Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Dr. Caitlin Elsaesser is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. She is a licensed clinical social worker and completed her MSW and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. The overarching goal of Dr. Elsaesser’s work is to partner with youth and communities to create health promotion efforts that are empowering and accessible. Dr. Elsaesser’s work is guided by critical race and feminist theories. With an understanding that those with lived experience hold key expertise in health, her work draws on community-based participatory methodology. Her career as a researcher is built on a decade of direct experience working with adolescents and families in Chicago, first as a high school teacher and later as a social worker. 

Dr. Phoebe Godfrey is an Associate Professor-in-Residence in Sociology at UCONN.  She teaches courses on Society and Climate Change, Sustainable Societies, Sociology of Food, Sociology of Education and many others but in all, her focus is on engaging students in order to help them explore their potentials.  She considers her teaching and her non-profit work as central to her commitment to social and ecological justice.  She the co-editor of a two-volume reader – Systemic Crises of Global Climate Change: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender and Emergent Possibilities for Global Sustainability Intersections of Race, Class and Gender, Routledge 2016. More recently, she is also the co-editor of Global [Im]-Possibilities: Exploring The Paradoxes of Just Sustainabilities, Bloomsbury Press, 2021 and author of Understanding Just Sustainabilities:  A Case Study of a Share-Use Kitchen in Connecticut, Routledge, 2021. She is the co-founder (with her wife Tina Shirshac) of the non-profit CLiCK (Commercially Licensed Co-operative Kitchen) in Windham that is an incubator for local food businesses.  She considers her teaching and non-profit work as central to her commitment to social and ecological justice.

Micah Heumann, Master of Arts in Psychology, Doctoral student in Educational Leadership.  Director of the Academic Center for Exploratory Students at the University of Connecticut.  Research on microaggressions committed against BIPOC students and Black student experience in advising spaces at a PWI.  Two incredible kiddos Asher (13) and Daniel (16) that teach me daily about what is important in life.  Married to Sara my soulmate and best friend for over 22 years.

Carl W. Lejuez is the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and a professor in the department of psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut. As provost he oversees all aspects of the academic mission, with a focus on supporting holistic student success, growing research and innovation, and enhancing the role of a public flagship university as an engine for its state. As a first-generation college student, he attended Emory University as an undergraduate and West Virginia University as a graduate student. He previously served as the interim provost and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Kansas, and as a faculty member in the department of psychology at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Erin Scanlon (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut-Avery Point. She teaches introductory physics courses as well as she conducts physics education research focusing on moving the physics community toward being more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and socially just. Her service work focuses on higher education policy and supporting physics education professional organizations. Dr. Scanlon enjoys singing and spending time at the beacice.

Margaret Lloyd Sieger, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, School of Social Work. Dr. Lloyd Sieger’s research focuses on practice and policy addressing substance use disorders in child welfare, with particular attention to families with infants and young children. Dr. Lloyd Sieger currently serves as Principal Investigator on three federally funded projects researching and evaluating state-level changes to policy on substance exposed infants, family treatment court effectiveness, and best practice standards implementation. She has published close to 40 articles and chapters in the peer-reviewed literature on these topics. She teaches MSW-level courses on social policy, program evaluation, research, and substance use disorders. She earned her doctorate at the University of Kansas, masters at Avila University, and bachelors at the University of Arizona.

Saran Stewart, PhD is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs, and Director of Global Education. She is a Salzburg Global Fellow and the recipient of multiple awards including the 2019 Vice Chancellor Award for Excellence from the University of the West Indies and the 2018 African Diaspora Emerging Scholar award by the Comparative and International Education Society. At the core of her research, Dr. Stewart examines issues in comparative education, decolonizing methodologies, postcolonial theories, critical/inclusive pedagogy and access and equity issues in higher education. She is editor of the 2019 book, Decolonizing Qualitative Methodologies for and by the Caribbean (Information Age Publishing) and co-editor of, Race, Equity and the Learning Environment: The Global Relevance of Critical and Inclusive Pedagogies in Higher Education (Stylus). Her research has been published in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Journal of Student Affairs, Postcolonial Directions in Education Journal and the Journal of Negro Education, to name a few.

Ryan D. Talbert is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty affiliate of the Africana Studies Institute and the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on health disparities, race and racism, and punishment and inequality. His scholarship has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Race and Social Problems, and Sociology Compass, and has been covered in outlets such as NBCBLK, ASA News, and The Sentencing Project.