Welcome New Faculty!

The Curry College community would like to formally welcome an outstanding group of faculty members to campus for fall 2012. These new faces are enthusiastic and ready to empower our students to excel and dedicate themselves to success inside and outside the classroom.

	Alissa Cardone is a special appointment in Fine Arts, teaching dance and movement. Alissa holds an MA in Performance Studies form NYU (2003) and an MFA from UCLA's Department of World Arts & Cultures (2011). An interdisciplinary movement artist, dancer, choreographer, teacher and curator, Alissa has performed, taught and toured nationally and internationally. In 1999, Alissa co-founded the intermedia performance collaborative Kinodance Company with filmmaker Alla Kovgan and visual artist Dedalus Wainwright. Kinodance merges boundaries between dance, cinema, visual art, and sound, aspiring to develop a common language of interaction among art media. In 2012, Alissa was awarded one of four Mass Cultural Council Fellows in Choreography.
	Dr. Laura Carsten joins the Politics and History Department as a scholar of International Relations, with research interests in emerging powers, trade policy, global governance, foreign policy decision making, and international political economy. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from LSU, an M.A. in International Affairs from Florida State, and a doctorate from Ruhr University of Bochum in Germany. Prior to coming to Curry, Laura worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Chair of International Politics at Ruhr University since 2007. Dr. Carsten is author of numerous articles, book chapters, and conference presentations focused primarily on global trade and emerging powers in Asia and South America.
	Dr. Jennifer Ceven is a special appointment in Curry's Math Department. She earned her M.A. and Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, and Mathematics Education, at Montana State University, where she was a fellow at the Center for Learning and Teaching in the West. Dr. Ceven has an extensive background in math and science education and curriculum development in public schools and in higher education.  Most recently, she worked for Scholastic, Inc., leading an initiative to develop and train teachers in 30 schools throughout New England. She has also served as a consultant for Wheelock College's Center for International Education, Leadership, and Innovation, and for Bristol Community College, where she designed eLearning tools for developmental mathematics courses.
	Dr. Shavindrie Cooray is the newest member of our Management Department. In 2009, she earned her Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., where she also received her M.Sc in Internet Systems Development. Her research focuses on aligning the needs of non-technical end users of information systems with the developers of such systems. Dr. Cooray has presented her research at several conferences throughout Europe, and has served as Principal Business Analyst on projects for the University of Portsmouth and the Portsmouth City Council. Most recently, she was a lecturer in Information Systems at the Boston University School of Management and University of Massachusetts, Boston.
	Dr. Kristen Getchell is the newest addition to the Curry College Writing Program. She has a B.A. in Political Science from UConn, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, and a Ph.D. in Composition and TESOL from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in writing assessment and writing placement, Dr. Getchell currently has a book chapter in press entitled Expert Reader Scoring, and she serves as manuscript reviewer for the journals Programmatic Perspectives and Journal of Writing Assessment. In addition to her scholarly work, while at Indiana she was Assistant Coordinator of the Writing Placement Program, and she has taught composition courses at IUP, University of New Hampshire, and New England College.
	Dr. Benjamin Hidalgo, who holds a Ph.D. in Clinical-community Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, joins our Psychology Department this fall. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral fellow at The Center for AIDS Intervention Research at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Hidalgo's research focuses on intervention models for marginalized populations, in particular the homeless population. He has presented at over a dozen conferences, and currently has three manuscripts under review. During the past seven years, Dr. Hidalgo has taught a variety of psychology courses at Illinois Champaign-Urbana and two colleges in Milwaukee.
	Dr. Karen Lischinsky joins our Sociology and Criminal Justice Faculty as Assistant Professor, after teaching in the department since 1999. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northeastern University (2000), M.S.W. from Boston University (1990) and B.A. in Sociology from Suffolk (1988). In the community, Dr. Lischinsky has worked extensively with incarcerated men and women on issues of racism, classism, homophobia, domestic violence, re-entry, and mental health, and led diversity workshops for the Boston Police Academy. At Curry, she has brought numerous speakers to campus on topics including the death penalty, sexual assault, and restorative justice, and she has organized campus "sleep-ins" to focus student attention on the issue of homelessness.
	Coleen Toronto comes to Curry College's Nursing Department from Boston College, where she was the Assistant Director of the Clinical Learning Center. She has been a practicing nurse for over 30 years, in a variety of fields, and has served as clinical adjunct faculty at Massachusetts College of Pharmacology and Curry College. A graduate of Northeastern University with an MSN from Framingham State University, she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Nursing at UMass Dartmouth University.

Curry's award-winning faculty challenges our students to explore, discover, grow and expand their capacity for self-directed, lifelong learning.  These latest additions to our ranks will continue that tradition for years to come.