Books on bookshelf

Current Fellows and Mentors

Fellows

Barry Bachenheimer

Barry Bachenheimer, Adjunct Faculty, Counseling and Educational Leadership 

Dr. Barry Bachenheimer has over 25 years experience in the K-12 education field as a teacher, coordinator, supervisor, principal and central office administrator in several New Jersey school districts.  He is currently the Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment for the Pascack Valley Regional High School District.  He has been an adjunct professor in both the Curriculum and Teaching and Educational Administration graduate school departments at Montclair State University for 20 years. Effective, innovative, analytic and research-based instruction and technology integration is his professional passion and he has published several articles, chapters and journals on this topic and others.

The “other side” of Dr. Bachenheimer’s life is in the area of emergency services and public safety where he has over 32 years experience in emergency medical services and firefighting in both professional and volunteer roles, and has responded to thousands of emergency calls. He often serves as an instructor in a variety of areas to share lifesaving skills.  Helping others, saving lives, and training others to do the same is his personal passion.

He thinks about all of these things while he cooks, plays music, runs, swims and bikes as far as possible.

Denell Downum

Denell Downum, Instructional Specialist, Writing Studies 

Denell Downum is an Instructional Specialist in the Department of Writing Studies. She holds a PhD in English literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on Irish literature, with particular attention to how the country’s past and its rich vernacular tradition in the Irish language help to shape Ireland’s literature today. Her articles have appeared in scholarly journals including Eire-Ireland, the New Hibernia Review, and the Irish University Review. She teaches courses in Writing and in Gender and Women’s Studies. Prior to coming to Montclair State, she taught at other institutions including Suffolk University, Bay State College and the City University of New York.

Andriy Fomin

Andriy Fomin, Adjunct Faculty, Classics

Dr. Fomin has been working as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Classics and General Humanities at Montclair State University since 2013, where he has taught classes on Classical antiquity, including offerings in ancient Greek, on Troy and the Trojan War, on classical mythology, and on Greek and Roman civilization.

He has earned his advanced degrees, an EdM (Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education) and a PhD (Classics), at Rutgers University. He has held fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and at the American Research Center in Sofia, and has been a research fellow at the University of Konstanz.

His scholarly interests include ancient Greek and Roman historiography and the literature of the Second Sophistic (the Greek cultural revolution in the Roman empire during the first three centuries CE). His current main research focus is on the late second/early third century CE Roman historian Dio Cassius.

Jie Gao

Jie Gao, Assistant Professor, Marketing

Dr. Jie Gao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing at Montclair State University, New Jersey. She earned her PhD in Recreation, Park and Tourism Management from The Pennsylvania State University, U.S. While completing her PhD, Dr. Gao served as an instructor of record for undergraduate courses in the Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Management at The Pennsylvania State University. 

Dr. Gao’s research interests focus on consumer decision-making with an emphasis on consumers’ emotions and well-being in travel and events industry. She is also interested in applying data mining techniques into her research. Dr. Gao has published research articles in various top-tier academic journals including Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, and Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing. She has also presented her research findings at prestigious national and international conferences, such as the Travel and Tourism Research Association Annual Conference, and the Annual International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education (ICHRIE) Conference.
Johanna Quinn

Johanna Quinn, Post Doctoral Researcher, Family Science and Human Development 

Johanna S. Quinn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Research on Youth Thriving and Evaluation (RYTE) at Montclair State. She received a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017. Her research explores public schools in an era of increased federal oversight and intervention, and the role institutions play in creating, sustaining and ameliorating inequalities. Johanna holds a BA in Psychology from Columbia University, an MS in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has taught in New York City public schools. At Montclair State University she teaches courses on Social Inequality and Sociological Research and is excited to research, write and teach about the ways that race, class and gender intersect in people’s lived experiences.

Elizabeth Riveras Rodas

Elizabeth Riveras Rodas, Assistant Professor, Educational Foundations 

Elizabeth Iris Rivera Rodas is an assistant professor of quantitative research methods in the Department of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University’s College of Education and Human Services. She holds a joint PhD in urban systems with a concentration in urban educational policy and in management with a concentration in economics from Rutgers University – Newark, an MS in social research from Hunter College, CUNY, and a BA in economics from Barnard College, Columbia University.

Dr. Rivera Rodas began her career as an education researcher and completed a two-year data fellowship through Harvard University’s Strategic Data Project in a northern New Jersey urban district. Before beginning her doctoral work, she was the director of research, evaluation and policy at the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), where she designed and implemented several evaluation studies of NACME programs and served as a member to the board of directors for the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. Her appointment at NACME followed several years of research experience, the last two as a research analyst at SRI International’s Center for Education Policy in Washington, D.C. As an economist of education, Dr. Rivera Rodas’ scholarly interests involve the economics of urban education, residential and school segregation and teacher quality.

Elizabeth Rivera Rodas’s current research focuses on determining the extent to which first and second generation Latino students are placed in lower-level mathematics courses at the beginning of high school and the trends behind this placement. In addition, her current research uses structural equation modeling to show that there is a relationship between gentrification and K-12 public school funding, and gentrification and the achievement gap.

Dr. Rivera Rodas is interested in increasing student engagement in all of her classes and learning how to effectively conduct hybrid courses.

Linda Zani Thomas

Linda Zani Thomas, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications and Media

Linda Zani Thomas is an adjunct professor in the School of Communications and Media teaching Fundamentals of Speech. She is a business professional with decades of experience in advertising and marketing and a state advocate for medically-fragile developmentally disabled children and adults. Linda’s research focuses on survival and resilience. Her goal for the Engaged Teaching Fellowship is to create and teach a class that combines group dynamics, leadership theory and practice, and disaster crisis management.

 

Blanca E. Vega, Assistant Professor, Counseling and Educational Leadership

A native New Yorker, Dr. Blanca E. Vega is the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants. Dr. Vega is Assistant Professor of Higher Education at Montclair State University. She earned a doctorate (EdD) from the Higher and Postsecondary Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. During that time, she also worked as Director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) at Marymount Manhattan College. Dr. Vega earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology from Brandeis University and a Master of Arts degree in higher education at New York University.

Dr. Vega’s scholarship broadly focuses on equity, access, and success in higher education among underserved populations. Her primary area of research situates racism as one of the multiple barriers that can impact higher education experiences and success – not just for students, but also for administrators and faculty. She is currently studying perceptions of racial incidents in higher education and organizational responses to these incidents. Her secondary area of research explores leadership and policymaking and their impact on access to and support for undocumented students. In this line of inquiry, Dr. Vega examines leadership concerning undocumented students in an increasingly anti-immigrant political environment and how this might affect other leadership decisions for historically oppressed groups in higher education. Finally, Dr. Vega continues to explore Latinx intellectualism in higher education curriculum, instruction and the professoriate

Mentors

Reba Wissner, Adjunct Faculty, Cali School of Music

Reba Wissner received her MFA and PhD in musicology from Brandeis University and her BA in music and Italian from Hunter College of the City University of New York. She is the author of articles on seventeenth-century Venetian opera, Italian immigrant theater in New York City, music in 1950s and 1960s television, and music history pedagogy and has presented her research on these topics at conferences throughout the United States and Europe. She is the author of A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone (Pendragon Press, 2013) and We Will Control All That You Hear: The Outer Limits and the Aural Imagination (Pendragon Press, 2016) and is currently working on both her third book, Music and the Atomic Bomb in American Television, 1950-1969 (under contract with Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, forthcoming in 2020) and a collaborative book and database project called Cues and Contracts: Music and the American Television Industry that examines music cues and their reuses, as well as administrative documents related to American television music production. She is also co-editing a volume on the music and sound design in Twin Peaks. Dr. Wissner is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including a Sight and Sound Subvention from the Society for American Music, a James and Sylvia Thayer Short-Term Research Fellowship from UCLA, a Wallis Annenberg Research Grant from the University of Southern California, and a 2018 recipient of a research and teaching service award from the Montclair State University Adjunct Union Local 6025.