Academic leadership

My academic leadership has focused on program building, faculty governance, curricular innovation, undergraduate research, student success, and cross-campus collaboration.

I currently serve as Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures and Director of Global and Regional Studies. I previously served as Director of the Honors Program, where I worked to expand enrollment, strengthen student programming, support a living-learning community, develop campus-wide undergraduate research opportunities, support transfer students, and build resources connecting students to grants, fellowships, mentoring, and other academic opportunities.

My institutional service has included Faculty Senate, Rank and Tenure, Core Curriculum working groups, Strategic Planning Taskforces, Institutional Effectiveness/WSCUC work, program review, search committees, and the Fulbright Student Campus Advisor role. I have also founded and organized academic initiatives such as the SMC Student Research Conference and Showcase, faculty scholarship support programming, film festivals, international education events, and student-facing curricular and co-curricular opportunities.

Across these roles, I am especially interested in how liberal arts institutions can connect academic excellence, student belonging, mission, ethical leadership, and innovation. As a Silicon Valley-adjacent liberal arts college, Saint Mary’s has a distinctive opportunity to help students think critically, humanely, and creatively in the age of AI and technological transformation.

Beyond Saint Mary’s, my leadership experience also includes serving on boards and in elected leadership roles for national and international scholarly organizations, as well as organizing national and international conferences, conference sessions, and scholarly networks that bring together faculty across institutions, disciplines, and countries.