Taking leadership to the next level

2017 Fellows

Our inaugural cohort of ALI Fellows brought together nine advancing leaders from multiple areas of the university. Learn more about each Fellow below.

Nina Berman

Nina Berman

Director and Professor

School of International Letters and Culture

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Nina Berman, PhD is a director and professor in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU, Berman taught at Ohio State University, University of Texas at Austin and Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, Germany. A commitment to working across diverse geographies, histories and cultures to advance qualitative change in the lives of humans marks the foundation of her career. With more than 20 years’ experience researching, documenting and analyzing the dynamics of cultural diversity, socio-economic disparities and policy, and political authority affecting various populations, Berman is dedicated to creating pragmatic solutions to closing the gap among academic, non-profit, governmental and business stakeholders. Her research interests include globalization studies, humanitarianism, tourism, German orientalism and colonialism Germans in Africa and intercultural hermeneutics.

 

 

 

Nadya Bliss

Nadya Bliss

Director

Global Security Initiative

Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development

Nadya Bliss, PhD is the director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University. GSI serves as the university-wide hub focusing on addressing emerging global challenges, with a focus on borderless threats, characterized by complex interdependencies and often conflicting objectives. Prior to taking on her GSI role, Dr. Bliss served as the Assistant Vice President for Research Strategy in the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development at ASU. Before joining ASU in 2012, Dr. Bliss spent 10 years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, most recently as the founding Group Leader of the Computing and Analytics Group. Under her leadership, the Group’s research portfolio included a wide-range of programs funded by DARPA, iARPA, ONR, NGA, USAF, ASD(R&E), and other U.S. Government sponsors. In 2011, Dr, Bliss was awarded the inaugural MIT Lincoln Laboratory Early Career Technical Achievement award recognizing her work in parallel computing, computer architectures and graph processing algorithms and her leadership in anomaly detection in graph-based data.

 

Bryan Brayboy

Bryan Brayboy

Director, Professor and Advisor to President Crow

Center for Indian Education

School of Social Transformation

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee) is President’s Professor and Borderlands Professor of Indigenous Education and Justice in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. At ASU, he is Special Assistant to the President for American Indian Affairs, Director of the Center for Indian Education, Associate Director of the School of Social Transformation, and co-editor of the Journal of American Indian Education.  From 2007 to 2012, he was Visiting President’s Professor of Indigenous Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

He is the author and editor of six volumes, dozens of articles and book chapters, and has written multiple policy briefs for the U.S. Department of Education, National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences.  His research focuses on the role of race and diversity in higher education, and the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty in institutions of higher education.  He is a nationally and internationally recognized academic and speaker on the topic of Indigenous education, having been a visiting and noted scholar in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway.  His work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the Ford, Mellon, Kellogg, and Spencer Foundations, and several other private and public foundations and organizations.  He and his team have, over the past 16 years, have prepared over 150 Native teachers to work in American Indian communities.

 

 

 

Cynthia Lietz

Cynthia Lietz

Senior Associate Dean

College of Public Service and Community Solutions

Cynthia Lietz, PhD, LCSW is Senior Associate Dean, College of Public Service & Community Solutions and Professor, School of Social Work. Dr. Lietz conducts research that informs strengths-based practice with youth and their families. Specifically, she applies the construct of resilience to family systems examining the ways family units cope with and grow stronger despite trauma, loss, and other challenges. She is particularly interested in the translation of research to practice. As a result, she developed Strengths-Based Supervision (SBS; Lietz, 2014), a model of clinical supervision that supports effective implementation of family-centered practice in child welfare settings. This model has been adopted by the public child welfare systems in Arizona, Texas, and Idaho, and infused into training material at several additional organizations including the Butler Institute in Colorado, and the Virginia and Arizona Chapters of the National Association of Social Workers.

Cynthia is also known for her passion for student success, serving as PI for ASU’s Bridging Success program and chosen by the Associated Students of Arizona State University for the Centennial Professor Award in 2012 to honor her commitment to teaching and community-based research.

 

Tiffany Lopez

Tiffany Lopez

Director and Professor

School of Film, Dance and Theatre

Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

Tiffany Ana López, Director of the School of Film, Dance and Theatre, has more than 20 years of experience as a scholar focused on community engagement and the arts. She has worked with a range of theaters, including Cornerstone Theater Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Mark Taper Forum, The Los Angeles Theatre Center, and Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble, and is founding artistic director of the Latina/o Play Project at the Culver Center of the Arts in Riverside, CA. Her research looks at the role of the arts in creating conversations about violence and trauma. She has extensive experience working in Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural communities exploring personal and social change through the arts.

López, the first in her family to graduate high school and attend college, transferred from community college to California State University, Sacramento, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English. She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her honors include a University of California Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. She is also a Fulbright Scholar, a CORO Leadership Fellow and Adjunct Faculty, and an alumna of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Executive Leadership Academy.

 

 

 

 

Ji Mi Choi

Ji Mi Choi

Associate Vice President for Strategic Partnerships and Programs

Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development

Ji Mi Choi leads and collaborates with Arizona State University colleagues and external partners to advance entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as global, corporate and clinical partnerships. She brings to ASU her expertise in higher education at the intersection of entrepreneurial and public-private partnerships.

Previously, Choi served in various fast-paced and evolving roles at New York University: early in her career at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts before new media was new media; later at the Polytechnic University (now the Tandon School of Engineering at NYU), first serving as the chief of staff to the president and vice president for strategic initiatives, then later serving as the senior director of integration, leading the merger between the two institutions; and subsequently serving as the assistant vice president for global programs planning. Choi has also served at the world-renowned Earth Institute at Columbia University, ultimately as chief of staff and assistant deputy director.

Choi earned her B.A. in English Literature and Communication Arts from Marymount Manhattan College and an M.S. in Strategic Communications from Columbia University.

 

 

 

Jake Pinholster

Jake Pinholster

Associate Dean for Policy Initiatives and Associate Professor

Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

Jake Pinholster, Director of the School of Film, Dance and Theatre and Associate Dean for Policy and Initiatives in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, has been with Arizona State University. Jake’s efforts have centered on projection and media design and technology for performance. He is an associate artist with Les Freres Corbusier, the resident video designer for the David Dorfman Dance Company, and a contributor to Live Design Magazine. His professional media/projection design credits include The Pee Wee Herman Show (Broadway/HBO Special), Carrie Fisher: Wishful Drinking (HBO Special), Current Nobody (Woolly Mammoth, La Jolla Playhouse), Hoover (La Jolla Playhouse), Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Center Theatre Group), Heddatron (HERE Arts Center) and many other productions at off-Broadway, regional, and academic venues. As an educator and administrator, Jake has been involved in a number of long-term initiatives that fuse technology, interdisciplinarity, and curricular innovation, and he has been an invited speaker on these topics at the National Association of Schools of Theatre, the Leadership Institute of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and LDI. He received his Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Florida. He currently lives in Tempe with his wife Angela, who is a founding director of Create Academy, a K-12 arts-integrated, non-profit charter school in downtown Phoenix.