Carola Suarez-Orozco, Chair

Carola Suárez-Orozco is a Distinguished Professor of Counseling & School Psychology and is the co-founder of Re-Imagining Migration. Using mixed-methodological strategies, her work focuses on elucidating the child, adolescent, and young adult experience of immigration—how is their development shaped by immigration and how are they changed by the process? She has studied a wide variety of processes including identity formation, family separations, civic engagement, and the unauthorized experience. A focus on school settings has been an essential and enduring theme in her basic research agenda as schools are a first contact point between the immigrant children, their families, and the new society. Further, education is a critical predictor of current as well as future wellbeing and socio-economic mobility for the most rapidly growing sector of the U.S. youth population. Prior to joining the University of Massachusetts, Boston faculty, she was a professor of Human Development and Psychology at UCLA where she was the Principal Investigator on the Spencer Foundation grant—”Making the Invisible Visible: Systematically Examining Classroom Bias) and the Ford Foundation grant—”Bridging the Compassion Gap: Addressing Social Inclusion for Immigrant Origin Children & Youth.” Her books include: Children of Immigration (Harvard University Press), Learning a New Land (Harvard University Press), Transitions: The Development of the Children of Immigrants (NYU Press) as well as Immigrant-Origin Students in Community College: Navigating Risk and Reward in Higher Education among others. She has been awarded an American Psychological Association (APA) Presidential Citation for her contributions to the understanding of cultural psychology of immigration, has served as Chair of the APA Presidential Task Force on Immigration, and is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Art Bardige

Art has wanted to revolutionize education since he started graduate school. A graduate of the University of Chicago in physics, he taught physics, developed education films, taught and developed a new curriculum for middle school mathematics, started his first company, Learningways in 1980 becoming the premier independent educational software developer, designed MathProcessor in 1990, EnableMath in 2004, and What if Math in 2014. Art is a trustee at Lesley University and a longtime resident of Cambridge, MA. Art’s personal website is artifacts.com.

Celina Barrios-Millner

Celina Barrios-Millner leads the Equity and Inclusion Unit within the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, and oversees the City’s efforts to connect local residents, veterans, and people of color to economic opportunity through the Boston Resident Jobs Policy (BRJP) and the Supplier Diversity Program. In this role, Barrios-Millner brings two decades of experience in creating opportunities in disenfranchised communities through community engagement and strategic policy development and guides the City’s efforts to ensure local residents can benefit from the more than $15 billion in development in the pipeline and connect minority and women-owned enterprises (MWBEs) to millions of dollars in economic opportunities through procurement.

Prior to joining the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, Barrios-Millner led Immigrant Integration efforts for the City of Boston where she provided strategic direction to departments to ensure that immigrant residents and their needs were at the forefront of policy and program design. Previously, she led Partnership Development for the State Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance (SOMWBA) to generate business opportunities and resources for certified woman (WBE) and minority-owned businesses (MBE). She is fluent in Spanish and holds a MPP in Urban Policy and Strategic Management from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A in International Relations and Human Rights from The American University.

Nikhil Bhojwani

Nikhil is a Managing Partner at Recon where he focuses on strategy and innovation topics for payers, providers, and population health firms. Prior to co-founding Recon, Nikhil spent 8 years at the Boston Consulting Group where he was a core member of the strategy and healthcare practice areas. Experienced in working with health plans, biotech and pharma companies, med-devices, and health care services, Nikhil has helped his clients innovate and execute solutions, develop strategy, make critical business decisions and plan and enable executive level and organization-wide change. Prior to BCG, Nikhil co-founded and ran media businesses in India and was a guest columnist and author. He is a graduate of St. Stephen’s College and The Wharton School.

Carolina Gomez

Carolina is an Associate Director for the Endowment & Foundation Practice at Cambridge Associates, working in business development and relationship management. Prior to joining Cambridge Associates in 2017, Carolina worked at Kaufman Rossin as a business development supervisor supporting and leading many of the firm’s business development and marketing initiatives. Previously, she held a marketing position at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. There, she managed publications and marketing materials geared to Latin American clients, including institutional and high-net-worth individuals. Carolina’s prior experience includes developing programs at Vital Voices, an international non-profit organization, and serving as a research assistant at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

Bintou Kunjo

Bintou Kunjo is a Master of Global Management student at Thunderbird, a graduate school at Arizona State University. Prior to pursuing her master’s degree, Bintou founded a tea company, Taaling Tea, while working as the operations manager at Impact Hub Boston. At Impact Hub, Bintou launched an Arts for Social Change project to provide a platform for raising awareness on social issues through the arts. Bintou graduated from Bowdoin College, with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry and pre-medicine concentration. While at Bowdoin, Bintou served as site director for Let’s Get Ready. She worked primarily with refugee and asylee students in Maine, to help reduce barriers in their efforts to pursue higher education. A native of The Gambia, Bintou’s family sought political asylum in the USA in 2003. She is passionate about issues of migration and plans to leverage business and entrepreneurship to drive change within this area.

Kristen Lucken

Kristen Lucken chairs the Religious Studies program at Brandeis University and serves on the faculties of Sociology, International and Global Studies, and Religious Studies. Her research explores global migration, American immigration, ethnic and religious pluralism, social inclusion and nationalism. Living and working in the Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia during a time of major historical change (1990-1998), Dr. Lucken witnessed the unexpected dissolution of multicultural states and investigated the rise of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans. Her research project on Bosnian refugees in New England investigated how religious and ethnic identities are maintained and transformed through the process of migration. Dr. Lucken’s published works address Bosnian refugee settlement in New England, the transnational religious lives of second-generation Indian-Americans, and the roles played by religious institutions in immigrant ethnic identity maintenance. A collaborative, cross-national project investigates how religion and spirituality present themselves within public institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe following a time of unprecedented refugee flows and rising levels of religious pluralism.

Margot Stern Strom

Margot Stern Strom served as President of the Board and Executive Director of Facing History and Ourselves from its inception in 1976 until her retirement in 2014 when she assumed the title of President Emerita and Senior Scholar. Through her deep commitment to honoring the voices of students and her firm belief that history matters, she has inspired millions of students and their teachers around the world to investigate the root causes of prejudice, discrimination, and collective violence, and to understand the obligations of a democratic citizenry by choosing to participate. Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, during the “Jim Crow” era of racial segregation and discrimination, Margot learned from her family to ask disquieting questions about the practices of racial prejudice that she saw around her in the Deep South. She studied history and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois and her master’s degree at Memphis State. While teaching her first Facing History class at a middle school in Brookline, MA, Margot earned her GCAS at Harvard Graduate School of Education where she worked with pioneering researchers to examine moral development, identity formation and ethical decision making in adolescence. There she developed a classroom pedagogy that recognized students as moral philosophers. Working closely with historians, religious leaders, Holocaust survivors, her colleagues and students, Margot left the classroom, and with a Federal education grant, developed resources and materials that led to the publication of Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior and the development of a curriculum whose primary case study focused on the failure of democracy in Germany, the systematic process of dehumanization, antisemitism and the steps leading to the Holocaust. In Facing History’s professional development seminars, educators and adults in the community learned ways of engaging students to investigate connections between past and present and to think deeply about issues of stereotyping, peer pressure, and civic participation. During the 1980s, Facing History and Ourselves was incorporated as a non-profit organization and designated as a model program by the U.S. Department of Education. Under Margot’s four decades of leadership, the organization steadily grew into an international evidence-based program for promoting civic learning.