ABOUT

My leadership experience includes serving as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Mercy University, the largest private Hispanic-Serving Institution in New York State.

Previous to that position, I was Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, in the City University of New York (CUNY).  Guttman is CUNY's first new community college in over four decades.

Before that appointment, I held executive leadership roles Queens College, CUNY, including Associate Provost for Innovation and Student Success, Assistant Provost for Teaching Excellence and Experiential Education, and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. These roles included projects that advanced student learning and success through faculty development, experiential education, and targeted academic support.

Scholarship: My scholarly research has concentrated on cross-linguistic aspects of sentence processing, particularly on syntactic ambiguity and the contribution of prosody to syntactic disambiguation. Another focus of my work is the impact of the second language on the first language of bilinguals. I am also interested in matters related to teaching and learning, particularly how faculty development impacts student learning, and in STEM course redesign and peer mentoring programs. I have received funding for my research and institutional interventions work from a variety of sources, including the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Education, the Petrie Foundation, the Pinkerton Foundation, and the New York City Department of Small Business Services. 

Education: My interest in how people learn and use multiple languages led to my focus as an undergraduate student at New York University (BA in Linguistics and German) and to my specialization as a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center (MA and PhD in Linguistics). After completing my PhD, I was appointed to the faculty at Queens College, in the Linguistics and Communication Disorders Department, earning tenure in 2007, promoted to Associate Professor in 2008, and promoted to Professor in 2015. I have also served as doctoral faculty for three PhD programs at the CUNY Graduate Center: Linguistics; Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures; and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences.