Viret Family Faculty Leadership Fellows Program

The Viret Family Faculty Leadership Fellows Program provides faculty members considering a career in academic leadership with a variety of leadership development opportunities centered around a consequential project of importance to the University.

Designed for those aspiring to leadership positions as chairs, deans, provosts or other executive administrative careers, the Leadership Fellows program is a selective program that engages its participants in a process that is designed to develop leadership talent and skill through hands on experience.

A project oriented experience, the Viret Family Faculty Leadership Fellows program focuses on initiatives key to academic administration and executive leadership within the university setting. The Fellows’ projects align with and will advance Momentum, the University’s strategic plan.

The Viret Family Faculty Leadership Fellows program is built around an intensive semester long experience. The Fellows will participate in meetings and one on one discussions with a leadership mentor. They will also have access to professional development seminars and workshops and support to attend national conferences in their area of interest.

Learn about the generous endowment from Lionel Viret ’95

Fall 2021–Spring 2022 Fellows

Reem Khamis-Dakwar, PhD

Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Khamis-Dakwar’s Viret Fellowship work will focus on the future interprofessional education (IPE) mission and vision at Adelphi University. Members of the Adelphi community will be surveyed to report on 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 will be 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.

Kellyann Monaghan

Associate professor and chair of art and art history, College of Arts and Sciences

Lahney Preston-Matto, PhD

Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences

Monica Yang, PhD

Professor and chair of management, Robert B. Willumstad School of Business

Joint Viret Project: Dr. Preston-Matto’s project centers on faculty rewards—more specifically, faculty service and its role in earning tenure and promotion. She is developing clearer definitions of faculty service and criteria for assessing that service. Dr. Yang’s project focuses on service workload equity and particularly on putting in place the tools to make service workload more transparent and equitable. The goal is to help deans, chairs and individual faculty members effectively manage service assignments.

Fall 2019–Spring 2020 Fellows

Beverly Araujo, PhD

Professor, School of Social Work

CarolAnn Daniel, PhD

Professor, School of Social Work

Viret Project: Dr. Daniel 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.

Anthony Dotterman, PhD

Senior lecturer, General Studies, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Dotterman 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.

Margaret Gray, PhD

Associate professor and chair of political science, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Gray 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. Dr. Gray looks forward to resuming these workshops when she returns from sabbatical.

Eugenia Villa-Cuesta, PhD

Associate professor of biology, College of Arts and Sciences

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

Priya Wadhera, PhD

Associate professor and chair of languages, literatures and cultures, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Inspired in part by the National Humanities Alliance in Washington, D.C., Dr. Wadhera 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.

Spring 2019 Fellows

Elizabeth Palley, JD, PhD

Professor, School of Social Work

Viret Project: Dr. Palley helped to develop a new dean onboarding training.

Fall 2018 Fellows

Zachary Johnson, PhD

Interim associate dean for undergraduate students. Robert B.School of Business

Viret Project: As the “director of the Innovation Center launch,” Dr. Johnson 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).

Salvatore J. Petrilli ’05, EdD

Associate dean for academic operations and General Education, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Petrilli created a University-wide strategic plan for Intersession and summer sessions.

Spring 2018 Fellows

Dana Battaglia, PhD

Associate professor, Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences

Viret Project: The goal of Dr. Battaglia’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.

Rachel Isaac-Menard

Associate professor, University Libraries

Viret Project: Associate Professor Isaac-Menard 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.

Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo, PhD

Associate professor, College of Nursing and Public Health

Viret Project: Dr. Pajarillo 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. Adelphi’s ETS Onboarding will be piloted in Summer 2022 for a Fall 2022 launch.

Fall 2017 Fellows

Daryl Gordon, PhD

Associate professor, Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Gordon investigated international engagement at Adelphi University. To facilitate collaboration, she developed a mechanism to collect and share Adelphi faculty members’ international expertise. The information is available on the Adelphi website at adelphi.edu/faculty/profiles/international.

MaryAnne Hyland, PhD

Dean, Robert B. Willumstad School of Business

Viret Project: The purpose of Dr. Hyland’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.

Spring 2017 Fellows

Diann Cameron-Kelly, PhD

Associate provost for Student Success, Office of the Provost

Viret Project: Dr. Cameron Kelly evaluated the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs and performed a comparative analysis with similar departments at 10 other universities.

Jacqueline Jones LaMon, JD

Vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion

Viret Project: LaMon, while exploring Adelphi’s formal Mentoring Program, discovered numerous other instances of mentoring taking place on campus. In so doing, she strengthened the University’s reputation for mentoring (later rewarded by a 2019 Encoura Innovation Award honoring Adelphi’s formal Mentoring Program).

Andrea Ward, PhD

Associate dean for student success strategic initiatives, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Ward focused on examining the organization of health-related majors at Adelphi. In addition, she developed a framework for an undergraduate major in Health Sciences.