Viret Family Faculty Leadership Fellows

Designed for faculty aspiring to positions as chairs, deans, provosts or other executive administrative careers, the program is highly selective and engages participants in a process designed to develop leadership talent and skill through hands-on, project-based experience.

Endowed by a $1 million donation from Lionel Viret ’95, the program has supported more than 20 faculty members since 2017. Each fellow spends a semester away from teaching duties not only to work on their chosen project but also to develop executive leadership abilities. Fellows work directly with a leadership mentor and attend professional development seminars and national conferences in their areas of interest. They are also offered opportunities to present their work to internal and external stakeholders.

Several Viret fellows have aspired to leadership positions at Adelphi and other universities, using the lessons learned from this professional development experience and research to influence pedagogy, policy, experiential and service learning and interprofessional education.

Meet Our Current Viret Fellow

Fall 2024-Spring 2025 Fellow

Telvis M. Rich

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor and Director of the Bachelor of Social Work program, School of Social Work.

Viret Project: Dr. Rich’s project involves exploring ways to strengthen the recruitment and retention of students of color and to increase workplace diversity. Dr. Rich will look into ways to enhance the recruitment and retention of faculty and students of color, with a focus on Black faculty and students, and to contribute to the promotion of the University’s strategic plan and mission. His current research centers on workplace diversity, engagement and inclusion among students and full-time and adjunct faculty.

Fall 2023-Spring 2024 Fellows

Margaret Cassidy

Current Role at Adelphi: Professor and Chair of the Department of Communications, College of Arts Sciences’

Viret Project: Dr. Cassidy’s project focuses on high-impact student experiences, curricular and extracurricular, and the extent to which students participate in these activities. Given that these types of experiences—such as independent research and creative projects, study abroad, relationships with professors and mentors, experiential learning opportunities and participation in extracurricular activities, internships and on-campus employment—are central components of student persistence to graduation and life satisfaction after graduation, this project aims to increase both campus-wide awareness of high-impact opportunities and knowledge about how to leverage those opportunities.

Tandra Chakraborty

Current Role at Adelphi: Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: As her project, Dr. Chakraborty plans to spearhead efforts to enhance Adelphi’s academic structure, advocating for an inclusive, supportive and accessible online learning environment that’s geared to the University’s diverse student body and seamlessly aligned with the Momentum 2 strategic plan.

Geoffrey Ream

Current Role at Adelphi: Professor, School of Social Work

Viret Project: Dr. Ream’s project involves a total rewrite of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) manual, revising policies and procedures to conform to the 2018 version of the federal Common Rule and adapting to the realities of post-COVID research. Time permitting, he will also conduct a needs assessment around faculty research support.

Fall 2021-Spring 2022 Fellows

Reem Khamis-Dakwar, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders , Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Khamis-Dakwar’s Viret fellowship work focuses on the future interprofessional education (IPE) mission and vision at Adelphi University. Members of the Adelphi community were surveyed about their current IPE activities and partnerships at Adelphi, their perspectives toward IPE and specific needs to facilitate transformation of the teaching and learning at Adelphi, to become more interprofessional in nature. Strength, weakness, opportunities and threats were identified, based on the input from the community, and then used to develop a suggested action plan for structural transformations to increase IPE activity at the University.

Kellyann Monaghan

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor and Chair of Art and Art History, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Kellyann Monaghan’s project examines ways to integrate the arts and culture more fully into campus life, inspired in many ways by her leadership of the University’s annual Fall Arts Festival. She is exploring ways to incorporate art and art history classes into other disciplines, develop Adelphi’s art and art history department into a cultural center for the campus as well as the surrounding community, and partner with the community for experiential arts learning opportunities for Adelphi students.

Lahney Preston-Matto, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences

Monica Yang, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Professor and Chair of Management, Robert B. Willumstad School of Business

Joint Viret Project: Drs. Yang and Preston-Matto’s project centers on faculty service. Drs. Preston-Matto’s research focuses on faculty service and its role in earning tenure and promotion. She is developing clearer definitions of faculty service and criteria for assessing that service. Dr. Yang’s project focused on service workload equity and particularly on putting in place the tools to make service workload more transparent and equitable. Their joint project’s goal isto help deans, chairs and individual faculty members effectively manage service assignments.

Fall 2019–Spring 2020 Fellows

Beverly Araujo Dawson, PhD

Professor, School of Social Work

CarolAnn Daniel, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Interim Associate Dean, School of Social Work

Viret Project: Dr. Daniel, a professor in the School of Social Work when she participated in the Viret fellowship, focused on creating a central structure to provide all junior faculty with a network of mentors. She also developed a mentoring curriculum to enhance mentor/mentee competencies.

Anthony Dotterman, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Senior Lecturer, General Studies, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Dotterman focused on first year-learning communities and retention. In particular, he explored how the General Studies Learning Community could potentially align curriculum, faculty and administrative resources to support interdisciplinary teaching and a “meta-majors” advisement model through General Education as a way to encourage student engagement and retention.

Margaret Gray, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Gray established a program called Faculty Productivity, which currently includes three workshops with advice for faculty pursuing their scholarly or creative work. These workshops were held through the Faculty Center for Professional Excellence (FCPE) in Spring 2020, Fall 2021 and Fall 2022. In addition, similar workshops were presented during faculty orientations in August 2020, a College of Arts and Sciences adjunct workshop, and FCPE workshops in January 2020 and 2021 for faculty submitting for review or promotion.

Eugenia Villa-Cuesta, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor of Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: During her time as a Viret Fellow, Dr. Villa-Cuesta worked on strengthening inclusive pedagogy in STEM at Adelphi University in support of faculty and students.

Priya Wadhera, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor and Chair of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Inspired in part by the National Humanities Alliance in Washington, D.C., Dr. Wadhera sought to establish a Humanities Alliance at Adelphi University to fortify connections between and among faculty in the humanities. The goal: Make faculty feel more interconnected and students find their studies in our fields even more enjoyable, valuable and purposeful.

Spring 2019 Fellows

Elizabeth Palley, JD, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Professor, School of Social Work and Director, PhD Program

Viret Project: Dr. Palley helped to develop onboarding training for new deans.

Fall 2018 Fellows

Zachary Johnson, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor. Robert B.School of Business’

Viret Project: As the director of Adelphi’s Innovation Center launch, Dr. Johnson authored a detailed business plan based on interviews with 50-plus faculty members. From this, he built project charters and service level agreements (SLAs) and crafted an approach for experiential learning that would lead to enriching experiences for students while also generating revenue for the University. Via a collaboration with Adelphi’s Office of University Advancement and External Relations, he secured a $135,000 grant from Jovia Financial as proof of concept for the center. He was also a project co-sponsor of the Innovation Center construction project and co-led the planning and delivery of a design-thinking conference that included 100-plus attendees (industry and faculty).

Salvatore J. Petrilli ’05, EdD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Dean for Academic Operations and General Education, College of Arts and Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Petrilli, who was an associate professor and chair of the mathematics and computer science department, created a University-wide strategic plan for Intersession and summer sessions.

Spring 2018 Fellows

Dana Battaglia, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor, Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences

Viret Project: The goal of Dr. Battaglia’s project was to see if, and how, other departments were engaging undergraduate students in research. Recommendations were offered to streamline more equitable processes across Adelphi University.

Rachel Isaac-Menard

Associate professor, University Libraries

Viret Project: Associate Professor Isaac-Menard analyzed how Adelphi Libraries could more effectively support distance and online students in blended and online courses and programs. Her project concluded by identifying priorities for Adelphi Libraries and led to Adelphi establishing her current role as distance education coordinator.

Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Professor, College of Nursing and Public Health

Viret Project: Dr. Pajarillo chose to pilot a Graduate Student Onboarding-Professional Development Program (GSO-PDP) project. This was a four-week onboarding intensive consisting of a module per week that was built into the Informatics for Advanced Nursing Practice course for incoming graduate students. The modules consisted of correctly accessing and researching databases and evidence-based sites and reviewing the writing of a thesis. This project came about after he noticed the wide disparity in educational, technological, research and professional experiences that graduate students bring to higher education. The goal of the GSO-PDP: Level the playing field among all incoming students. Dr. Pajarillo piloted this for the first cohort in Fall 2019 and conducted an evaluation during the last semester. He has established a multidisciplinary team to improve the onboarding process (incorporating students’ and faculty suggestions) and called it Equitable, Targeted and Specific (ETS) Onboarding.

Fall 2017 Fellows

Daryl Gordon, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate professor, Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences

Viret Project: Dr. Gordon investigated international engagement at Adelphi University. To facilitate collaboration, she developed a mechanism to collect and share Adelphi faculty members’ international expertise. A map showing faculty members’ international connections is available online.

MaryAnne Hyland, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Dean, Robert B. Willumstad School of Business

Viret Project: The purpose of Dr. Hyland’s project was to provide resources for department chairs in order to create consistency and best practices for hiring and working with part-time faculty.

Spring 2017 Fellows

Diann Cameron-Kelly, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Associate Provost for Student Success, Office of the Provost

Viret Project: An associate professor of social work and chair of the BSW program at the time she participated in the Viret Fellowship, Dr. Cameron-Kelly compared Adelphi’s sponsored research program—which helps faculty members find funding and manage aspects of their projects—with those at 12 other universities. She later served as interim dean of the School of Social Work program and was the associate provost for student success in the Office of the Provost. She was named a 2022-2023 ACE Fellow by the American Council on Education, one of only 46 leaders nationwide chosen for the organization’s intensive mentorship program.

Jacqueline Jones LaMon, JD

Current Role at Adelphi: Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Viret Project: Dr. LaMonwas a professor in the English department when she became a member of the inaugural group of fellows in Spring 2017. In exploring Adelphi’s formal mentoring program, she discovered numerous other instances of mentoring taking place on campus. In doing so, she strengthened the University’s reputation for mentoring, highlighted by a 2019 Encoura Innovation Award honoring Adelphi’s formal mentoring program. She became an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and in December 2019 was named the University’s vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Andrea Ward, PhD

Current Role at Adelphi: Interim Associate Provost for Student Success, Enrollment Management and Student Affairs

Viret Project: Dr. Ward was a member of the biology faculty when she entered the Viret program. Her project focused on examining the organization of health-related majors at Adelphi and studied how Adelphi might establish a new health degree, which led to the launch of the University’s Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences in Fall 2020. Following the fellowship, Dr. Ward became the associate dean for student success and strategic initiatives in the College of Arts and Sciences before being named to her current role.