Viret Family Faculty Leadership Fellows

Viret Project: Esther Kogan, EdD plans to pilot the BLUE Committee (Bridging Learning, Understanding, and Ethical Practice) to strengthen how we assess teacher candidates beyond academic qualifications. This initiative focuses on evaluating key professional dispositions—such as responsibility, collaboration, empathy, and resilience—through consistent, data-driven frameworks. By advancing this work, we are ensuring that our candidates are not only strong scholars but also well-prepared, ethical, and resilient educators.

Viret Project: Hariklia Proios, PhD will explore the needs and wants of stroke survivor organizations from across the United States by working with colleagues within the Adelphi and global community. This work will address disparities including brain health resources, care and community engagement, and will focus on how to strengthen knowledge-sharing, advocacy, and support for survivors and caregivers by bringing together national SSOs, industry partners and advocates.

Viret Project: Aaren Freeman, PhD will work to integrate campus sustainability with the Environmental Studies and Sciences Department, renew efforts with the STARS program, and reconstitute the Sustainability Council to support the Sustainability Officer in campus-wide efforts.

Viret Project: Telvis M. Rich, PhD’s project involves exploring ways to strengthen the recruitment and retention of students of color and to increase workplace diversity. Dr. Rich will look into ways to enhance the recruitment and retention of faculty and students of color, with a focus on Black faculty and students, and to contribute to the promotion of the University’s strategic plan and mission. His current research centers on workplace diversity, engagement and inclusion among students and full-time and adjunct faculty.

Viret Project: Margaret Cassidy, PhD’s project focuses on high-impact student experiences, curricular and extracurricular, and the extent to which students participate in these activities. Given that these types of experiences—such as independent research and creative projects, study abroad, relationships with professors and mentors, experiential learning opportunities and participation in extracurricular activities, internships and on-campus employment—are central components of student persistence to graduation and life satisfaction after graduation, this project aims to increase both campus-wide awareness of high-impact opportunities and knowledge about how to leverage those opportunities.

Viret Project: As her project, Tandra Chakraborty, PhD planned to spearhead efforts to enhance Adelphi’s academic structure, advocating for an inclusive, supportive and accessible online learning environment that’s geared to the University’s diverse student body and seamlessly aligned with the Momentum 2 strategic plan.

Viret Project: Geoffrey Ream, PhD’s project involves a total rewrite of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) manual, revising policies and procedures to conform to the 2018 version of the federal Common Rule and adapting to the realities of post-COVID research. Time permitting, he will also conduct a needs assessment around faculty research support.

Viret Project: Reem Khamis-Dakwar, PhD’s Viret fellowship work focuses on the future interprofessional education (IPE) mission and vision at Adelphi University. Members of the Adelphi community were surveyed about their current IPE activities and partnerships at Adelphi, their perspectives toward IPE and specific needs to facilitate transformation of the teaching and learning at Adelphi, to become more interprofessional in nature. Strength, weakness, opportunities and threats were identified, based on the input from the community, and then used to develop a suggested action plan for structural transformations to increase IPE activity at the University.

Viret Project: Kellyann Monaghan’s project examines ways to integrate the arts and culture more fully into campus life, inspired in many ways by her leadership of the University’s annual Fall Arts Festival. She is exploring ways to incorporate art and art history classes into other disciplines, develop Adelphi’s art and art history department into a cultural center for the campus as well as the surrounding community, and partner with the community for experiential arts learning opportunities for Adelphi students.

Joint Viret Project: Drs. Monica Yang, PhD and Lahney Preston-Matto, PhD’s project centers on faculty service. Drs. Preston-Matto’s research focuses on faculty service and its role in earning tenure and promotion. She is developing clearer definitions of faculty service and criteria for assessing that service.

Joint Viret Project: Drs. Monica Yang, PhD and Lahney Preston-Matto, PhD’s project centers on faculty service. Dr. Yang’s project focused on service workload equity and particularly on putting in place the tools to make service workload more transparent and equitable. Their joint project’s goal isto help deans, chairs and individual faculty members effectively manage service assignments.

Viret Project: Beverly Araujo Dawson, PhDis a Professor in the School of Social Work at Adelphi University and the Program Director of the Online MSW Program. She received her doctoral and master’s degree from the University of Michigan and a BA in Psychology from Hunter College. Her research focuses on the social determinants of well-being, as well as culturally-based protective factors among first and second-generation Latino/a families. More specifically, her work examines the impact of discrimination, racial identity, and acculturation on the mental health of Latino/as. Another area of her research focuses on social work pedagogy in online social work learning environments.

Viret Project: CarolAnn Daniel, PhD, a professor in the School of Social Work when she participated in the Viret fellowship, focused on creating a central structure to provide all junior faculty with a network of mentors. She also developed a mentoring curriculum to enhance mentor/mentee competencies.

Viret Project: Anthony Dotterman, PhD focused on first year-learning communities and retention. In particular, he explored how the General Studies Learning Community could potentially align curriculum, faculty and administrative resources to support interdisciplinary teaching and a “meta-majors” advisement model through General Education as a way to encourage student engagement and retention.

Viret Project: Margaret Gray, PhD established a program called Faculty Productivity, which currently includes three workshops with advice for faculty pursuing their scholarly or creative work. These workshops were held through the Faculty Center for Professional Excellence (FCPE) in Spring 2020, Fall 2021 and Fall 2022.

In addition, similar workshops were presented during faculty orientations in August 2020, a College of Arts and Sciences adjunct workshop, and FCPE workshops in January 2020 and 2021 for faculty submitting for review or promotion.

Viret Project: During her time as a Viret Fellow, Eugenia Villa-Cuesta, PhD worked on strengthening inclusive pedagogy in STEM at Adelphi University in support of faculty and students.

Viret Project: Inspired in part by the National Humanities Alliance in Washington, D.C., Priya Wadhera, PhD sought to establish a Humanities Alliance at Adelphi University to fortify connections between and among faculty in the humanities. The goal: Make faculty feel more interconnected and students find their studies in our fields even more enjoyable, valuable and purposeful.

Viret Project: Elizabeth Palley, JD, PhD helped to develop onboarding training for new deans.

Viret Project: As the director of Adelphi’s Innovation Center launch, Zachary Johnson, PhD authored a detailed business plan based on interviews with 50-plus faculty members. From this, he built project charters and service level agreements (SLAs) and crafted an approach for experiential learning that would lead to enriching experiences for students while also generating revenue for the University. Via a collaboration with Adelphi’s Office of University Advancement and External Relations, he secured a $135,000 grant from Jovia Financial as proof of concept for the center. He was also a project co-sponsor of the Innovation Center construction project and co-led the planning and delivery of a design-thinking conference that included 100-plus attendees (industry and faculty).

Viret Project: Salvatore J. Petrilli ’05, EdD, who was an associate professor and chair of the mathematics and computer science department, created a University-wide strategic plan for Intersession and summer sessions.

Viret Project: The goal of Dana Battaglia, PhD’s project was to see if, and how, other departments were engaging undergraduate students in research. Recommendations were offered to streamline more equitable processes across Adelphi University.

Viret Project: Rachel Isaac-Menard, PhD analyzed how Adelphi Libraries could more effectively support distance and online students in blended and online courses and programs. Her project concluded by identifying priorities for Adelphi Libraries and led to Adelphi establishing her current role as distance education coordinator.

Viret Project: Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo, PhD chose to pilot a Graduate Student Onboarding-Professional Development Program (GSO-PDP) project. This was a four-week onboarding intensive consisting of a module per week that was built into the Informatics for Advanced Nursing Practice course for incoming graduate students. The modules consisted of correctly accessing and researching databases and evidence-based sites and reviewing the writing of a thesis. This project came about after he noticed the wide disparity in educational, technological, research and professional experiences that graduate students bring to higher education. The goal of the GSO-PDP: Level the playing field among all incoming students. Dr. Pajarillo piloted this for the first cohort in Fall 2019 and conducted an evaluation during the last semester. He has established a multidisciplinary team to improve the onboarding process (incorporating students’ and faculty suggestions) and called it Equitable, Targeted and Specific (ETS) Onboarding.

Viret Project: Daryl Gordon, PhD investigated international engagement at Adelphi University. To facilitate collaboration, she developed a mechanism to collect and share Adelphi faculty members’ international expertise. A map showing faculty members’ international connections is available online.

Viret Project: The purpose of MaryAnne Hyland, PhD’s project was to provide resources for department chairs in order to create consistency and best practices for hiring and working with part-time faculty.

Viret Project: An associate professor of social work and chair of the BSW program at the time she participated in the Viret Fellowship, Diann Cameron-Kelly, PhD compared Adelphi’s sponsored research program—which helps faculty members find funding and manage aspects of their projects—with those at 12 other universities. She later served as interim dean of the School of Social Work program and was the associate provost for student success in the Office of the Provost. She was named a 2022-2023 ACE Fellow by the American Council on Education, one of only 46 leaders nationwide chosen for the organization’s intensive mentorship program.

Viret Project: Jacqueline Jones LaMon, JD was a professor in the English department when she became a member of the inaugural group of fellows in Spring 2017. In exploring Adelphi’s formal mentoring program, she discovered numerous other instances of mentoring taking place on campus. In doing so, she strengthened the University’s reputation for mentoring, highlighted by a 2019 Encoura Innovation Award honoring Adelphi’s formal mentoring program. She became an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and in December 2019 was named the University’s vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Viret Project: Andrea Ward, PhD was a member of the biology faculty when she entered the Viret program. Her project focused on examining the organization of health-related majors at Adelphi and studied how Adelphi might establish a new health degree, which led to the launch of the University’s Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences in Fall 2020. Following the fellowship, Dr. Ward became the associate dean for student success and strategic initiatives in the College of Arts and Sciences before being named to her current role.