Anna Errore, Information Systems and Operations Management, Goizueta

Anna Errore is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Information Systems and Operations Management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. She currently teaches Data and Decisions Analytics to undergraduate students. Anna holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration (area of Supply Chain and Operations, with a minor in Statistics) from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. She also holds a previous Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Palermo, Italy. Her research gravitates at the intersection of Statistics, Management Science, and Engineering. Anna’s research focuses on methodological developments for applications of advanced statistical tools for quality improvement and operations management. Specifically, her work is mainly focused on Experimental Design theory and applications. She is also an ASQ-certified Six Sigma Black Belt. Anna is interested in both teaching and research in Data Analytics, broadly defined and applied to different domains. She has previously taught Business Statistics and has been a graduate teaching assistant for many related courses for undergraduates, MBAs, and Executive MBAs on subjects of Data Analytics and Operations Management at the Carlson School of Management.

“In my project, ‘Teaching inclusively for diverse abilities,’ I will focus on inclusive pedagogies that specifically address diversity and inclusiveness for students with all types of diverse abilities. Both visible and invisible disabilities, involving physical or mental health, affect many of our students’ lives, and their academic paths. As educators, we can go beyond reasonable accommodations and find small strategies and actions to accomplish inclusiveness to diverse abilities, in ways that make everyone feel better about themselves. The focus can be on everyone’s uniqueness and strengths, rather than limitations and impairments, emphasizing more the core competencies that we are teaching in the specific fields/domains and making sure that the diverse abilities are essentially perceived less like disabilities and more like different characteristics of every person, but don’t define them as any less than anyone else.”

Devon Goss, Sociology, Oxford College

Devon Goss is a sociologist specializing in the areas of race and ethnicity, the family, and sports. She completed her PhD in 2018 at the University of Connecticut in Sociology with a graduate certificate in Feminist Studies. Much of her research centers on the experiences of those who cross racial boundaries. Her co-authored book with SunAh Laybourn, Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations: Breaking the Line (2018), explored non-black members of African American sororities and fraternities. Previously, she documented the impact of racial ideology on members of transracial families, the experiences of white students who attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the racial motivations of white expats in Mexico. Beyond sociology, she enjoys gymnastics, listening to podcasts, and playing with her pugs, Gigi and Bridget.

“I intend on using the DEI Teaching Fellowship to innovate my coursework and curriculum to reflect racial diversity outside of the white/non-white binary. As a sociologist of race and ethnicity, much of my original training has focused on the differences in opportunities and outcomes between white individuals and people of color. I aim to use the fellowship to add more course content, assignments, and activities that better reflect the diversity of racial groups that I teach at Oxford College, including Asian, Latinx, and Native American racial groups.”

Jennifer Grant, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, SOM

Jennifer Grant graduated from Emory University with an MD/PhD after completing her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where she worked on an honors thesis exploring social and structural causes of severe respiratory illness in Jamaican children with the Jamaica Ministry of Health. She has demonstrated a strong commitment to research, and her doctoral dissertation was entitled, Trends in HPV Vaccination of US Adolescent Females: How Policies, Education, and Health Care Providers Influence Immunization Rates. She also has worked on projects at Emory exploring HIV/AIDS ambulatory healthcare by Black women in the South and a project at Georgia Tech working on a simulation model of hospital-acquired infection transmission in neonatal intensive care units. Her work has been published in AIDS Care and The International Journal of Health Services.

“Through the CFDE Diversity Fellowship, I hope to develop a Diversity, inclusion, and social justice case conference series open to faculty and trainees, in partnership with the Diversity Inclusion and Social Justice committee (DISC). The series would utilize patient case presentations to highlight specific topics related to community psychiatry and health equity. The case conference format would highlight the role of social structures in patient presentation, disease progression, and treatment outcomes. Such a format can also foster engagement and discussion through which participants can learn from each other’s experiences and backgrounds. Potential topics, based on the American Association for Community Psychiatry model curriculum, including:

• Cultural Competency
• Structural Competency- the policies, economic systems, and other institutions (judicial system, schools, etc.) that have produced and maintain modern social inequities as well as health disparities, often along the lines of social categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality.
• Social Justice and Mental Health
• Racism and Mental Health
• Poverty and Mental Illness
• Housing & Homelessness
• Criminalization of People with Mental Illness-
• The Recovery Model
• Inpatient Flow & Discharge Planning- factors for high utilization of psychiatric services, along with potential interventions that reduce readmissions.“

Alex Grizzell, Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology, ECAS

Alex Grizzell is a recently minted Assistant Teaching Professor in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program in Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences, having joined in Fall 2022. That said, Alex’s decision to shift to a fifteen-year research neuroscience career from his plans to pursue clinical psychology began at Emory University Hospital in 2007 when his father was approved for a disability-funded brain surgery to treat his intractable epilepsy. As a first-gen college student at the time, Alex helped his family understand and navigate the decision to continue with his father’s surgery; in doing so, Alex also found inspiration from Emory students and physicians to not only learn but teach neuroscience. Since that time, Alex has conducted research on an array of behavioral neuroscience topics focused primarily on the neural substrates of emotion, motivation, and stress resilience, particularly with a focus on prefrontal cortical- and amygdala-based circuitry. He also conducts pedagogy-centered research related to open education resources and equitable teaching/learning practices in neuroscience classrooms and laboratories. Alex’s PhD in Neuroscience and Behavior comes from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and he completed his postdoctoral research at The University of Colorado, Boulder. He has also led research efforts at the Bay Pines Veterans Affairs Hospital in Bay Pines, Florida, and at the Morsani College of Medicine at The University of South Florida. At Emory, Alex teaches Behavioral Neuroscience, Advanced Topics in Neuroscience, and is developing a class on Neurodiversity as well as Responsible Communication in Neuroscience. Alex also openly identifies as neurodivergent and welcomes discourse with students on navigating college, academia, and life in general with such differences.

“As a CFDE DEI Fellow, I am eager to help update our understanding of what constitutes “neurodivergence” in the post-pandemic era and how best to make our classrooms more accessible for neurodiverse populations. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, estimates suggested that as many as 1 in 6 college freshman could have a diagnosable neurodivergent condition such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Dyslexia (among others). However, the stresses associated with the pandemic forced many (particularly among affluent communities) to pursue added supports. As a result, diagnoses of these conditions have skyrocketed among children, college students, and adults. Critically though, many intersecting challenges make it hard for some people to obtain diagnosis and students with neurodivergent conditions may present in many different ways and with many different challenges. Furthermore, many highly intelligent students may remain unaware or in denial of their own neurodivergence due to compensatory and unconscious abilities to mask their challenges. While this may collectively seem daunting for caring educators to address, I hope to also encourage fellow faculty to embrace principles of Universal Design Learning and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, among others, to make our learning environments accessible for all students, regardless of their individual learning abilities.”

Harshita Kamath, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, ECAS

Harshita Kamath is the Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and a faculty member in the Graduate Division of Religion. Her graduate and undergraduate courses, like her research, foreground intersectional approaches to caste and gender, embodied learning, and theoretical discourses on gender, sexuality, and performance order to create an interdisciplinary and creative teaching environment for engaging South Asia.

“As a CFDE Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Teaching Fellow Program, I plan to develop a series of workshops on caste and caste-based discrimination at Emory. In Fall 2023, I plan to teach a course on caste that will include developing materials for teach-ins on caste and also an exhibition on caste at the Woodruff Library.”

Christina Lee, Mathematics, Oxford College

Christina Lee is an Associate Teaching Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the Mathematics Center at Oxford College. Her research focus is in Computational Neuroscience, more specifically voltage pattern formation in an excitable neuronal network. Christina is passionate about improving diversity and inclusion in mathematical classes.

“My colleague Simba Nkomo and I completed the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project facilitators training in Summer 2022 (https://www.inclusivestemteaching.org/). The training was informative in both the subject of DEI in the STEM classroom and the organization and documentation necessary to have a reproduceable workshop. By participating in the DEI Teaching Fellows program, I hope to learn more about creating and sustaining an inclusive learning environment and facilitate meaningful conversations on our campus and beyond that encourage more of our faculty to make their own adjustments in the classroom as it relates to STEM.”

Simba Nkomo, Chemistry, Oxford College

Simba Nkomo is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. His research interests include synchronization behavior in networks of coupled chemical oscillators as well as science education. He has taught Introductory Chemistry courses as well as Structures and Properties, Principles of Reactivity, and Light and Matter.

“My colleague Christina Lee and I completed the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project facilitators training in Summer 2022 (https://www.inclusivestemteaching.org/). The training was informative in both the subject of DEI in the STEM classroom and the organization and documentation necessary to have a reproduceable workshop. By participating in the DEI Teaching Fellows program, we hope to learn more about creating and sustaining an inclusive learning environment and facilitate meaningful conversations on our campus and beyond that encourage more of our faculty to make their own adjustments in the classroom as it relates to STEM. I would like to increase diversity in undergraduate STEM research participation of first-generation students, underrepresented minorities, and students coming into college with no prior STEM research experience.:

Alix Lindsey Olson, WGSS, Oxford College

Alix Lindsey Olson is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oxford College of Emory University, and is co-director of Emory University’s Studies in Sexualities program. Alix’s book The Terms of Resistance: Doing and Undoing Democracy will be published by Columbia University Press in early 2024. Her articles and book chapters have appeared in The Journal for a New Political Science, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, and Contemporary Political Theory, and in a range of scholarly collections. Olson has been a member of the 2020 Arts and Social Justice Fellowship faculty cohort, and the 2019 CFDE Teaching Fellowship. Olson has received Oxford’s Mizell Award for excellence in teaching-service, as well as the Emory Center for Women’s 2022 “Feminist Pedagogy” award. Prior to Olson’s academic life, she toured internationally as a spoken word poet, and this work has been featured in media outlets like HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Air America (with Rachel Maddow), NPR, and, most recently, Showtime’s The L Word: Generation Q.

“Through this fellowship, I will be examining literature on “Decolonizing Gender Studies,” and developing a running bibliography to share with colleagues (both at Emory and beyond). Some initial questions I am interested in pursuing are the following: Is it possible to avoid the deployment of “decolonize” as a “metaphor” (Tuck & Yang, 2012), while engaging it as a commitment in our pedagogy? Beyond choice of texts, what aspects of our syllabi (learning objectives, expectations, and modes of assessment) need to be revamped or reimagined in order to effectively decolonize our overall course architecture? How does the work of decolonizing syllabi overlap with projects to decolonize the academy, more broadly? And perhaps most importantly, what are the conversations we need to be having with our students, even as we are grappling with these questions ourselves? Ultimately, my aim is that the journey I undertake as part of this fellowship might also support other instructors moved to interrogate the dominant colonial epistemologies and methodologies in their fields. I will be eager to share my inquiries, findings, and struggles, and to facilitate professional gatherings in which we can collectively probe this ongoing and vital work.”

Angela Porcarelli, Department of French and Italian, ECAS

Angela Porcarelli is an Associate Teaching Professor of Italian in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. Her research focuses on early modern theories and literary expressions of comedy, particularly in the genre of the beffa and its tradition established in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Additionally, she explores the interplay between cultural processes and spatial forms in shaping the identity of Italian cities. She co-edited (with Andrea Scapolo) the volume Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures (Amsterdam University Press, 2022).

Angela has expertise in Italian film studies and has published on the cinema of Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. She contributed chapters to Pier Paolo Pasolini: In Living Memory (ed. M. Bergonzoni and B. Lawton, New Academia Publishing, 2008) and Il cinema di Marco Tullio Giordana: Interventi critici (ed. F. Colleoni, E. Dalla Torre and I. Lanslots, Vecchiarelli, 2014) on the subject of realism and meta-representation in Pasolini’s cinema. In fall 2022, she curated the exhibition “Fellini and Fantasy” hosted by the Carlos Museum of Emory University.

Angela is also interested in translation theories and practices, having translated a selection of short stories from Federigo Tozzi’s collection Bestie into English for the Journal of Italian Translation (Fall 2022), and is currently working on translating selected poems by American poet and activist Juan Felipe Herrera into Italian.

My project is to examine underrepresented themes, authors, and ideas in the Italian canon, as well as to re-evaluate the canon from new perspectives. I would like to approach the field of Italian Studies from a transnational/transcultural viewpoint and examine how cultural identities, such as race, gender, sexuality, and religion, have evolved over time and across various geographical regions. Potential topics to examine include African-Italian studies, Italian colonialism, Arab-Italian Studies, Asian-Italian Studies, immigration in Italy, the Italian diaspora, race and racism in Italy, southern Italy, and the experiences of “new” Italians.

Tehila Sasson, History, ECAS

Tehila Sasson is an assistant professor of history of the British empire and decolonization at Emory University with a particular interest in the history of economic life.

“The central question that drives my research is how empire shaped Britain during and after decolonization, and how it structured economic inequalities in both postimperial Britain and its former colonial territories.”

Cristy Tower-Gilchrist, School of Nursing

Cristy Tower-Gilchrist is an Assistant Professor, Clinical Track, the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. She earned her PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and completed post-doctoral training as a FIRST IRACDA Fellow at Emory University. Tower-Gilchrist joined the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing (SON) as Clinical Teaching Faculty and serve as the Liaison for the SON-Oxford pipeline and Prerequisite Coordinator.

With the increasing number of students applying to nursing school, there is a need to ensure that we are meeting the needs of all students. We as a people do not all think and learn the same. My project focuses on developing best practices to accommodate neurodiversity in the nursing classroom.