Jacob Berger

Jacob Berger is a doctoral student in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center where he is focusing on the philosophy of mind. His dissertation will concern the relationship of the qualities of sensory mental states (such as the reddish quality of a sensation) to the perceptible properties of objects (such as the red color of an apple). He graduated from Swarthmore College in 2005. Before coming to City Tech, he taught several courses in Philosophy at Baruch College, including a course that focused on the intimate connection between thought and language. Because of this connection, he believes that helping students to acquire strong writing skills in turn helps them to think well.

Reagan Lothes

Reagan Lothes is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include Modernism and 20th and 21st century utopian and dystopian literature, with a focus on post-war English and American poetry. Her dissertation explores Sylvia Plath’s “conversation” with women Modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, Amy Lowell, and Edith Sitwell, about the relation of women’s experience to what Plath called the “bigger things,” such as war and history.

She has been teaching at John Jay College since 2001. During this time, she has taught a range of composition courses, from developmental to a second-year course focused on preparing students for writing across the disciplines, and the themes of these courses have included media studies, fashion studies, and utopian studies. She has also taught American literature, Modern Literature, with a focus on utopian and dystopian literature, and an author’s course on Sylvia Plath for the Distinguished Students Program.

In addition to her experience at John Jay, she has worked at Katherine Gibbs, teaching Business Communications and composition courses to students with such majors as information technology and fashion design.

Her experience both as a student and teacher convinces her daily of the value of writing as a process of learning and discovery. She looks forward to the many discoveries the faculty and students at City Tech, with their diversity of interests and backgrounds, hold in store.

Myrto Mylopoulos

Myrto Mylopoulos is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection between agency and consciousness. Before coming to the Graduate Center, she completed an M.A. in Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. While there, she had a chance to work as a teaching assistant for a number of writing intensive philosophy courses, where she learned some of the basic principles behind Writing Across the Curriculum, and came to better appreciate the central role that writing plays in learning. She has since had a chance to put what she learned into practice in her own teaching at CUNY's Brooklyn College, where she taught philosophy from 2007 - 2010. She's looking forward to her role as a Writing Fellow at City Tech.

Norman Perlmutter

Norman Perlmutter grew up in Toledo, Ohio, the oldest of three siblings. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA and a M.A. in mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has also taken philosophy courses at the graduate level at CUNY. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center, conducting research in set theory under the supervision of Joel David Hamkins. He expects to complete his Ph.D. in May 2013 and hopes to pursue a career in academia.

He taught algebra, precalculus, and calculus for three years at City College. He also has extensive experience as a private math tutor and completed an actuarial internship one summer at AXA Equitable while he was an undergraduate.

His nonacademic interests include travelling internationally, playing go, reading science fiction, and attending Off Off Broadway theater.

Kareem Rabie

Kareem Rabie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include state theory, political economy and uneven development, subjectivity and the formation of political ideology, and the Middle East. His dissertation examines the present push towards privatization in the housing market, and the contemporary state-building project in the West Bank. Over four years at Hunter College, he taught Introduction to Cultural Anthropology as well as courses on the anthropology of the Middle East and on political anthropology. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a fellow on the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Seokhee Yoon

Seokhee (Kiki) Yoon is currently a doctoral student in Criminal Justice at John Jay College. During her graduate career, she has participated in projects concerning restorative justice, sentencing downward departures, crime and immigration, workplace victimization and robbery patterns. Her research interests include victimization, research methods (especially quantitative methods), evidence-based policy and collateral effects of imprisonment. She was accepted to the Quantitative Analysis of Crime and Criminal Justice program at Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research in 2010, where she examined the reasons why victims do not report to the police. Her dissertation is an extension of that project and will utilize a multi-level analysis.

Helen Burnham

Helen Burnham is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center/CUNY. Her focus area is late nineteenth and early twentieth century American art. Her dissertation centers on the new model of an art-based education that evolved during the nineteenth century. This new model (referred to today as ‘active learning’) combined constructive applications with a general model of education. She has taught art history courses at York and Queens Colleges, and at Seton Hall University. She places a strong emphasis on learning, and applying, the visual language of art, as a primary critical tool with which to approach any work in any medium, culture or period. At City Tech, she has conducted a variety of faculty workshops on such topics as using writing as a tool for developing critical thinking skills, expanding approaches to the standard research paper, and fine-tuning assignments to maximize learning potential. She is a firm believer in the value of writing as a critical method for developing the ability to think.

Yimao Chen

Yimao Chen is a doctoral student in Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently writing his thesis on the global properties of the solution for a parabolic equation with infinity-Laplacian. Before coming to Tech, he worked as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Hunter College where he taught Algebra for College students, Precalculus, Calculus I and Calculus II. When teaching at Hunter, he paid a lot of attention on the process of writing to learn and writing to access learning in science and engineering courses, since he deeply believes that writing in disciplines plays a crucial role in the procedure of solving a practical problem. From his own experience, he found that the students' problem-solving ability in science and engineering courses had enhanced substantially with the improvement of the writing ability. He also had worked as a programmer at a software company for several months.

Departments: Mathematics, Physics, Computer Engineering Technology, Computer Systems Technology

Mehmet Baris Kuymulu

Mehmet Baris Kuymulu is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests includes global inequality, urban social movements, political ecology, neoliberal globalization, and social theory. His dissertation examines the formation of the Right to the City Alliance in New York City as an urban justice movement against neoliberal urbanism. At the City Tech, He organizes workshops on issues pertaining to ESL writing difficulties, effective grading techniques, basic principles of scholarly writing, the APA format and plagiarism.

During 2008-2009 academic year, He was a fellow at The Center for Place, Culture and Politics. At Brooklyn College, where he was a Graduate Teaching Fellow for four years, and at Baruch College in the summer semesters, he taught urban and transnational anthropology, ethnographic practice, anthropology of race, and the history of Middle Eastern modernization, in addition to introductions to anthropology and sociology.

Departments: Restorative Dentistry, Vision Care Technology, Construction Management, Human Services, Social Science

mkuymulu@gc.cuny.edu

Daniel Newsome

Daniel Newsome is doctoral student specializing in the history of science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently in the midst of writing my dissertation on a selection of quadrivial scholars from the 14th and 15th centuries. By definition these scholars were selected for their demonstrated proficiency in all four quadrivial disciplines: arithmetic, music theory, geometry, and astronomy/astrology. His interest is not so much in the development of these disciplines themselves, but in the relationships between these disciplines. He's also currently working on an illustrated commentary of an Islamic natural philosophical text from 12th-century Granada.

In the late 1980s, he studied painting and drawing at the New York Studio School and with the boost of a Hohenberg Travel Award, he relocated to Madrid in 1989, where he independently studied at the Museo del Prado. In order to extend my stay in Spain, he worked as an ESL instructor and in a cabinetry shop.

In the 1990s, he continued to draw and paint in the New York City metropolitan area and participated in a variety of group and solo exhibitions. Also in the 1990s, he worked in furniture fabrication and restoration and ultimately formed a storefront business in SOHO specializing in fine art framing and display furniture.

Meanwhile, a childhood love of science and mathematics led me back to school. He got a physics degree with a minor in the history of science from Bard College in 2002. Since then, he has been working towards a Ph.D. in the history of science, teaching the history of science at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, and teaching myself preindustrial woodworking techniques.

In terms of writing, he is most concerned with communication over formal considerations. In his own classes, he has promoted the use of images, animations, and sound within written assignments, emphasizing the holistic integration of these media. In addition to traditional writing assignments, he regularly has his students write fiction based on our class readings, in part so that they can find a voice, and in part to help them engage our readings actively rather than passively.

Departments: Nursing, Health Services Administration, Business, Humanities

Liza Pappas

Liza Pappas is a Ph.D candidate in the urban education policy program at the Graduate Center. Her dissertation will look at school closings in New York City. Liza has a background in service-learning, education organizing, youth civic engagement, and video production. She has taught courses on race and public education and the historical and philosophical foundations of second education in the United States at Hunter College prior to joining City Tech in 2009 as a CUNY writing fellow.

Mark Schiebe

Mark Schiebe is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he conducted research in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. His dissertation explores how American novelists have depicted the connections between artistic creation and business practice. He has been at City Tech for the past eight years, working in the English Department, the Atrium Learning Center, and the Freshman Year Summer Program (FYSP), where he has taught developmental writing courses and CPE workshops as well as tutoring a broad range of City Tech students in writing and research skills. As a Tech Writing Fellow, I conduct faculty development seminars on such topics as “Efficient Grading Strategies” and “Preparing Students for CPE Success.” Currently, he works closely with faculty in the Mathematics and Computer Systems Technology Departments, helping develop writing and research assignments. He regularly facilitate in-class writing workshops in these Professor’s classes on topics such as internet research skills and proper source citations. In his work with Tech faculty, his goal is to introduce WAC practices while remaining sympathetic to the individual needs of the instructor and the unique challenges posed by each discipline.

Departments: English, Mathematics, Computer Systems Technology, Computer Engineering Technology, Radiologic Techology

mschiebe@gc.cuny.edu

Laureen Park

Laureen Park is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Social Science Department at City Tech. She is the former college CPE Liaison. The position taught her the importance of supporting students’ proficiency in writing, which also relates to communication and critical thinking skills. She is committed to the principles of WAC and believes that the way to become proficient at writing is through habitual practice. ‘You don’t become skilled at writing by not doing it.’ Her scholarly interests include phenomenological approaches to the philosophy of science and psychoanalytic approaches to conflict resolution.

Jody Rosen

Jody R. Rosen, an assistant professor in the English Department at New York City College of Technology, has worked with WAC for many years. A former Writing Fellow at the College of Staten Island and Senior Communication Fellow at Baruch College’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, she integrates writing-intensive and communication-intensive approaches into her composition and literature courses. Her scholarship focuses on narrative theory, Modernisms, and gender and sexuality studies. She holds an AB from Brown University and a PhD and Women’s Studies Certificate from the CUNY Graduate Center.

jrrosen@citytech.cuny.edu