Amber Stubbs

Amber Stubbs graduated from Simmons College in 2005 with an B.S. in Computer Science and English, then attended Brandeis University where she earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science, specifically in the field of natural language processing. While at Brandeis she co-authored a book, Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning (O’Reilly, 2012) with James Pustejovksy.

Her doctoral dissertation, "A Methodology for Using Professional Knowledge in Corpus Annotation," involved creating an annotation methodology to extract high-level information — such a hospital patient's medical diagnosis — from narrative texts. As part of that research, she also developed the Multi-Purpose Annotation Environment (MAE) and Multi-document Adjudication Interface (MAI) software, which is used at institutions around the world for natural language processing research.

After completing her Ph.D., Amber worked as a Postdoctoral Associate under Ozlem Uzuner at the State University of New York at Albany.  During that time, she worked on the 2014 i2b2 Natural Language Processing Shared Task, which focused on recognizing risk factors for heart disease in medical records, as well as the identification and removal of personal information about patients from their records.

Amber became an Assistant Professor at Simmons College in 2014, where she teaches courses in both the Computer Science and LIS programs.  She is delighted to be back at Simmons, and enjoys helping students understand technology and how to make it work for them.

Amber Stubbs' Curriculum Vitae

Abbie Frost

Niloufer Sohrabji

As a college student I was drawn to economics because it taught me how to think about, and address the many challenges that ail our world. I became an educator because I wanted to share this knowledge and inspire my students to make a positive difference in the world.

Lisa Hussey

Lisa Hussey, who joined the GSLIS faculty in Fall 2008, was formerly the director of library services at DeVry University in Arizona, and has taught at the University of British Columbia and the University of Missouri, where she received her doctoral degree. She also served as program manager for the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science. Hussey has given several presentations on diversity in librarianship and what motivates minorities to choose a library science career.

Lisa Hussey's Curriculum Vitae

Lisa Brown

Peter Botticelli

Peter Botticelli has a doctorate in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.S.I. degree with a concentration in archives and records management from the University of Michigan School of Information. His most recent position was at University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science, where he directed the school's Digital Information Management (DigIn) graduate certificate program. Previously, he held research positions at Cornell University Library, the University of Michigan, and Harvard Business School. He has taught graduate courses on digital libraries, digital curation, scholarly communication, and digital preservation and has published research in history and archival studies.

Peter Botticelli's Curriculum Vitae

Lena Zuckerwise

Lena Zuckerwise is a political theorist specializing in contemporary political thought and democratic politics. Her first book, which will be published in 2015, brings the work of Hannah Arendt into the company of several key debates in democratic theory. Professor Zuckerwise’s writings on the subjects of post-colonial feminism, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and the theory of foundationalism will appear later this year in the Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Other interests include gender and feminist theory, and the politics of race in the United States. Professor Zuckerwise teaches courses in historical political thought; contemporary feminist theory; the politics of human rights; and modern and contemporary theories of justice. Prior to coming to Simmons, Professor Zuckerwise taught at Wellesley College and Mount Holyoke College in the political science and gender studies departments, respectively. She completed her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Zuckerwise lives in the city of Boston with her partner, three-year-old son, and corgi, Olive, who has befriended many of her students. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking and cooking.

Amitabh Dashottar

Dr. Dashottar joined the faculty at Simmons College in January 2013. Before Joining Simmons, Dr. Dashottar did Postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Investigative Imaging and his doctoral research at the Human Performance Laboratory at the Ohio State University.

Bruce Tis

Bruce Tis is a computer engineer having worked at Digital Equipment Corporation before entering academia. He joined the Simmons College faculty in 1998 after spending 11 years on the faculty at Boston University teaching graduate students in Computer Science and Computer Information Systems MS degree programs. He specializes in computer networks, computer and network security, operating systems, and database management systems. He has done research in distributed operating systems and is also interested in computer science education having published papers on curriculum design and computer science pedagogy and conducted workshops on computer security. Most recently he has spend considerable time designing, developing and teaching online courses.

James Corcoran

James Corcoran, an associate professor in the Department of Communications, is the author of two books on domestic terrorism. The first, Bitter Harvest: The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland, examined the rise of the anti-tax movement in rural America embodied by extremists groups such as the Posse Comitatus. NBC-TV turned the book, which was based on Corcoran's Pulitzer Prize nominated coverage of the murders of three U.S. marshals by a militant tax protest group, into a made-for-television movie, starring Rod Steiger, entitled "In the Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas." Bitter Harvest received the Gustav Meyers Center's award for Outstanding Book on the subject of human rights and the Golden Pen Award. Penguin Press reissued it with a new foreword in 1995 following on the Oklahoma City bombing. A third edition was reissued in 2005.

His second book, Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, was co-authored with Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Written after the Oklahoma City bombing, it traced the growth and impact of hate groups, militias, and racist demagogues.

Corcoran is a member of the United Nations' "Roster of Experts on Terrorism and Related Phenomena" and a recipient of the Bush Foundation Leadership Award, which is awarded annually to no more than 20 people who are considered of "substantial standing" in their fields. During his 10-year career as a journalist, which included work for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead and Newsweek, Corcoran received more than 24 state, regional, and national writing awards.

Martha Mahard

Martha Mahard has more than three decades of professional experience with the Harvard University Libraries, including work in photography and visual collections at the Fine Arts Library, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Harvard Theatre Collection of The Houghton Library. In addition to her numerous journal articles and presentations in the field of photographic archives, cultural heritage, and digital preservation, she is the co-author with Ross Harvey, of The Preservation Management Handbook: A 21st Century Guide for Libraries, Archives and Museums (published by Rowman and Littlefield in April 2014). With Michele Cloonan she was co-principal investigator for the IMLS (Institute of Library and Museum Services) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarians grant which supported the development and implementation of the Cultural Heritage Informatics concentration. She has served as a consultant on major projects for museums and libraries, including the Worcester Art Museum and the Boston Public Library, and is a current board member at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. Mahard received an M.A. in Theatre History from Tufts University, and her M.S. and D.A. from Simmons SLIS.

Martha Mahard's Curriculum Vitae

Josephine Atinaja-Faller

Gregory Slowik

Music courses cover a wide range, including music history, theory, and performance (through an inter-institutional agreement with the New England Conservatory of Music.) The music program at Simmons is an academically oriented one designed for liberal arts students who study music as a humanistic pursuit; examining prevailing musical, social and expressive influences from diverse eras and cultures.

My professional life has been divided into two areas, performer and teacher. Luckily, one enhances the other. For many years I performed a great deal of piano solo repertoire, a piano concerto and chamber music with colleagues in Boston, around New England and beyond. A solo concert at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, will always remain a highlight, closely followed by a number of chamber music concerts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and a radio broadcast on Chamberworks, heard on WGBH Radio, Boston.

Teaching has always been my first love, however, and I have served on the faculty of a small, European-style conservatory, The Longy School of Music in Cambridge, and at a large research institution where I taught music theory for 10 years at MIT, also in Cambridge. But teaching music history and theory in a liberal arts college is my preferred academic venue and Simmons College and I have been together for many years.

Writings on music appear in the Journal of the Haydn Society of Great Britain and in Abafazi, a journal exploring women of African descent ("Marian Anderson: The Lady from Philadelphia Revisited.") I frequently judge piano competitions for private music schools, statewide piano competitions for the Massachusetts and New Hampshire Music Teachers Associations as well as national competitions for the National Music Teachers Association.

Richard Wollman

Richard Wollman is Professor of Creative Writing, Shakespeare, and 17th Century Literature. He is both a poet and a sculptor whose work may be viewed on his website. 

Professor Wollman is on the Advisory Board for the Mass Poetry Outreach Program at UMass Lowell as well as the Massachusetts Cultural Council in Newburyport. He is on the Executive Committee of the Powow River Poets and is a member of both the Newburyport Art Association and the John Donne Society.