Dana Natale
Dana Natale is a Research Development Specialist for the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) at Montclair State University. As such, she assists faculty interested in preparing competitive proposals to federal, state, and local government agencies, as well as foundations and corporations. In addition, she provides training to faculty and staff, and acts as the liaison to funding agencies. Prior to joining the ORSP, Dana spent four years building and supporting experiential education and campus-community partnership development at Montclair State. As Assistant Director and Special Projects Coordinator for the Center for Community-Based Learning, she created a development plan and funding protocol, wrote grants, conducted research, and coordinated a variety of campus-community partnership projects. Throughout her 12 year tenure at the University, Dana has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses as an adjunct faculty member, including: Cultural Anthropology, Multicultural Anthropology, and Grant Writing. Before coming to Montclair State, Dana worked in research coordination and development positions for a number of non-profit organizations and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dana holds an M.A. in Anthropology and a B.A. in Psychology.
Jessica Henry
Jessica S. Henry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Justice Studies, and received the University Distinguished Teacher Award in 2015. After serving as a public defender for nearly a decade, Professor Henry joined the Montclair State University faculty in 2005. She teaches a wide range of courses, including Criminal Law and Procedure, Death Penalty Perspectives, Hate Crimes, and Wrongful Convictions. Professor Henry has appeared as a frequent commentator on national television, radio, and in print media, and is a frequent blogger with the Huffington Post. Her areas of research include severe sentences (including the death penalty and life without parole), prisoner re-entry, hate crimes and the criminal justice system.
Lisa Lieberman
Lisa Lieberman is an Associate Professor in Public Health, who focuses on adolescent and pre-teen health issues from teen pregnancy to smoking. Her extensive work also includes assessments of condom availability and abstinence education programs. She has evaluated pregnancy and HIV prevention programs in New Jersey, New York, Georgia and South Dakota. Professor Lieberman served as the county evaluator for the Rockland County Department of Health Comprehensive Tobacco Program since 2000 and has been an evaluation consultant to the U.S. Office of Population Affairs. She has also chaired the New York State Office of Children and Family Services Research and Evaluation Workgroup.
Eileen Fitzpatrick
Eileen Fitzpatrick is a Professor of Linguistics, holding a Ph.D. from New York University. Her research interests include automatic deception detection, computational linguistics, forensic linguistics, and corpus linguistics.
Monica Taylor
Monica Taylor is an Associate Professor of Secondary and Special Education in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching. She is the lead faculty in the secondary strand of the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency. She earned her doctorate in Language, Reading, and Culture from the University of Arizona. She previously taught French and Spanish in an alternative middle school in NYC and is the author of several articles on co/autoethnography, teacher leadership, inquiry and social justice. Taylor has published the book, Whole language teaching, whole hearted practice: Looking back, looking ahead.
Todd Kelshaw
Todd Kelshaw is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Media. As a scholar of organizational communication, his special concerns are for democratic environments in which members may share leadership, collaboratively create and problem-solve, and foster healthy relationships across cultural, moral, and attitudinal differences. In an organizational landscape that is increasingly characterized by democratization, globalization, and decentralized yet thoroughly networked interactivities—all of which are advanced through emerging communication technologies—issues of stakeholder empowerment are quickly becoming more important and sophisticated. If, as John Dewey observed, democracy is not so much a mechanism of governance as it is a moral ideal to be realized throughout the communicative contexts of our daily lives, such issues are inherent to all of our communities, spanning residential and civic settings, politics and governance, work, commerce, education, recreation, journalism, and so on. Through his scholarship, he aims to interrogate and celebrate notions of relational stakeholdership and to develop and apply dialogic and deliberative communication competencies toward people’s mutual empowerment and organizational well-being.
Lara Lakusta
Laura Lakusta is a Professor in the Department of Psychology. After completing a NIH funded postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, Professor Lakusta joined the Montclair State University faculty in 2008. She teaches a wide range of courses, including Developmental Psychology both at the undergraduate and graduate level, Child Psychology, and Introduction to Statistical Methods in Psychology. Professor Lakusta is the recipient of a grant from the National Science Foundation that has supported her research exploring how infants conceptualize events and how such preverbal representations may support early language acquisition. Recent studies are further exploring spatial language acquisition in children 2 to 7 years of age, focusing on the meaning of terms encoding space. She has numerous peer-reviewed publications including recent publications in the journals, Infancy, Language Learning and Development, and Cognitive Science.