create belonging beyond colonized ways of being.

Elif Yucel, PhD, supports the learning and evaluation efforts that inform the Foundation’s grantmaking and advance our commitment to sharing knowledge internally and with the field. Prior to joining ECMC Foundation, Elif worked in higher education for over a decade, holding roles in college advising, student services and prison education. Elif holds a PhD in Urban Education Policy from the University of Southern California, where her dissertation examined reentry programs and support for formerly incarcerated students on community college campuses and the role these programs play in the reentry and higher education landscapes. Her research has also examined equity issues facing community colleges and higher education policy, with an explicit focus on transfer, developmental education and access and completion for justice-impacted students.

Elif holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy and Planning from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Chinese from Trinity University.