Catherine Paden

Catherine Paden (PhD, Northwestern University) is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science & International Relations, and Dean of the Undergraduate Program, at Simmons University. Her research and teaching interests focus on racial politics, social movements, interest groups, and how underrepresented groups gain political representation. She is the author of Civil Rights Advocacy on Behalf of the Poor (2011, pb 2013), which assesses whether, and how, low-income African Americans gain representation in anti-poverty legislative battles. Her current research examines the impact of local civil rights and economic justice organizing on national policy and interest group priorities. She has published her research in the DuBois Review and has contributed research on the Nation of Islam to a volume on religion and American politics (University of Virginia, 2012). Paden has served as the Faculty Assistant to the Dean on Diversity Initiatives, on the Dean's Diversity Task Force, and on the President's Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council (PDIAC). As Dean of the Undergraduate Program, Paden is responsible for the implementation of the new Simmons core curriculum, the Simmons PLAN (Purpose, Leadership, ActioN).

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.

Shirong Luo

Shirong Luo has been a member of the philosophy department at Simmons University 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 University (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.

James Huddleston

License/ Certifications/Awards 

Professional Organizations Membership

Dr. Huddleston joined the physical therapy faculty at Simmons University in 2008, after several years as an adjunct faculty member in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences. He has worked in many different health care settings over the course of his career, with a concentration in acute care and mind/body medicine settings, including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the Benson/Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at MGH in Boston, and York Hospital in York, ME. He has a strong clinical background in physical rehabilitation, cardiac wellness and lifestyle behavior change. Dr. Huddleston is the author of several book chapters and articles on topics ranging from exercise to health behavior change. His current clinical work and areas of interest are in cardiac wellness, and health coaching for health promotion, wellness and chronic disease management.

Daniel Joudrey

Daniel Joudrey, an expert in organizing information, joined the Simmons faculty in 2005 and teaches information organization and three separate cataloging courses. Prior to coming to Simmons, Joudrey was a teaching fellow and research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh for Dr. Arlene G. Taylor, a well-known cataloging authority. Joudrey was also a metadata policy intern at the Library of Congress. Before that, he worked for an international non-profit social services organization. He is lead author for the newly revised and expanded 11th edition of Introduction to Cataloging and Classification and co-author of the 3rd edition of The Organization of Information. Joudrey received his Ph.D. and MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and his B.A. in theatre from George Washington University. He writes on education for cataloging and metadata, subject access, and other cataloging topics. He has been a member of the American Library Association for nearly 15 years.

Daniel Joudrey's Curriculum Vitae

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.

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...

Rich Gurney

Dr. Gurney is an expert in the field of Green Chemistry Education, where he has been actively developing curricula for the past 13 years. He focuses his teaching and research on the applications of green chemistry and finding solutions for everyday problems using materials that are "benign by design." As the Principle Investigator and Director of the Undergraduate Laboratory Renaissance Program, funded in part by the W. M. Keck Foundation and the National Science Foundation, Dr. Gurney is currently studying the effectiveness of an entirely project-based, research-integrated, greener organic chemistry laboratory experience as one component of a completely re-engineered, undergraduate, green-laboratory curriculum. The ULR Program encompasses a fundamental reengineering of the undergraduate laboratory curriculum using the principles of green chemistry to expose students to the excitement of research beginning in their first-semester of their undergraduate career. The integrity of the knowledge learned within the ULR laboratory sequence has been maintained, while providing an environment for students to hone their higher-order cognitive skills such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. From 2008 – 2013, the W. M. Keck Foundation supported the effort to expand this pedagogy to course-based laboratories not only in Chemistry, but also in Physics and Biology, with a total of 9 faculty participants. Dr. Gurney is also highly active in the development of greener polymeric systems capable of closed-loop molecular recycling, in collaboration with Dr. Debora Martino at INTEC (Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química) and the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina. Funding in part to support undergraduate participation in this collaboration and research has been provided by the (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina (CAI+D Tipo II PI 11-57), CONICET (PIP 112-200801-01079 and D-1280/2011) Argentina, the NSF OISE (#1031394), the Semiconductor Research Corporation Educational Alliance-Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, and the Presidential Fund for Faculty Excellence at Simmons University for the financial support. Dr. Gurney is one of the 16 founding members of the Green Chemistry Education Network and one of the ten founding faculty Board Members for the Green Chemistry Commitment.

Lisa Hussey

Lisa Hussey, who joined the SLIS 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

Peter Maramaldi

Peter Maramaldi, PhD, MPhil, LCSW, MPH is a Professor at the Simmons University School of Social Work with faculty appointments at the Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology. Dr. Maramaldi's expertise in gerontology, evidence-based health promotion, interprofessional teaming, and integrated healthcare delivery has made him a leader in the field of behavioral health.  His teaching, research and consultation services are informed by his 30 years of practice, community organizing, and research experience with diverse populations in urban and rural residential and community-based settings.

Dr. Maramaldi's clinical experience is wide ranging with pediatric, adult, and geriatric populations.  He has worked in services for: caregivers, elders, assistance for children and families, victims of human trafficking, post-adoption programing and services, in-home biopsychosocial assessment and treatment planning, hospital-based psychosocial services, quality improvement initiatives, non-profit management and fundraising.

His cross-cultural acumen is exceptional.  Dr. Maramaldi spent 16 years in residence at the International House in New York City, which is a unique enterprise founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1924 to promote international understanding among emerging world leaders.  Dr. Maramaldi was retained to develop and deliver the institution's first yearly cross-cultural mental health services for over 700 graduate researchers, students and trainees representing more than 100 countries.

In research Dr. Maramaldi has had consistent NIH and foundation funding. He collaborates extensively with national teams of researchers addressing social and behavioral determinants of health with patients, caregivers and the healthcare workforce. He has conducted applied research in a range of settings including long-term care facilities, community and hospital-based health and mental health settings, and innovative dental services.  His studies include promoting cancer screening, addressing health disparities, testing intervention models using randomized clinical trials, developing and taking to scale quality improvement approaches using behavioral interventions, and adopting safety models from the aviation industry to develop cultures of quality to eliminate errors in outpatient dental treatment and surgery.  His most recent national work, based at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, investigates how healthcare teams are structured to deliver high quality care to frail elders in the community with specific interest in the cost implications of various team models.

Dr. Maramaldi is the recipient of several national career development and mentoring awards in the areas of oncology and gerontology.  During the Obama Administration, he was among a select group of social workers invited to participate in a White House Briefing on the Affordable Care Act. More recently he was named an expert participant for a Congressional Briefing on the future of the healthcare workforce to improve care for the Nation's aging adult population. He serves on numerous national boards, committees and special work groups including one that planned and acquired funding for a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study, which focuses on integrating social needs care into the Nation's healthcare system. 

Dr. Maramaldi is a first-generation college graduate completing his undergraduate training at Montclair State University in New Jersey while working full-time. From there he completed his MSSW, MPH, MPhil, and PhD Degrees at Columbia University in New York City.  More recently he completed an advanced management certificate program at Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Joel Blanco-Rivera

Joel A. Blanco-Rivera earned his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences. His research interests are the study of the relation between archives and transitional justice in Latin America, government accountability, and the documentation of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. He has an MSI with specialization in archive and records management from the School of Information at the University of Michigan. From 2004 to 2005, he was a lecturer at the University of Puerto Rico's Graduate School of Information Sciences and Technologies, where he taught courses for the certificate in archives and records management. His dissertation research is a case study of the work of the National Security Archive in the context of transitional justice in Latin America. It focuses on the efforts of this organization to obtain U.S. declassified records for investigations about past human rights violations in Latin America. He has been teaching in the archives area at Simmons since the spring of 2012.

Joel Blanco-Rivera's Curriculum Vitae

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.

Paul Abraham

Paul Abraham was born and raised in Boston and was connected enough to the “Athens of America” to stay here for his degrees: his undergraduate studies at Boston College, his master’s at Boston University and his Doctorate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  He majored in French at BC and started traveling back then with a year in France and a semester in Mexico. His first position was teaching French and Spanish in Brookline, Subsequently, he spent a summer in Spain and a sabbatical in Japan, just after earning his TESL degree at BU.

After several years in Brookline, Abraham went on to teach international students and do administration at the Center for English Language and Orientation Programs (CELOP) at Boston University. From there, he went to head up a similar program at Bradford College in Haverhill, MA.

After completing his doctorate in Reading and Second Language Acquisition at Harvard, he became a faculty member in the Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language Program at Simmons. A few years later, he became the Program Director. 

Abraham’s first sabbatical in 2003 took him to the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) as a Fulbright Scholar where he taught a graduate seminar in second language reading as well as an undergraduate course in applied linguistics.  The Fulbright was followed up by a Fulbright Alumni Award between USACH and Simmons University with faculty and student exchanges from 2004-2007.  

Abraham calls his second sabbatical his “Asian” sabbatical. In spring 2013, Abraham served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist for a month at Dong Thap University in Cao Lahn, Vietnam, where he taught undergraduates, English language faculty, and local teachers. His focus was on test taking skills and strategies.

He followed up with a trip to China with Primary Source where he visited migrant schools in Shi-an and Beijing.  At the end of the term, he was invited to Yamagata University in Yamagata, Japan, where he observed classes in public schools and universities and piloted a small research project on teacher attitudes towards teaching English.  

Currently, Abraham directs both the MATESL Program and the Language and Literacy Program, a Special Education language-based reading program, in the Education Department. 

Abraham is a frequent presenter at TESOL and he has coauthored, with Daphne Mackey, an ESL reading and vocabulary series, Contact USA, with Pearson as well as Get Ready: Interactive Listening and Speaking, a low-level listening and speaking book.

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.