Wednesday, June 1: Opening Plenary
TLC Staff & Sule Aksoy

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Friday, June 3: Faculty Plenary
Shawna Brandle, Anjana Saxena, Cheryl Smith

Shawna M. Brandle is a Professor of Political Science at Kingsborough Community College and a member of the faculty of the Digital Humanities program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research areas include human rights, media coverage of human rights and refugee issues, and Open Educational Practices in higher education. In Fall 2021, Dr. Brandle was a Fulbright Scholar at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. She is the author of Television News and Human Rights in the US & UK: The Violations Will Not Be Televised (Routledge 2015); her current book project is co-authored with Dr. Janet Reilly. She spends her spare time making art with her family.

Anjana Saxena is a Professor and Chairperson in Biology Department, Brooklyn College. She has done her Masters in Biochemistry from MS University, India and PhD in Reproductive Biology from Mumbai University, India. She then obtained post-doctoral training in Ariel University, Israel, Columbia university and NYU Langone Medical
Center and acquired multi-disciplinary expertise in biomedical research fields, and currently running a highly competitive research laboratory at Brooklyn College. She has received major fundings from NIH, NSF, NYAS and CUNY as a Principal Investigator.

Anjana Saxena’s research goal is to understand how cells perceive variety of stresses including DNA damage and trigger a cellular response. Specific focus is on how nucleolar stress factors regulate cellular fate (survival, cell death or senescence) during DNA damage response (DDR) where survival can lead to cancer phenotype. Few major research areas include understanding: 1) the role of RNA-binding proteins in regulating gene expression during DDR 2) how dietary methyl nutrients (e.g., dietary choline obtained from meat, eggs, milk) provide epigenetic regulations in obesity and gestational diabetes 3) how bacterial and fungal microbiomes affect cellular immunity that affect normal (e.g., inflammaging) or disease physiology (e.g., cancer and other metabolic disorders).

She has published 32 scientific publications in high-impact journals including Nature, Cancer Discovery, Science Immunology, JCI etc. She has mentored many research students in her laboratory at Brooklyn College, PhD (5, including as a co-mentor); MA (12 MA research, 3 library theses); UG (39 with multiple honors theses) and HS (16), many of them are minority and women in STEM.

Anjana Saxena is also an ACUE (The Association of College and University Educators) credentialed educator. She has always been very experimental with her teaching and describes her teaching as a “Guided Tour”. She engages students in thinking “outside of the text-book”, incorporates “C.R.E.A.T.E. approach” (Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next Experiment), Bloom’s Taxonomy and Fink’s progressive pedagogy of self-assessment. She teaches both UG and PhD Level courses in Microbiology, Cancer Biology, biochemistry and has developed multiple new courses.

Cheryl Smith is Associate Professor of English at Baruch where she teaches writing, American literature, and world literature. Her current book project, Poetic Justice: Poetry, Protest, and Democracy in Higher Education, looks at the value of poetry in the classroom, connecting it to the advancement of expression, educational equity, social liberation, and democracy in two periods of civic struggle: open admissions at CUNY and today. Cheryl has been also co-editor of Journal of Basic Writing since 2011. At Baruch, she is Dean’s Fellow for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Faculty Liaison to the CTL, and Faculty Director of the Honors Program. She serves on the CUNY Faculty Affairs Advisory Board and the Weissman Dean’s Council.

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Mon June 6: CUNY Student Plenary
CUNY Students