Join Us As We Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander and Jewish American Heritage Month

David Orenstein, Ph.D. – Professor of Anthropology

Dr. David I. Orenstein is a tenured full professor of Anthropology at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He is the co-author of two books, 2015’s Godless Grace: How Non-Believers are Making the World Safer Richer and Kinder, and the November 2019’s Darwin’s Apostles: The Men Who Fought to Have Evolution Accepted, Their Times, and How the Battle Continues. A primatologist by early training he has written for numerous national and international freethinker and science publications.

Dr. Orenstein is a noted civil and human rights activist, representing the American Humanist Association at the United Nations through the NGO/DPI program. Dr. Orenstein is a sought-after speaker on human rights, science education and evolution acceptance. He has spoken on these topics nationally, in Europe and Asia. He is also an ordained humanist chaplain who serves on the board of several local and national organizations. Including, The Secular Humanist Society of New York; The Broader Social Impacts Committee of the Hall of Human Origins/Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, and also served as a board member and treasurer for the Center for Freethought Equality.

Jin Y. Shin, Ph.D. – Associate Professor

Dr. Jin Y. Shin received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science at the Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick in 2000. After obtaining his Ph.D., he worked as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI) in New Jersey and the Department of Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Before joining CUNY in 2016, he served as Chief Chemist at the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute (MERI) in New Jersey since 2004. Dr. Shin has authored and co-authored 30 peer-reviewed journals and conference proceeding papers Dr. Shin was appointed an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science at Medgar Evers College in January 2016. Dr. Shin’s specialty and research area is developing an analytical method for the trace levels of toxic chemicals, including persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and trace metals in the water/air/sediment/biota samples. He is also interested in analyzing cannabinoids in plants, marijuana products, and biological tissues to investigate their environmental impact: water use, pesticide use, energy use, air/water pollution, and community public health. Recently he was awarded two research grants, one (2023-25) for studying Air Pollution-Health-Climate Interactions in Southeast Queens, NY, and the other (2023-2024) for studying The Effect of Metal Exposure in Newborns.

Sam Groveman, Ph.D. – Research Associate/Adjunct Professor

Sam Groveman is a chemist and educator who graduated from Reed College in 2010 with a BA in chemistry and obtained a PhD. In chemistry from the City University of New York in 2017. He currently works as a research associate and adjunct professor at Medgar Evers College. His primary focus is on analytical, radio, and environmental chemistry, and he’s happy to manage a fleet of scientific instrumentation in the core facility that is used to conduct research and educate students.

Sam especially enjoys working with Medgar students and teaching them practical skills in the lab and getting them hands-on experience with Medgar’s scientific instrumentation. Sam also enjoys building and working with computers and robots. He has a strong interest in embedded systems like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, home automation, and 3D printing. He works hard to integrate technology with his chemistry research and education programs.

Keming Liu, Ph.D. – Professor of Linguistics and Literature

Dr. Keming Liu serves as the campus ESL liaison in addition to Professor of English. Her courses include Introduction to Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, World Literature, and Professional/Technical Writing. An internationally recognized translator and scholar, she is the author of the recently published book Twilight: A Contemporary Pastoral Poet in China (August 2022) as well as the volume Voices of the Fourth Generation: China’s Poets Today (2010), which was adopted as a required text for Asian literature courses at Hong Kong University and in the UK. Dr. Liu was an editorial consultant for the translation of Platform Monopoly《垄断平台》(2018). In June 2016 she led a doctoral seminar on translation theory and practice at St. Andrews University. In November 2016, she delivered the keynote address on discourse strategies at the Islands-in-Between International Conference at the University of West Indies in Barbados. Her academic works include “Fiction on the Verge: Testing Taboos in The Republic of Wine” in Palgrave’s Handbook of Magical Realism (2020), Adult ESL: Politics, Pedagogy, and Participation in Classroom and Community Programs (Erlbaum, 1998), a book-length primer, Fingertip Chinese (2nd ed., Weatherhill, 2011), along with a Chinese translation of Henry James’s short story “Hugh Merrow” (1987). Her articles have appeared in such scholarly journals as Urban Education, Geo-linguistics, and Wadabagei. She reviews linguistics and literature titles for Choice magazine. Dr. Liu’s short story, “The Red T-Shirt” was featured at Wavehill’s 1996 writer-in-residence workshop. She is actively involved in research on the diachronic and synchronic development of languages and literature.

Homeira Pajoohesh, Ph.D. – Associate Professor

Homeira Pajoohesh joined the Department of Mathematics of Medgar Evers College in 2007. Her research areas are topology and order theory and their applications in computer science. She has been involving her students in the computational part of her research. She is granted sabbatical leave for this coming academic year and plans to visit in person/virtually University of the Balearic Islands in Spain and Western Kentucky University. She plans to have students working on the projects resulting from these visits.

Ethan Gologor, Ph.D. – Interim Dean, School of Liberal Arts

Currently Interim Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, Dr. Ethan Gologor will be completing his 45th year at Medgar Evers College this semester. He was formerly chairman of the Psychology Department for 10 years.

Following his graduation from college with a major in mathematics, he was accepted as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Somalia, where he taught for two years. Following his receiving his M.A. in philosophy, he traveled in Europe and Israel for a year, eventually getting married on the beach at Eilat. Following his becoming a Ph.D in psychology, he worked for a year in Liberia, engaging in research in culture and cognition for Rockefeller University.

All of these traveling ventures illustrate his life-long interest in the diversity of cultures that characterize the world and that has been a mainstay in his work at Medgar Evers College. In recent years, he has spearheaded committees which seek to introduce students to the ethnic and religious diversity that can be found even within the relatively small confines of the borough of Brooklyn. For example, by inviting members of various faiths to a Passover seder which he conducted, he was able to share the historical, psychological and political emphases of Exodus with Moslem students, a Jesuit priest and a Baptist minister, to name but a few. And the most recent event organized by his position on the Social Justice Committee was a talk on the significance of the Jewish holidays for women given by a conservative rabbi.

Dr. Gologor’s work with the Peace Corps served as a spark for other volunteer enterprises as well. As a licensed psychologist, he volunteered as a mental health counselor for post 9-11 first respondents, and for New York State and the college during the pandemic. He served as a medical team volunteer for the New York Marathon for almost 20 years (in one of which he ran the 26.2 miles himself). His interest in sport prompted his volunteering for several years for the U.S. Open, during which he did everything from distributing water bottles to teaching toddlers how to handle a racquet and the proper etiquette for returning a tennis ball to the next court. He has also been a volunteer usher in his synagogue during High Holiday services.

Interests in sport, children and religion can also be found in his research and writings. He has written three books on sport psychology and numerous articles on parental issues—from sharing play dates to negotiating city streets to teacher conferences. His talk at a Unitarian Church was on the value of anger, and his review of a book on the hiding of children in France during the Holocaust was delivered during the martyrology service on Yom Kippur. This year he published an article, “Psychology and Judaism” in an on-line journal, Jewish Views.

Harsha Rajapakse, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor

Harsha completed her doctoral studies as University of Illinois as Chicago and applied her methods as a postdoctoral Scholar at Biomedical Division of University of Chicago to study gastrointestinal (GI) protein interactions. She is serving as the biochemistry professor at Medgar Evers College since 2014. Her research focusses on GI track protein interactions and the effects of environmental pollutants on those interactions. She is also passionate about plant-extracted protein-based antibacterial agents and educational research.