Brooklyn College Welcomes New Faculty (Part 2)
Oct. 8, 2013
Among this year's 34 new full-time faculty members are a Conservatory of Music professor who has distinguished herself in the field of electroacoustic music; a scholar of Greek tragedy and classical mythology; an outreach and instruction librarian who specializes in subjects as diverse as earth and environmental sciences and LGBTQ studies; and a health and a nutrition sciences professor whose specialty is nutrigenomics—the study of how genes and nutrients interact.
This is the second in a four-part series.
Professor Michael Grayson, chair of the Department of Accounting at the School of Business
Michael Grayson, Professor and Chair
Michael Grayson is professor and chair of the Department of Accounting in the School of Business at Brooklyn College. He has earned these degrees: Doctor of Business Administration in accounting from Louisiana Tech University, Master of Accounting from Florida State University, an M.B.A. from Boston University, and a B.S. in Business Administration from Drexel University. He holds licenses as a certified public accountant in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Prior to academia, he worked in public accounting and in Fortune 500 companies, where he worked in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. His published research includes the mathematical proof, which solves what was characterized in an American Accounting Association monograph as being an "inherently insoluble" problem.
Assistant Professor Marianne Gythfeldt of the Conservatory of Music
Marianne Gythfeldt, Assistant Professor
Marianne Gythfeldt has distinguished herself in chamber music, orchestral and contemporary music performance on the international stage. She is equally at home in traditional, contemporary, and alternative genres as a clarinetist of Zephyros Winds, Consortium Ardesia, Collide-o-scope, SEM Ensemble, and former member of the Naumburg award-winning group New Millennium Ensemble. Gythfeldt is especially recognized in the fields of electroacoustic music, contemporary chamber music, and performance education. She is a former professor at the University of Delaware, where she won the Delaware Division of the Arts established artist award. Gythfeldt has recorded with CBS Masterworks, CRI, Albany, Koch, and Mode Records.
Assistant Professor Michael Hannon of Psychology, Counseling and Leadership at the School of Education
School Psychology, Counseling and Leadership
Michael Hannon, Assistant Professor
Michael Hannon is a counselor with over 10 years of experience in educational settings. He has a Ph.D. in Counselor Education from Penn State. He is a National Certified Counselor, a Licensed Associate Counselor (NJ), a certified New Jersey School Counselor, and has the New Jersey Director of School Counseling Services endorsement.
Hannon's primary research interest is the mental health of family members living with children with autism. Additional interests include urban school counseling practice and college access for low-income, high achieving students. His dissertation, "Love him and everything else will fall into place: An analysis of narratives of African-American fathers of children with autism spectrum disorders," explored the intersection of fatherhood, race, family, disability, and mental health and was the first empirical study for counselors to investigate the lived experiences of African-American fathers of children with autism.
Assistant Professor Matthew Harrick of the library
Matthew Harrick, Assistant Professor
Matthew Harrick is the Outreach and Instruction Librarian in the Reference and Instruction unit at Brooklyn College Library. He is the subject specialist for earth and environmental sciences, education, environmental studies, the juvenile collection, and LGBTQ studies. Harrick also works with the Early College High School programs at Brooklyn College (Brooklyn College Academy, STAR, and College Now). A native of Upstate New York, he comes to Brooklyn College with an M.A. in English Literature from New York University, and an MLS from Queens College.
Assistant Professor Jill V. Jeffery of the School of Education
Jill V. Jeffery, Assistant Professor
Jill V. Jeffery obtained her Ph.D. in English Education from New York University in 2010. Since then, she has held two academic positions: a year-long postdoc at NYU and a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of New Mexico. Her scholarship examines various conceptions of writing competence as understood by students, teachers, writing assessment designers, and researchers.
In addition to her academic work, Jeffery served for seven years as a public high school English teacher in Texas and in New York. She also worked as a site-based literacy consultant for the New York City Writing Project, a role that provided her the opportunity to work with secondary teachers across disciplines to develop writing-intensive curricula.
Jeffery's areas of expertise include Adolescent Literacy; Composition Theory; and Urban Education. She was awarded a National Academy of Education Predoctoral Fellowship in Adolescent Literacy to support her dissertation research on secondary students' writing. Jeffery has published research regarding adolescent writing in peer-refereed journals, including Research in the Teaching of English; Assessing Writing; the Journal of Literacy Research; and Learning and Individual Differences.
Assistant Professor Xinyin Jiang of health and nutrition sciences
Xinyin Jiang, Assistant Professor
Dr. Xinyin Jiang received her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Fudan University in Shanghai, China in 2008. She then went to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Nutrition in 2013. She completed her dietetic internship when she was pursuing her doctoral degree at Cornell University, and she became a registered dietitian in 2013. She received pre-doctoral fellowship awards from the American Society for Nutrition and Graduate Women In Science for her graduate study.
Jiang is interested in nutrigenomic research. She studies the nutrients involved in the methylation cycle, such as choline, betaine, folate and vitamin B12, which regulate early development via multiple venues. She conducts mammalian cell culture and human studies to assess the influence of methyl nutrient intake during pregnancy on different genomic and functional outcomes of the maternal-fetal pairs.
Assistant Professor Katherine Lu Hsu of classics
Katherine Lu Hsu, Assistant Professor
Katherine Lu Hsu graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in Classics and earned a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan in 2013. Her dissertation, Heracles and Heroic Disaster, examines the tension between the glorious victories and destructive disasters of Heracles, as portrayed in the literature and visual images of ancient Greece. In 2009-2010, she was the Michael Jameson Fellow and a Regular Member at the American School for Classical Studies at Athens. Her research interests include Greek tragedy, classical mythology, ancient conceptions of heroism, and literary papyrology. Part of Hsu's role at Brooklyn College involves directing the Latin/Greek Institute, a nationally renowned and uniquely intensive summer language program.
