Faculty News

F ACULT y N EWS

The 2021 Council for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC) invited Dr. Duane Brooks to present “Student Engagement is Half the Story: A Case Study to Account for Institutional Engagement as a Complex Adaptive System for Assessment.”

Dr. Mark J. Hager (right) has pivoted his research with the pandemic. He recently collaborated with Dr. Julie Weitlauf on a series of cyber-seminars for the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Health Services Research & Development. His launch session was “Coping through Covid-19: Mentoring Needs of Early Career Clinician Researchers in VA,” which was followed by “Career Shock: An Explanatory Framework for the Impact of Covid-19 on Research Careers.” Drs. Hager and Weitlauf also served as discussants for Veterans Affairs leaders helping junior researchers manage their research careers during the pandemic.

Offered for the first time at Menlo College this coming fall semester, Board Trustee and Adjunct Professor of Management Helene Kim will teach “The Role of Blockchain in Business Model Innovation.” This new course will cover topics related to blockchain and cryptocurrency, and it will explore how the rise of digital assets is transforming financial services and other global industries. The course will give a leg up to students who will be pursuing a range of careers, including technology management, analytics, financial services, risk compliance, and emerging digital asset investment industries.

Provost Grande Lum (left) was the featured speaker at the Cambridge Negotiation Institute’s roundtable discussion: “Bridging and Healing Across Racial Divides Post-Election 2020: The Role of Conflict Resolution.” Interest in the new book he co-authored, America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights led to numerous speaking engagements, including at the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and at Peace Week, sponsored by the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.

Dr. Marianne Marar recently developed the Equity & Justice Studies (EJS) minor, which is aimed at fostering students’ development and/or reclaiming of dignity and agency. Dr. Marar and Dr. Sean Pradhan continue to merge social justice and sports management in their research with conference presentations such as “Bought, Traded and Sold: A Closer Look at Black Players and the Liberty Principle in the National Football League (NFL)” and “Interception! Sports Fans’ Responses to Social Justice in the National Football League (NFL).” “Is Baseball Going Soft? Perceptions of Womxn General Managers in Major League Baseball,” with Aaron Flores ’20 and Courtney Cooper ’21, was presented at the Annual Western Psychological Association (WPA) Convention. Dr. Marar was also recently invited to speak on a panel entitled Intersections of Discrimination, Religion and Civil Rights in a Variety of Contexts for the Massachusetts Fair Housing and Civil Rights Conference (FHCRC).

Dr. Margaret McFarland has joined the Board of Advisors of CREO Design, LLC, a green tech company based in Sausalito, CA. CREO has several products in concept stage, the most promising of which is BioBulb, scheduled for its first commercial installation later this year. The company is an early stage start-up that combines artificial intelligence for collecting nutrient, water and light needs

of indoor plants, with indoor installations in commercial and residential properties that integrate nature with buildings for healthier air. A focus is to advance a Wellness Wall for commercial buildings at substantially lower operating and plant costs than current green wall installations. She also serves as an advisor to the Executive Director of the American Real Estate Society on legal matters in connection with the unwinding of conference and hotel arrangements upended by the pandemic.

The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics published the master’s thesis written by Menlo’s mathematics lecturer Jessica Mean. “Peer Motivation: Getting Through Math Together” portrays peers as effective motivators for college-level math students.

Dr. Lisa Mendelman has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Research Fellowship by The Huntington Library to further her new book project, Diagnosing Desire: Mental Health and Modern American Literature, 1890-1955. She will be one of only ten NEH fellows in 2021-22 (reflecting the highly competitive nature of the program, just 6.5% of applicants were awarded a fellowship). In addition, Professor Mendelman’s article on contemporary discussions of feminist fiction, “The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: Computational Analysis of Literary Critical, Prestige Review, Social, and Corporate Discourses,” was accepted to the top digital humanities journal, The Journal of Cultural Analytics.

Dean of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Political Science Melissa Michelson (left) published two op-eds in the Washington Post in January 2021. In February 2021, her 2020 blog post “Teaching the Power of Local Political Participation” was published in Political Science Today (the post noted the participation of students Victor Garcia ’21 and Rasmia Shuman ’21). Also during the spring semester, Michelson had two articles accepted for publication: “Disbanding the Old Boys’ Club: Strategies for Departmental Gender Equity: (in PS: Political Science and Politics) and “De Gota a Gota: Persistent Activism of Millennial Latino Immigrants in the Trump Era” (Aztlan); received a grant from the Foundation for Civic Leadership for an evaluation of the national get-out-the-vote initiative known as Ask Every Student; and was quoted extensively in the media, including KTVU, the SF Chronicle, The Hill, and outlets in Chile and Denmark.

Dean of Student Affairs La’Tonya (LT) Rease Miles (right) is one of three editors readying a book for publication about the contributions of frontline campus workers to the retention, sense of belonging, and empowerment of first-generation college students. Through case studies, testimonials, and interviews, the collection will highlight the myriad benefits of relationships between campus service staff and first-generation college students.

Only 16% of the submissions to the Academic Libraries Management Association for presentation at their annual meeting were selected; one of those was “The Lived Experiences of (BI)POC Women Academic Library Deans/Administrators,” which was proposed by Dean of Library Services Valeria Molteni.

F ACULT y N EWS

Dr. Lakiba Pittman launched a series of talks on compassion and compassion cultivation for the Stanford School of Medicine, sponsored by the Pediatric Advocacy Coalition as part of their efforts to promote consciousness and awareness of the effects of racism and social justice issues on their clients and within their work environment. She also presented a “Compassion in Society” series with Thupten Jinpa, founder of the Compassion Institute, and the principal English translator to H.H. the Dalai Lama.

Professor Melissa Poulsen was asked to present “Citizen of Nowhere, Citizen of the World: Imagining Belonging in Asian Mixed-Race Literature,” at the Association of Asian American Studies’ annual conference.

Vice President for Student Success Angela Schmiede (right) was interviewed by Zippia for the article “Experts Weigh in on Current Job Market Trends.” Zippia heralded the article as a compendium of expert opinions on what aspiring graduates can do to start off their careers in an uncertain economic climate.

Business School Dean Mouwafac Sidaoui (left) was interviewed at length in five televised programs in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The interviews covered the hyflex classrooms we have deployed at Menlo, how we’re delivering curriculum during Covid-19, and mechanisms for innovation in bridging the gap between higher education and industry. Dean Sidaoui was also invited by the UAE government to speak at the Middle East EV Charging Infratech Summit, where the discussion focused on infrastructure innovations and profitable strategies for a cleaner and more sustainable future in the Middle East.

The winter 2020 issue of this magazine announced the formation of the new Rendanheyi Silicon Valley Center @ Menlo College (page 21) under the directorship of Dr. Annika Steiber. The new Center has developed a unique portfolio of seven business courses, starting with “Winning in the Digital Age – Leadership for the Twenty-First Century,” featuring Stephen Denning, the author of seven business books on leadership, and Bill Fischer, professor emeritus at IMD in Lausanne, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, and also the author of several books on driving strategic innovation. Several webinars produced by the center have attracted an average of two hundred business professionals from around the world. The new center is now part of the business ecosystem alliance, a network of like-minded centers across the globe. Finally, Dr. Steiber was an invited contributor to the Drucker Forum, where she discussed her observation that our new reality requires a new leadership model, one that unleashes talents and entrepreneurship within organizations.

Dr. Goolrukh Vakil was invited to give a presentation at Alliant University in the PsyD program on culture and psychology. The topic described how the practice of psychotherapy inherently contains tenets common in religious and spiritual practices.

A 2021 Leading School for Real Estate Education

Earlier this month, Commercial Property Executive published their list of the 2021 leading schools for real estate education. Menlo College ranked among the top 25 programs in the country, and one of the few that could boast of seeing 100% of its students successfully placed in the real estate industry post-graduation. Kudos to The Real Estate Center @ Menlo College Director Margaret McFarland for successfully growing our program in recent years.

Above: Margaret McFarland welcomes participants to a symposium on real estate in the Bay Area held by The Real Estate Center @ Menlo (TREC) in November 2019. TREC looks forward to sponsoring more exciting events – in person! – in the upcoming academic year.

Merriam-Webster!

Dean of Arts & Science and Political Science Professor Melissa Michelson was recognized for her contributions to political science intellectual discourse in an unexpected venue: The Merriam-Webster dictionary. The following entry now appears under the definition of political science in the latest edition of the dictionary.

Recent Examples of Political Science on the Web: Despite simmering frustrations in Sacramento, Melissa Michelson, apolitical scienceprofessor at Menlo College, doubted many Californians will look at Newsom’s decision to lift the order so critically.(Dustin Gardiner,SFChronicle.com, “Newsom’s abrupt shift on stay-home order angers legislators across aisle,” 25 Jan. 2021.)