NYU Steinhardt Welcomes New Faculty

Kris DeFilippis

Clinical Assistant Professor

Kris DeFilippis is an educator and scholar whose research works toward the  continuous improvement of equity, anti-racism, and organizational culture in schools. He has contributed chapters to two publications; one chapter was the outcome of his work as a steering committee member of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s iLead Collective. DeFilippis has presented his research at the University Council for Educational Administrators, the Carnegie Summit on School Improvement, and the UMD School Improvement Summer Institute. 

As an executive director/assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, DeFilippis worked directly with the School’s Chancellor coaching leadership and faculty to apply context-centered, science-based principles to advance equity, reduce disproportionality, shift organizational culture, and align multi-tiered systems of support to district goals.

Mike Hoa Nguyen

Assistant Professor; Faculty Affiliate at NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute 

Mike Hoa Nguyen is a professor, scholar, and educator whose work examines the benefits and consequences of racialized public policy instruments in educational systems. He is especially interested in how these instruments impact access, learning, opportunity, and success for students of color. 

Nguyen has extensive professional experience in the federal government, having served as a senior staff member in the United States Congress. In his nearly seven years on staff, he managed a wide-ranging portfolio and was responsible for multiple complex and long-term intergovernmental projects and initiatives focusing on postsecondary education and the judiciary. His work has been supported by organizations such as The Kresge Foundation and APIA Scholars, and has been published in several outlets including Educational Researcher, the Journal of Higher Education, and the Review of Higher Education.

He serves on the Board of Directors for the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, and volunteers and provides research consulting for education and civil rights organizations. Most recently, he was one of the lead authors of an amicus curiae brief on behalf of 678 social scientists in SFFA v. Harvard, which was cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in their opinion to uphold affirmative action.

Hala Nafez Alyan

Clinical Assistant Professor 

Hala Alyan is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the assessment and treatment of trauma, substance abuse, anxiety, mood and relationship concerns, and cross-cultural issues. In her clinical and supervisory work, she practices through an eclectic, intersectional, collaborative lens, and has received training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic Therapy, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Narrative Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Motivational Interviewing, and has worked in forensic, inpatient, school-based, and counseling centers. She is interested in the intersection of healing and the creative arts, and has run workshops that incorporate narrative therapy among incarcerated communities, survivors of torture, and refugees in the United States and Middle East. She is the author of two novels: The Arsonists’ City (Harper 2021) and Salt Houses (Harper 2017), winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, and The New York Times.

Ernesto Lira de la Rosa 

Clinical Assistant Professor

Ernesto Lira de la Rosa (he/him/his) is a clinician, researcher, educator, and consultant who has worked in a variety of settings in the Midwest and East Coast. Clinically, he specializes in working with complex trauma, anxiety and mood disorders, stress and burnout, and substance use disorders. He also has expertise working with survivors of sexual abuse, LGBTQ+ clients, people of color, and clients with intersectionality of identities. In his work he draws from a humanistic and feminist approach which allows for an exploration of cultural context, and discussion of advocacy and social justice implications. 

Lira de la Rosa has served as an expert consultant with nonprofits and businesses looking to create inclusive and diverse practices within their respective organizations. Prior to joining NYU, Lira de la Rosa worked at Columbia University in the Counseling and Psychological Services Department. He has also worked at NYC H+H Hospitals across inpatient and outpatient departments as well as on mobile crisis teams.

Lauren Christine Mims

Assistant Professor 

Lauren Christine Mims is a scholar and researcher who uses culturally-grounded developmental frameworks to explore how sociocultural stressors impact Black children’s learning and development. The goal of her work is to identify and amplify the strengths and assets found in children, families, and schools in an effort to buffer the deleterious academic, social, and psychological effects that Black youth experience in response to bias and discrimination. The ultimate goal of her research is to “freedom dream” (Kelley, 2002) with Black children and their families, and then use those insights to guide the development of new research, policies, practices, and narratives. 

Mims served as the Assistant Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans during the Obama Administration, where she was involved in strategic planning, policy making, student programming initiatives, management of federal interagency relationships, and the development of research-based publications.. She has served as  a member of the White House Council on Women and Girls, the U.S. Department of Education Policy Committee, the U.S. Department of Education Socioeconomic Diversity Working Group, as well as a member of First Lady Michelle Obama's Reach Higher Working Group. 

Michelle Twali

Assistant Professor; Faculty Fellow 

Michelle Twali is a researcher who studies the factors that contribute to the persistence of intergroup conflict and violence. Specifically, she focuses on the ways in which people make sense of their experiences of collective victimization and oppression, and how these beliefs predict their attitudes and behaviors towards other groups, engagement in collective action, and support or opposition to social justice policies. Dr. Twali has consulted with non-governmental organizations in Juba, South Sudan and Nairobi, Kenya, to develop intervention programs that aim to reduce conflict and promote intergroup relations.

Prior to joining NYU Steinhardt, Twali was a postdoctoral research fellow at Innovation for Poverty Action at  Princeton University.

Jaime Kahhat 

Clinical Assistant Professor 

Jaime Kahhat is a researcher whose work examines the relationship between inequality and economic growth and the role that institutions play in the process of economic development. Prior to joining NYU Steinhardt, Kahhat served as an assistant professor in the School of Business at The College of Westchester and as an External Consultant for the United Nations Development Programme project “Markets, the State and the Dynamics of Inequality: How to Advance Inclusive Growth.” Kahhat is the author of the chapter, “Labor Earnings Inequality: The Demand for and Supply of Skills” in Declining Inequality in Latin America: A Decade of Progress? (Brookings Institution and United Nations Development Program, 2010).  He has served as a reviewer for the Journal of Economic Theory and the Scandinavian Journal of Economics. 

Heddy Lahmann-Rosen

Clinical Assistant Professor

Heddy Lahmann is a Clinical Professor of International Education in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, and Human Development. She has more than a decade of experience in education conflict and crisis contexts, with a focus on arts education with youth affected by political violence. Her research has appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, and she has co-authored rigorous reviews on what works for education and social emotional learning in emergencies for UK’s Department for International Development, USAID, and the Education Conflict Review. Dr. Lahmann has consulted for the Community Arts Network/Porticus Foundation, FCDO, UNHCR, USAID, and the World Bank with expertise in education in humanitarian and development contexts, civic education, and arts for social change. In addition to her research, she has worked as a teaching artist, performer, and artist-researcher with children and youth domestically and internationally, including projects with Clowns Without Borders, Bond Street Theatre, and the Refugee Youth Summer Academy and Saturday Learning Series with the International Rescue Committee and Artists Striving to End Poverty. She is currently engaged with projects focusing on multimodal distance learning and global public arts education.
 

Seung Yeon Lee

Clinical Assistant Professor of Graduate Art Therapy

Seung Yeon Lee is an art therapy educator whose research focuses on exploring the role of flow theory in art therapy and its therapeutic value with young immigrants who are coping with everyday acculturation challenges. In South Korea, Nicaragua, and Israel, she worked with art communities to develop cross-cultural art therapy services and an intercultural competencies curriculum for graduate art therapy students.

Seung Yeon has served as an associate professor at the Clinical Art Therapy and Counseling Program at Long Island University, where she served as chair of the Department of Art. Prior to her tenure at LIU, she worked as a Board-Certified Creative Arts Therapist at the Adult & Adolescent Acute Care Psychiatric Unit at NYU Langone Medical Center. Her research has been published in American Art Therapy Association, Arts in Psychotherapy, Canadian Art Therapy Association, and Art Education.
 

Denise Cruz

Clinical Assistant Professor 

Denise Cruz (ella/she/her) is a speech-language pathologist and clinician who has been in practice since 2005. Her clinical interests include the rehabilitation of head and neck cancer patients, swallowing disorders, voice disorders, care of the professional voice, cognitive disorders, and culturally responsive practice in diagnostics and therapeutic delivery models. 

Cruz is of Puerto Rican descent, a bilingual (Spanish and English) speaker, and a "practivist," a practicing clinician and activist. She is dedicated to social justice activism in healthcare and education and patient advocacy. Denise is passionate about addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion issues within the field of speech-language pathology and is dedicated to the recruitment and mentoring of underrepresented students entering the field of speech-language pathology. She is committed to the pedagogical and implementation of culturally responsive practices in and out of the classroom and in clinical settings. She is currently a sitting board member of the New York State Education Department Office of the Professions (Licensing Board) for Speech-Language Pathology & Audiology.  

Leonard Santos 

Visiting Assistant Professor; Lab Coordinator of MediaLab

Leonard Santos is an educator whose research focus is in digital media, LGBTQ+ youth mental health and suicide, and digital activism. His current work explores the coordination of digital media and technology within a humanities curriculum.  He currently teaches practice-based courses and organizes the logistics and operations of MCC’s MediaLab, offering project assistance to staff and assisting students with digital critical making and practice-based coursework.

Santos has served as an adjunct professor at NYU. As a graduate student, he was NYU Weber Shandwick Master in Residence and worked with the global public relations company in their product and technology department.

Susan Dodes

Visiting Assistant Professor 

Susan Dodes is an educator and music industry executive whose artists and repertoire (A&R) and producer management firm, SuLeDo Music Consulting, has supported projects that have sold over 25 million records. Prior to establishing her own firm, she held senior positions in A&R at Universal Music and Sony Music, as well as senior creative positions at Warner-Chappell Music Publishing and Famous Music Publishing. 

She serves as Global Co-Chair of Mentorship for the She is The Music organization, a foundation created by recording artist Alicia Keys, to educate and empower young women interested in careers in music. She has been appointed a Mechanical Licensing Collective Education Ambassador by the the Mechanical Licensing Collective, an organization which serves as the primary collection society for songwriters’ mechanical royalties. 

Magdalena Fuentes 

Assistant Professor 

Magdalena Fuentes is an educator and researcher who studies machine listening, human-centered machine learning, self-supervised representation learning, computational rhythm analysis, and environmental sound analysis.

Before joining NYU as a faculty member, she was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL) and the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at NYU. She is part of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee and has been involved in the organization of ISMIR, ICASSP, DCASE and computational rhythm workshops.

Sarah Louden

Clinical Assistant Professor

Sarah Louden is an educator and researcher who explores the cognitive effects of multisensory perception on a broad range of musical topics including multimedia and contemporary music analysis, music theory pedagogy, classroom accessibility, stage performance, digital technology and virtual reality. In a recent National Society for Music Theory presentation, she lectured on crossmodal applications to accessibility and universal design in the music theory classroom. 

Louden’s dissertation, entitled “Cross-Sensory Perception in Music and Visual Media: A Neuro-Cognitive Approach to Cross-Domain Mapping in Multimedia,” received the distinguished dissertation award from the University of Buffalo in 2018. She contributed a chapter, “Sound-Induced Visual Illusion in Film,” to Music in Action Film: Sounds Like Action! (Routledge 2020). 

Prior to joining NYU Steinhardt as Visiting Assistant Professor in Fall 2019, she held adjunct teaching positions at Hofstra University and the University at Buffalo SUNY. 

Annaly Babb-Guerra

Clinical Assistant Professor 

Annaly Babb-Guerra is an educator whose research is focused on anti-racist, culturally sustaining, and humanizing pedagogy in the field of social studies and civic education. Her work has appeared in Teachers College Record and she has presented her work at conferences throughout the United States on topics ranging from creating anti-oppressive social studies pedagogy and curriculum to fostering political open-mindedness and generating interest through project-based learning. Her co-authored paper, “How Can Youth Become Both Politically Engaged and Politically Open-Minded? Processes, Outcomes, and Challenges in the ‘Legislative Semester’ Program" won the AERA Social Studies Research SIG Outstanding Paper Award in 2016. Before coming to NYU, Babb-Guerra served for over ten years as a social studies teacher in both the continental United States and the Virgin Islands. 

Grace A. Chen

Assistant Professor; Faculty Fellow 

Grace A. Chen is a scholar, teacher educator, and learning scientist. A former secondary school mathematics teacher, she studies teacher learning around issues of race, power, and equity, with a focus on identity, ethics, and affect. Her dissertation explored secondary mathematics teachers’ ethical stances on relational work. Her academic research on teachers' attunements, teachers' pedagogical responsibilities, marginalization in mathematics education, and Asian Americans in STEM education has appeared in Cognition & Instruction, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Race Ethnicity and Education, and the Review of Educational Research.

Prior to joining NYU, Chen was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, where she received the Graduate School's Founders Medal for First Honors and the Peabody Faculty Council Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Leadership Award. 

Christine Gentry

Clinical Assistant Professor

Christine Gentry is a teacher whose research explores the intersection of identity development and community in the urban public school classroom. Her work has been featured in publications such as English Journal and The English Record and on stages such as TEDx and The Boston Foundation’s EdTalks. Gentry has served as Director of Teacher Development and Licensure for a network of public high schools in Boston, where she managed and implemented all facets of The Urban Teaching Fellowship, a teacher residency program. Gentry currently serves on the Advisory Committee on Government Relations and Advocacy and co-chairs the LGBTQ+ Advocacy and Inclusion Topical Action Group for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. She also serves on the Storytelling Committee for the National Council of Teachers of English. Before her work in teacher preparation, Gentry taught English, creative writing, and oral storytelling in the public schools of Boston and New York City.

Katie Scott Newhouse 

Clinical Assistant Professor 

Katie Scott Newhouse is an educator, researcher, and scholar whose fields of study include disability studies in education, DisCrit, and critical spatial theory. Prior to joining NYU Steinhardt, Newhouse was a Bruce S. Goldberg Postdoctoral Fellow in Youth and Wellbeing at Teachers College. She was awarded the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Outstanding Dissertation award in 2021 from the Disability Studies in Education special interest group. She also served as an adjunct instructor at NYU School of Professional Studies in the graduate Professional Writing program and received an NYU Teaching Excellence Award in 2021. Her recent publications, “Cultivating Educational Spaces that Support Black Girl’s Spatial Inquires” and “Unraveling a Researcher’s Practices of Care with One Disabled Youth,” emphasize an ethical, care-based approach to research with youth that also informs teaching and learning. She was recently named co-program chair for the Disability Studies in Education special interest group of the American Education Research Association (2022-2024).

Alisha Nguyen

Clinical Assistant Professor, Residency Director

Alisha Nguyen is an early childhood educator whose areas of expertise include early childhood education, bilingual education, language and literacy, and family engagement. Her scholarship focuses on the intersectionality of language, power, race, class, and gender across educational settings and aims to foster racial, gender, and linguistic justice.

Nguyen's research projects have been recognized and funded by the National Council of Teachers of English, the International Literacy Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the American Educational Research Association. Her work has been published in Early Childhood Education Journal, NEOS: A Publication of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group, and Literacy Today.

Shamari Reid

Assistant Professor

Shamari Reid (he/him/his) is a teacher, educator, and scholar who explores how Black trans and queer youth and their communities sustain themselves amidst oppression. He is interested in how we collaborate with these communities to better transform schools into sites of equitable opportunity. Reid’s work also examines radical love as a moral imperative in social justice education, and as a path toward culturally sustaining school communities. His dissertation, which explores the agency of Black LGBTQ+ youth in NYC’s ballroom culture, was awarded the 2022 Dissertation of the Year Award by the Queer Studies SIG of AERA.

Dr. Reid is a 2020-2022 fellow in the NCTE Research Foundation’s Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Program. He also received a William T. Grant Fellowship to write Theories of Blackness, Indigeneity, and Racialization in Research to Reduce Inequality in the Lives of Young People. 

Lara Saguisag

Georgiou Chair in Children's Literature and Literacy; Associate Professor

Lara Saguisag is a children’s literature scholar and educator whose research, teaching, and community projects are informed by climate justice and energy justice movements. She is investigating the ways children’s cultural forms naturalize and interrogate human relationships with fossil fuels. Through the Children’s Literature Association’s Climate Justice Interest Group, which Saguisag founded and currently convenes, she works with colleagues to develop and promote climate justice pedagogies. With Marek Oziewicz, she co-founded Climate Lit, an open-access web resource for teaching climate change and climate justice through children’s and young adult literature.

Her monograph, Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers UP, 2018), received the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society and the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Single Book from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. She is also the author of several children’s books, including Animal Games/Mga Larong Hayop (Anvil Publishing, 2016) and the award-winning Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People (Anvil Publishing, 2015).

Andrew B. Torres

Clinical Assistant Professor of English Education 

Andrew B. Torres is an Afro-Boricua father, poet, educator, activist and scholar. He has worked as a teacher, tutor, researcher, instructional coach, workshop facilitator, and a high school social justice team lead. He completed his doctorate at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2021, where he was a College of Education Fellow and Research Enhancement and Leadership Fellow. His dissertation addressed how embodied arts, such as spoken word poetry, might address racial cultural trauma experienced by minority youth. 

Torres has performed his work at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Bowery Poetry Club, and El Museo del Barrio. Most recently he was the keynote speaker of the 6th Annual Computer Science Summit at Rutgers University. His publications include a chapter in HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip Hop Education Volume 3 (Peter Lang, 2021) and Critical Race Theory in Education: Informing Classroom Culture and Practice (Teachers College Press, 2019)

Karoline Trepper

Clinical Assistant Professor of English Education, Teacher Residency Program

Karoline Trepper (she/her/hers) is a teacher educator and researcher whose work examines multiple facets of teaching and teacher education, including teaching performance assessments, the design and enactment of project-based learning and affective approaches to literary interpretation, and school-university partnerships in teacher education. She has worked as a teacher in the Bronx, New York and Oakland, California, and has supervised teachers in the Stanford Teacher Education Program and its Hollyhock Fellowship Program 

Her research has appeared in Journal of Literacy Research, L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, and Compose Our World: Project-based Learning in Secondary English Language Arts (Teachers College Press, 2021).