New Faculty

Andrew Aprile is an early childhood music educator and a doctoral lecturer in the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at Queens College, City University of New York. Dr. Aprile’s preschool music teaching and work as an early childhood teacher educator and researcher coalesce around values of cultural responsiveness and social justice, applying, advocating, and defending play-based, arts-rich, developmentally appropriate pedagogies as a means to tap into children’s nascent sense of joy and empathy, so vital in the first years of schooling.

Dr. Iantheia Calhoun Dr. Calhoun has taught over 20 years as a music educator and band director in the Chicagoland, Bloomington, Indiana, and New York areas. During that time, she taught 7th through 12th grade general music and music technology, as well as directed 7th through 8th grade choir and 4th through 12th grade bands. While teaching as a full-time band director in Westchester County, New York, she founded and directed Jazz Elite, a jazz program for middle and high school students.

Dr. Calhoun served as an Adjunct Professor at Westchester Community College, teaching a classical trumpet studio and as the Associate Instructor in the African American Arts Institute and Music Education Department in Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. As a Music Education Associate Instructor, she held the following positions: University Supervisor for music education student teachers; Associate Instructor for Methods and Materials for Teaching Instrumental Music, Elementary Music, and Choral Music; and Coordinator for theYoung Winds Program.

Dr. Calhoun recently earned her PhD in Music Education with a cognate field in Jazz and African American Soul Studies from Indiana University. The topic of her dissertation was “The Effects of a Systematic Vocalization Method on Jazz Performance and Self-Efficacy.” She collaborated with Dr. Kevin Watson and Dr. Peter Miksza in a research study entitled “The Effect of Physical Practice, Mental Practice, and Mental Imagery on Performance of an Improvised Solo;” which she presented via a research poster at the 2016 Big Ten Academic Alliance Conference. She presented her dissertation pilot study via a research poster and Lightning-Talk at the 2018 Big Ten Academic Alliance Conference, and lecture at the 2019 Jazz Education Network Conference in Reno, Nevada.

Dr. Calhoun received her master’s degree from Jacobs School of Music in 2015, with a concentration in jazz trumpet. While working on her master’s degree, she worked as the Associate Instructor for the IU Soul Revue, which concentrated on performance of Black popular music. She wrote and arranged horn parts, conducted instrumental sectionals, and performed lead-trumpet with the ensemble. She also holds the following degrees: M.S. in School Building Administration from Mercy College in New York (2007); M.A. in Music Technology from New York University (1995); and B.A. in Music Education from Western Illinois University (1992). Dr. Calhoun shares her love of music by performing around the world with various ensembles playing a variety of music (e.g. classical, blues, jazz, R&B, neo-soul) and educating students as a guest classical and jazz conductor and clinician at schools around the United States.

Michelle Fraboni is Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary & Early Childhood Education (EECE). She has a doctorate from Columbia University Teachers College in Instructional Technology & Media, MSEd in Elementary Education from Queens College, and Bachelors degrees from the University of Minnesota in Elementary Education and Sociology/Criminal Justice. Her research focuses on fostering preservice teachers’ professional identity through their engagement in face-to-face and online learning communities. Additional research interests include how faculty mindset and teaching practices influence college students’ sense of belonging and academic success.

Before Fall 2020, Dr. Fraboni spent more than ten years working with the Center for Teaching & Learning at Queens College. She served as Associate Director from 2013 – 2015, and Director from 2015 – June 2020, providing QC faculty with opportunities to enhance their teaching in online and face-to-face environments. She continues to work on pedagogy and faculty development for the STEM Bridges Across Eastern Queens grant (http://hsistem.qc.cuny.edu), funded by the United States Department of Education.

Dr. Fraboni is the Co-Director of Transitions to Teaching (https://ttt.qc.cuny.edu), a hybrid community (entirely online since Spring 2020), dedicated to creating a sense of belonging and community for students considering becoming elementary school teachers. She was also the Co-Director of the Cross Campus Teacher Education Collaborative (CCTEC) and Jumpstart@QC. Both projects connected students across three CUNY campuses (Queens College, Queensborough Community College, and LaGuardia Community College), enabling them to connect with peers online and in-person to collaborate on projects designed to improve writing for academic purposes, develop team-based problem-solving skills, improve digital literacy, and promote a sense of belonging in teacher education. 

Dr. Fraboni joined the QC faculty in Fall 1998 as Lecturer in EECE, where she has taught courses in digital literacy and other topics to over a thousand students over the years. She has contributed to her department, the College, and CUNY in myriad ways. In EECE, she has served as department webmaster, tech-consultant, faculty developer, coordinator of the undergraduate program, and deputy chair.  She has served on many QC and CUNY committees, including the Queens College Middle States Committee, the QC Student Technology Fee Committee, and CUNY’s Committee on Academic Technology. 

When she is not working at Queens College, Dr. Fraboni enjoys going to the theatre, visiting the New York Botanical Garden (https://www.nybg.org), and singing in the Queens College Choral Society (http://www.qcchoralsociety.org). A Minnesota native, she has lived in Queens for many years and considers herself an honorary New Yorker.  

Guoxiang (Emma) Hu is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Queens College. She is a physical chemist and uses computational chemistry methods to study functional materials for energy sustainability. She was awarded the Ph.D. in Chemistry from University of California, Riverside in 2018, studying surface chemistry and catalysis from first-principles density functional theory. She then joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Postdoctoral scholar from 2018 to 2020, where she studied strongly correlated metal oxides and their interfaces using many-body quantum Monte Carlo and two-dimensional materials via computational high-throughput and machine learning approaches. She began her current position at Queens College in 2020, and her research group uses multiscale simulations as well as machine learning to solve important problems in three energy-related applications: catalysis, neuromorphic computing, and solar harvesting.​​

Jun Li received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, in 2017, and his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the School of Computer Science, Fudan University, China, in 2009 and 2012. In 2017-2020, he was an assistant professor at the School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University. Since 2020, he joined the Queens College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York, as an assistant professor. Merging the gap between theory and practice, his research studies both theoretical and practical challenges of deploying erasure coding in distributed systems for storage, analytics, and machine learning.

Dr. James Lowry received his PhD from University College London (UCL). Currently he is a lecturer at the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies of the University of Liverpool in the UK. He will join GSLIS (Graduate School of Library and Information Studies) of Queens College in the Spring of 2020. Dr. Lowry has extensive international professional and academic experience, working in diverse organizational and cultural contexts. His primary area of expertise is in the area of digital government, digital archives and digital records management. He has also done research in the area of critical data studies, data literacy, statistical data analysis and information visualization in formal educational settings. His studies found that while critical data literacy on the part of data users is a vital but under-developed area of the open government ecosystem, and information professionals must do more to support citizens in critically reading data not only for its content, but for its reliability and authenticity. This is a line of work Dr. Lowry hopes to continue to pursue in his research and professional service.

Dr. Lowry is still in UK in 2019 Fall. He will start teaching for us (GSLIS) from 2020 Spring.

Robin Naughton, PhD is an experienced user-centered researcher, technologist, digital librarian, and educator with over 20 years of experience designing, developing and managing interactive products throughout all phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and across multiple platforms (web, mobile, tablet, interactive whiteboard, etc.). Her research focuses on human-computer interaction (HCI) and mental models, specifically how to design interactive systems that are useful, easy to use and enjoyable.

Dr. Naughton has extensive experience in designing and developing interactive educational products. Prior to her current position, she ran the digital program for the New York Academy of Medicine Library, where she built a digital lab to digitized rare books and manuscripts and developed the Digital Collections and Exhibits website to share digitized collections. Dr. Naughton was also a digital consultant in educational technology and worked with LearningExpress, an EBSCO company, Oxford University Press, English Language Teaching, and Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. She built and managed interactive educational products (web & mobile), online courses created for public and state libraries, the transition of print to eBooks, interactive whiteboard products for students and teachers learning and teaching English, and elearning courses for test preparation.

Dr. Naughton holds a PhD in Information Science from Drexel’s College of Computing and Informatics. Her MA and BFA degrees are in English from Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Ph.D. research and teaching areas include Caribbean and Latinx literatures and cultures, bilingualism, and transnational feminism. She has a particular interest in borders, feminism, and translation. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press 2014) to be published in Spanish as Julia de Burgos: ícono puertorriqueña (University of Illinois Press 2021). She is editing a bilingual anthology entitled “I Am My Own Path: The Writings of Julia de Burgos” and she is editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010). Her translation of Mayra Santos Febres’s collection of poetry Boat People is in contract with Cardboard House Press.
Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Latino Studies Journal, CENTRO: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Translation Review, and Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. She has received awards from the Woodrow Wilson and Mellon foundations, the American Association of University Women, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

Md Mahbubur Rahman received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Wayne State University in 2020 and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in 2012. His research interests include Low-Power Wide-Area Networks, Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Distributed Systems. He co-primary-authored a paper that was nominated for the best paper award at ACM SenSys 2016. He also co-authored a paper that received the best paper award at IEEE ICII 2018. In 2019, he received the Michael E. Conrad Outstanding Graduate Research Publication Award for publishing the most significant research article in the field of Computer Science at Wayne State University. He has also published many research articles in the top-tier conferences (e.g., ACM SenSys, ACM/IEEE IoTDI, IEEE ICNP, etc.) and journals (e.g., IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, etc.) of Computer Science.

Yongwu Rong received his B.S. from University of Science and Technology of China, and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. After a postdoctoral appointment at Michigan State University, he joined the George Washington University where he stayed from 1992 to 2019 before joining Queens College. Dr. Rong has visited a number of institutions including Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he has served as a program director at National Science Foundation on several occasions.

Dr. Rong’s research background is in 3-dimensional manifolds and knot theory, a branch in the area of low dimensional topology. He also has a strong interest in mathematical applications in other disciplines and has collaborated widely with people outside mathematics. He was the founding director for the George Washington Institute for Mathematical Sciences (GWIMS) which promotes interdisciplinary collaborations involving mathematics. As an educator, Dr. Rong has a strong commitment in the education of our students. While at GW he served as the principal investigator for several training grants including the Joint Undergraduate Mathematics and Physics (JUMP) Scholarship grant and the Data-Driven Mathematics and Statistics Training, Education, & Research (Data MASTER) grant. At his leisure time, Dr. Rong enjoys music, tennis, and running. He was a gold medalist for 1500m men while in college and has participated in a number of marathons.

Dr. Jay Shuttleworth joins Queens College as an Assistant Professor of Social Studies in the Department of Secondary Education and Youth Services. He holds a B. A. in history from the University of California, Davis and an M. A. and Ph.D. in Teaching Social Studies from Teachers College, Columbia University. He was a Core Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University, and he was most recently an Assistant Professor of Education at Long Island University, Brooklyn.

His research interests include global citizenship education, social studies teacher education, and sustainable living education. He brings with him funding from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources grant program, and he has previously secured research and curriculum development support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
He is a member of Teaching Tolerance’s Teaching Hard History Advisory Board, and he is an editorial advisory board member for the journals, Social Studies and the Young Learner and Social Studies Research and Practice. He has published work in journals like Teachers College Record and Teaching and Teacher Education, and he has appeared as a guest on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor and Public Broadcasting Service’s Central Valley Chronicles.

While a secondary teacher, he was named a finalist for the California Teacher of the Year distinction (California Department of Education), and he studied education in Japan on a Fulbright Memorial Fellowship.

Mara Steinberg Lowe is an Assistant Professor at CUNY Queens College in the department of Linguistics and Communication Disorders. She received her PhD in 2020 from New York University. Her research interests include the neural and cognitive processes underlying language processing, recovery from acquired speech and language disorders, and the use of neuroimaging and neurorehabilitation techniques to improve treatment efficacy for people with communication disorders. Mara is also a practicing speech language pathologist with expertise in the assessment and treatment of neurogenic communication and swallowing disorders.

Sonali Sugrim received her MLS with a certificate in the Preservation of Cultural Materials from Queens College in 2017. She has an MA in Public History from St. John’s University. Sonali has worked as the Cataloging and Electronic Resources Librarian at Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and as the Head of Acquisitions at SUNY Stony Brook University, overseeing the electronic resources management and migration to Ex-Libris Alma/Primo. In addition, Sonali volunteers for the Queens Memory Project creating audio clips and transcriptions.

Dr. John Svadlenka is a Doctoral Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. He has taught courses in Software Engineering and Operating Systems Principles at Queens College since 2019. His research interests are in the areas of matrix approximation, dimensionality reduction, and algorithm design for Big Data. Dr. Svadlenka also has nearly thirty years of industry experience in software design, architecture and implementation. He has worked in a variety of technology environments delivering software solutions for clients across a broad range of applications.

An immigrant from the Dominican Republic and a product of the CUNY system, Fidel J. Tavárez is proud to be joining Queens College’s History Department as an assistant professor. Broadly speaking, he is a scholar of the Spanish Atlantic, and his research explores how the Hispanic world—including Spain and Latin America—governed, harnessed, and adapted to the effects of early modern globalization and capitalism. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Imperial Machine: Assembling the Spanish Commercial Empire in the Age of Enlightenment. Committed to cultivating wide-ranging curiosity, Dr. Tavárez offers courses on Latin American, Atlantic, and global history. Before joining Queens College’s History Department, he held an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Global History of the Freie Universität Berlin and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago. He earned a Ph.D. in history at Princeton University, a B.A. in history at The City College of New York, and an A.A. in Social Sciences and Humanities at LaGuardia Community College.

Dr. Bryan Thornton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational and Community Programs at Queens College, City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of California, Los Angeles and California State University, Los Angeles. Prior to entering his doctoral program, Dr. Thornton worked as a special education teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District for over 12 years. His experiences as a special educator continue to inspire his research interests which focus broadly on inclusive education in addition to the impact of disability-related stigma on students with disabilities.

Chia-Ling Tsai received the B.Sc. and B.Sc. (Hons.) degrees in computer science from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in1994 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY, in 2003. She joined National Chung Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering. Since 2008, she has been with Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Dr. Tsai has published papers in high-impact IEEE journals, including IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. Her current research interests include biomedical image analysis, computer vision, image processing, image registration, natural language processing in literacy education, and interdisciplinary undergraduate research.

As Head of Special Collections and Archives at the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library, Annie’s goal is to maximize use of the collections for research, teaching, and community engagement. Prior to her position at Queens College she served as the Archivist and Scholarly Communications Librarian at SUNY Maritime College, and as Project Archivist at the Museum of the City of New York, Queens Museum, and Columbia University. She recently completed a master’s degree in Maritime and Naval Studies at SUNY Maritime College, where she published a digital capstone exploring sailor diaries of the twentieth century. She received her Masters of Library and Information Studies and Archives Certificate from Queens College in 2010.

Dr. Megan Rhodes Victor is an anthropological archaeologist with a focus on historical archaeology, encompassing sites from between roughly 1500 and 1900 AD. Her research focuses on colonialism, on commensality and commensal politics – the way that people interact through food and drink, including the negotiations and nostalgia that come with those interactions – especially among historically marginalized groups, on frontier spaces, on gendered practices, and on the intersection of archaeology and video games (including augmented reality and virtual reality) known as “archaeogaming.” Her most recent work examines the archaeology of taverns, saloons, and social negotiation in 18th and 19th-century North America, including The Molly House Project. “Molly houses” were clandestine 18th-century enterprises that operated in taverns’ back rooms and upper floors, providing opportunities for gay, transgender, and cross-dressing individuals in England and the English Colonial World to meet with one another in a world where such actions had fatal consequences in the eyes of the law. The Molly House Project is the first to archaeologically examine these spaces of the LGBTQ+ community.

Victor received her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan (2010), her M.A. in Anthropology (2012) and her Ph.D. in Anthropology (2018), both of which were from William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Most recently, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Archaeology Center at Stanford University, where she directed the archaeological excavations of the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters (ACLQ) Project, which examined the daily lives of the Chinese workers who lived at the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters (1880s to 1925) and were employed at Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm and, later, at Stanford University during its early years. The ACLQ Project focused on these workers’ quotidian activities, with the specific aim of understanding what these individuals were doing when they were not laboring, including commensal politics and leisure. Here at Queens College, in addition to her active research projects and curricular contributions, Dr. Victor has an extensive archaeological collection that she will be using for student projects and hands-on historical archaeological lab experience.

Yinxian Zhang is a political sociologist who is broadly interested in public discussion, ideology, state-society relations, and regime legitimacy. Her current book project combines qualitative and computational methods to explore the nature of the Chinese public sphere and its changes under the influence of state control. Yinxian received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2019. Before joining the Department of Sociology at Queens College, Yinxian was a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University.