Eight new faculty members join 2020-21 SUNY PRODiG cohort

The College is pleased to announce that eight faculty members who joined the campus community for the fall 2020 semester have been accepted into the SUNY PRODiG cohort for the 2020-21 academic year:

Adolfo Bejar Lara, Languages, Literatures & Cultures
Latanya Brandon, Teaching & Learning
Matthieu Chapman, Theatre Arts
Aurora De Armendi, Art
Asilia Franklin-Phipps, Teaching & Learning
Christina Koehne, Mathematics
Ethan Madarieta, English
Ramon Vasquez, Teaching & Learning

This is the second cohort of SUNY faculty in PRODiG, (“Promoting Recruitment, Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth”), which launched in 2019. The systemwide program aims to increase the representation of historically underrepresented faculty at SUNY, and better serve an increasingly diverse student population, by providing professional development and salary support for a three-year period.

“One of the longest standing and most unfulfilled challenges facing higher education is to diversify the workforce of the academy and to create learning and working environments that are equitable and inclusive so that every member of our community can achieve their full promise,” said President Donald P. Christian. “PRODiG has created a framework and offered funding for intentional and sustained change and helped us take bigger and bolder steps in our journey to be a more inclusive campus.”

Faculty are nominated to the program after being hired based on their credentials, through the same competitive national search process followed for all vacant faculty positions.

PRODiG-supported faculty gain access to a network of colleagues across the state university system, as well as professional development opportunities offered through the SUNY Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. The salary support provided by SUNY positions the College to reinvest funding to further develop campus-based inclusion, retention and advancement initiatives.

Among the criteria for this cohort of PRODiG nominees are the following:

  • Faculty must be hired in full-time, tenure-track positions
  • They must be a member of an historically underrepresented minority group and/or a woman teaching/researching in a STEM+H discipline
  • They must have a start date after June 30, 2020, and before July 1, 2021

Please visit https://www.suny.edu/prodig/ to learn more about SUNY’s PRODiG initiative, and join us in supporting the 2020-21 cohort’s growth and success here at New Paltz.