Medgar Evers College Faculty Trio Named CUNY Career Success Fellows
The CUNY Office of Transformation recently announced three Medgar Evers College (MEC) faculty members as Career Success Fellows—Professor Jade Robertson, Dr. Rosa Zavala-Gutierrez, and Dr. Shiraz Mujtaba. The threesome is among approximately 20 faculty members across CUNY who have been tapped annually in the past two years to think about the best ways CUNY faculty can support our students in their future lives and careers. Career Success Fellows are chosen for their experience, motivation, and potential to be campus and CUNY-wide leaders of this important initiative. Supporting CUNY students in their lives beyond CUNY is one of Chancellor Matos Rodríguez’s key goals and is also a significant part of the new strategic plan.
Professor Robertson, an assistant professor of mass communications at MEC, is a groundbreaking intercessory artist, choreographer, and filmmaker whose work explores how dance can be used as a ministry to uplift people of color and heal all people. Her spirited and soulful movement style earned her the Chuck Davis Emerging Choreographer Fellowship at BAM. Her critically acclaimed dance film, Recharge, premiered online in 2020 and speaks directly to the racial dialogue happening in Black America.
Dr. Zavala-Gutierrez is an associate professor of computer science and the chair of MEC’s Physics and Computer Science Department. A 10-year faculty member, she has been committed to fostering computer science education for underrepresented minority students and started researching computer science education, which resulted in publications in CS education conferences and journals. Her research expertise is in artificial intelligence, semantic Web, recommender systems, and data science.
Dr. Mujtaba is another decade-long MEC faculty member and an associate professor in the Department of Biology. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Immunology of HIV/AIDS. Before coming to MEC, Mujtaba pursued post-doctoral training at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where he established his own research lab and served as an independent principal investigator and assistant professor. Since coming to MEC, Mujtaba has taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses and is currently the course coordinator of Biotechnology and Society.
Current Career Success Fellows faculty have pioneered effective (and easy) methods of helping students understand the relationship between classroom learning and careers that can be adapted to every field (for example, used successfully in business, statistics, art history, and other courses). The expansion of the Career Success Fellows in Spring 2023 is a focused effort by CUNY to engage more faculty in this work.
