Amy Pattee

After completing her master's in library science at Rutgers University, Amy Pattee worked as a children's librarian at public libraries in Ocean County and Burlington County, New Jersey. She received her doctorate in library and information science from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She has published in journals related to library science and children's literature, and has contribute to professional journals School Library Journal and The Horn Book. Her most recent book, Developing Library Collections for Today's Young Adults, was published by Scarecrow in 2013. She teaches children's and young adult literature.

Amy Pattee's Curriculum Vitae

Lowry Pei

I grew up in St. Louis, got my B.A. in English at Harvard (1967) and my Ph.D. at Stanford (1975). I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war. I came to Simmons in 1985 after teaching at the University of Missouri, UC San Diego, and Harvard’s Expository Writing Program. Despite having done a dissertation on Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, I didn’t become a Victorianist; instead I’ve spent my career teaching writing. At Simmons I was director of Freshman Writing, later called Writing and Thinking, from 1985 to 1996, and then directed MCC, the first-year core/writing course, from 1996 to 1999. In 2004-2006, I led faculty workshops and seminars on teaching writing as part of the “Writing Infusion” initiative, whose goal is to have writing-intensive courses offered in all majors. I chaired the English Department 2002-2007.

I currently teach creative writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and Approaches to Literature, otherwise known as spring training for English majors.

Katherine Wisser

Katherine Wisser comes to SLIS from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she earned her doctorate in 2009 and master's degree in library and information science in 2000. Wisser also holds a master's degree in early American history from the University of New Hampshire. While in North Carolina, Wisser spent five years as the metadata coordinator for NC ECHO, a statewide program that encourages and supports use of appropriate metadata by member institutions to ensure online access to cultural heritage information facilitation, workshop instruction and individual institutional consultation. Prior to that, she spent two years as a libraries fellow in the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries cataloging and special collections departments. Wisser's articles have been published in, among others, American Archivist, Library HiTech, and Library Resources and Technical Services. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Technical subcommittee for Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). Wisser joined the Simmons SLIS faculty in Fall 2009.

Katherine Wisser's Curriculum Vitae

Peter Maramaldi

Rachel Galli

Nobel prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock wrote, “Everything is one. There is no way to draw a line between things.” This is certainly true in my own field of Neuroscience, where the study of brain and behavior integrates many areas of study and emphasizes the connection between mind and body. It is also true of my work here at Simmons. It is difficult to draw a line between my teaching, research, and mentoring efforts, in part because they are intertwined around a central theme of increasing the participation of women in the sciences. I traveled a nontraditional path in finding my passion and vocation, and I especially enjoy helping others explore their interests and career possibilities. Sometimes you’ll be surprised where life takes you, and it is the life skills and education you acquire in college that can help you make the most of your opportunities. I love to teach, and here at Simmons I’m able to work closely with students as they become active participants in a learning process that occurs in the classroom, in the research lab, and in advising relationships and extracurricular activities.

Rong Tang

Rong Tang received her doctorate from the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She has taught evaluation of information services, technology for information professionals, library automation systems, digital information services and providers...

Suzanne Leonard

Suzanne Leonard is Associate Professor of English, and co-coordinator of the college's interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author of Fatal Attraction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (Routledge, 2014).

She regularly instructs classes on American film and television studies, feminist media studies, women's literature, literary interpretation, and cultural studies, and frequently teaches courses affiliated with the Women's and Gender Studies department and the college's Gender and Cultural Studies Master's program. She also teaches graduate classes through the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at MIT.

Professor Leonard is most interested in the intersections between feminism and popular culture, and her work has examined topics including: the treatment of the adultery plot in feminist novels; marriage envy; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's epic romance; Lily Tomlin; political spouses and The Good Wife; reality television and celebrity culture; and working women in American film and television.

Professor Leonard is currently working on a book on marriage and wives called Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in Twenty-First Century American Culture.

Michael Brown

Michael L. Brown is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics. He came to Simmons in 1986 and, for his first fifteen years at the College, taught half-time in mathematics and statistics, and half-time in computer science. Following that period, he has been teaching entirely in mathematics and statistics.

Professor Brown’s interests have been wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. As an applied mathematician, earlier in his career, he published in major journals in mathematical statistics, biophysics, and medical informatics. He also produced working papers in computer hardware design and econometric modeling. He in addition published expository mathematics. He was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Research Center of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In recent years his interdisciplinary reach has taken new directions. He seeks to connect the mathematical sciences with issues of public interest, as well as with the arts. Twelve of his Letters to the Editor (eleven signed with his Simmons affiliation) on these topics have appeared in the New York Times. He is also concerned with the deeper motivations for learning and, more generally, questions of meaning and ethics in psychological life. He is a member of the Faculty Learning Community on Student Learning Theory, and has been a longtime member of the Simmons Honor Board. In the arts, he has a particular interest in theatre and drama, exemplified for instance by his very well-received performed readings at the Harvard Strindberg Symposium, a centennial gathering of scholars in honor of one of the founders of the modern theatre.

His Ph.D. is in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in mathematical statistics, from Harvard. His A.M. is in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in the mathematical physics of fluid dynamics, also from Harvard. His B.A. is from Columbia College of Columbia University in New York, where he was the valedictorian of his graduating class of more than 600 students.

Sarah Volkman

Sarah Volkman is a Professor of Nursing at Simmons who has been involved in preparing nursing students in the basic science content since 1989. She is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She holds a joint appointment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Immunology and Infectious Diseases where she is a Principal Research Scientist. 

In addition to teaching at Simmons, she continues to teach Infectious Diseases at Harvard University, where her scientific research interests involve understanding population genetics and the mechanisms of drug resistance in the human pathogen, Plasmodium falciparum. Dr. Volkman is an international expert on malaria and works with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Worldwide Antimalarial Drug Resistance Network, among other international groups focused on malaria. She is a Councilor for the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. She has received several awards including the Young Investigator Award by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and was a Senior Teaching Fellow and a Christensen Fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Volkman has been recognized for both her research and teaching at the Simmons School of Nursing and Health Sciences.

Tien Ung

Mary Wilkins Jordan

Mary Wilkins Jordan came to Simmons SLIS from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she earned her doctorate. Prior to entering academia, Jordan worked in public libraries as a director and administrator. Her research and consulting work now focuses on ways to help libraries to function better and to serve their communities more effectively. She teaches Management and also Evaluation classes, as well as Public Libraries, Reference, and the Internship class, all with a focus on helping students acquire the skills they need to be successful in their professional careers. Jordan also has a J.D. from the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and worked as an attorney before entering the library field.

Shirong Luo

Shirong Luo has been a member of the philosophy department at Simmons College since 2006. Prior to his appointment at Simmons, he had been a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College for two years (2004-2006). The first recipient of the Dean's Award for Exceptional Faculty Scholarship at Simmons College (2012), Dr. Luo has focused his research on Chinese philosophy of the classical period, comparative philosophy, and feminist ethics. He was an invited lecturer at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers (2008).

Among the many courses Dr. Luo has taught at Simmons are Asian Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, World Religions, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Philosophy and the Arts, Philosophy through Literature and Film, Philosophy of Human Nature, American Pragmatism, Biomedical Ethics, and MCC.

Judith Aronson

Judith Aronson has been teaching graphic design at Simmons for seventeen years and has been a practicing designer and photographer for more than thirty years. Prior to Simmons she taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University. Earlier in her career she was a program analyst in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in Washington, DC, served as a VISTA Volunteer in East Harlem, and worked as a city planner for the New York City Environmental Protection Administration. For fifteen years she lived overseas: three years in South East Asia and twelve in England where she was a photojournalist. Aronson holds a BA in American Studies from the University of Michigan and a MA in City Planning and a MA in Fine Art/Graphic Design, from Yale University.

Her special interests are typography, environmental design, and photojournalism. In 2003 she received a grant from the Colleges of the Fenway to teach the course Wayfinding: Design, Information Architecture and Public Spaces. Wayfinding is a specialty that applies design principles to information systems that help people move through complex urbanscapes — hospitals, airports, college campuses and the like. In 2006 Aronson had a one person retrospective in Boston of her color photographs, TACTILE |MERCANTILE, with pictures ranging from the young Mick Jagger, to the slums Harlem and the exotic scenery in South East Asia. In 2010 she published LIKENESSES, with the Sitters Writing About One Another, a book of black and white portraits of writers and artists. The book led to a number of exhibitions both in the US and England including at the Picture Gallery, Christ Church, Oxford, The Poetry Society, London and the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. A poetry competition sponsored by Bristol University in conjunction with the last show produced thirty poems each responding to one of her photographs. In 2015 the exhibition will move to the Cambridge University Library in England for twelve months.

Aronson’s photographs are held in collections at The National Portrait Gallery, London; Christ College, Cambridge; Keble College and Christ Church, Oxford University; Brotherton Library, Leeds University; and the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institute), Washington, DC. Her work has been published in The Sunday Telegraph, England, the New York Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, Ms. Magazine, and the Boston Globe.

Susan Duty

After obtaining a doctoral degree in occupational epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2002, I joined the nursing faculty in the nursing program at Simmons College. I am a Professor and Faculty Director of the Health Professions Education PhD Program. I teach research methods across the baccalaureate, master's and doctoral curriculums. I am also certified as an Adult Nurse Practitioner with specialization in Occupational Health. In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I work clinically at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, MA as a Nurse Research Scientist helping build the infrastructure for nursing research there.

My research agenda explores environmental exposures to plasticizers including phthalates and bisphenol A and I work collaborative with students and multidisciplinary faculty on studies exploring Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus colonization of people, pets and surfaces. I has many peer reviewed publications and have presented this work regionally, nationally and internationally. In my role as Nurse Research Scientist in the clinical setting, I have extended my scholarly activity into clinical research translation aimed at reducing 30-day readmissions, improving satisfaction with patient care, reducing hospital acquired adverse outcomes and improving the infrastructure for palliative care.

Grant funding has been secured from highly competitive National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, the National Institute for Environmental Health and Safety, as well as from the Simmons College President's Fund and from private foundations like the Passport Foundation and the New England Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing Alumnae Association. I recently completed a 2-year, $250,000 workforce development grant from the Commonwealth Corporation to improve the infrastructure for palliative care at Simmons College and at our practice partner site- South Shore Hospital.

I am a member of the Organization of Nurse Leaders Research Council, the MA Action Coalition - Academic Practice Partnership working group and I am the Treasurer of the Theta-at-large Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International. I serve as a peer reviewer for many top tier journals and have received The Theresa LaPlante Award for Excellence in Administration from Sigma Theta Tau.