Elizabeth Chin

CAREER PATH
After diverse educational experiences, my fascination with indigenous cultures and my love of the arts—music, dance, acting, painting, writing—and of study eventually led me to a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology.

OUT-OF-THE-BOX TEACHING
I dislike passive learning and am experimental in my teaching, although I’m old-fashioned about basic rules of respect—no lateness, no yawning. I challenge my undergrads to take hold of their own education. They participate in imaginative acting exercises, write ethnographies of each other to understand behavior and thought, go to museums, run classes, get into the field, teach younger students. They become confident, learn to work in a team and be responsible.

MY INTEREST IN CONSUMERISM
Purchasing Power (2001) examined consumption (of toys, school supplies, lunches, clothes) as a medium through which social inequalities—of race, class, gender—are experienced, imposed, and resisted by poor young blacks. My new manuscript is an ethnography of my own consumption over three years. My next research project will look at consumption and poverty in Haiti including the practice of restavek or child slavery. I’ll spend a year there studying the culture.

ON THE GRADUATE CENTER
I had great mentors and the student diversity was stimulating. I still have five or six really tight relationships with classmates.

Richard M. Lerner

CAREER PATH
Sports and youth development always fascinated me. In college I switched my major from physical education to developmental psychology. I was an assistant professor at age twenty-four. Over my career, I’ve authored or co-authored over seventy books and five hundred chapters or articles in scientific journals. Today I study, and advocate for, healthy development in youth across the country and internationally.

MY NEW BOOK
The Good Teen (2007, Crown Publications) presents evidence that adolescents who show the characteristics of positive youth development—competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring—are less likely to be involved in risky behaviors—drinking, drug use, bullying. The book has led to interviews on national radio, Good Morning America, and Fox News.

MAJOR NEW LAB STUDY
In the 4-H Study, I’m assessing the role of out-of-school-time activities—sports, community work, the arts—on the positive development of four thousand kids from twenty-five states.

ADVICE TO PH.D. STUDENTS
Commit yourself to hard work and to finding a caring, committed, and productive mentor. Mentoring is the most undervalued aspect of graduate school.

ON THE GRADUATE CENTER
Incredible mentoring from my professors gave me the model for my own students. They row the boat, but I do too, to help them on their way.

Helen Greenwald

CAREER PATH
From childhood, opera enthralled me. I corresponded with Joan Sutherland! I became a freelance cellist, had my own studio. In doctoral study, I discovered my love of musicology: music history, theory, analysis, philology, criticism. Now, while teaching and pursuing numerous editing and writing projects, I continue to play chamber music, and I’m a regular lecturer and writer for the NYC Opera and Boston Symphony Orchestra.

WRITING AND EDITING
Inspired by a Graduate Center course, I’m writing a book on "Opera and Image." I co-edited the critical edition of Rossini’s opera, Zelmira (2005)—and am working on Verdi’s Attila. Critical editions establish a valid and performable text supported by primary sources. They also include critical notes as well as the work’s history, reception, place within the composer’s oeuvre, descriptions of all the sources. It’s fun, like uncovering a mystery.

PERFORMING AND SCHOLARSHIP
It’s very important for musical scholars to be musicians first.

DISSERTATION ADVICE TO STUDENTS
Always write about something you really love, otherwise it won’t happen.

ON THE GRADUATE CENTER
Far superior to other schools. Students were expected to be musically fluent. A happy, positive time. My dissertation experience couldn’t have been better, with Allan Atlas as chair. I was able to perform a lot too, with faculty and students.

Bruce Altschuler

CAREER PATH
After a false start studying engineering, I ended up in Vietnam, which heightened my interest in politics and after military service I earned a B.A. in political science at City College, then a Ph.D. at the Graduate Center. I began teaching at SUNY—Oswego before I finished my dissertation and I’ve never left. My enduring field of interest has been how polling has influenced election campaign strategies. I’ve published three books on the subject, visiting some great cities and fascinating libraries on the way.

INFLUENCE OF TECHNOLOGY ON POLLING
Those with cell phones only are harder to reach, so it’s tougher to feel you have the correct sample. The internet has helped polling, although online surveys leave out lower income people who have no computers.

RADIO BROADCASTING
For over twenty years I’ve been a political analyst and commentator for National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and BBC World Service.

PRESIDENTS ON STAGE
I’m investigating plays about U.S. presidents, to see how public perception of the presidency, as depicted in theatre, has changed over time.

ON THE GRADUATE CENTER
It was great. I still have friends from there, including my advisors, Ken Sherrill and Ned Schneier, now retired; I got my job through a fellow graduate student on the Oswego faculty; and former Oswego students have enrolled at the Graduate Center.

Sylvia Atsalis

SOCIAL BEHAVIOR OF PRIMATES
I’m fascinated by animal social behavior, from the habits of the 40 gm nocturnal mouse lemur—the subject of my dissertation and a book (Prentice Hall, September 2007)—to the monthly flirtations of 100 kg aging female gorillas with their male counterparts. Concerns that an aging gorilla might become pregnant and be unable to care for her offspring led me to a study of menopause involving thirty gorilla females in seventeen zoos nationwide. The findings could help our understanding of human menopause, including diseases linked to its onset.

PRESERVING PRIMATES
My colleagues and I are seeking funding to create a research center for aging primates in Chicago; they get arthritis and cardiovascular disease just as humans do. I’m editing a book on primate reproductive aging for Karger. I’m also deeply interested in the nocturnal lemurs of Madagascar. At least ten new mouse lemur species have been recognized in the last few years, with additional research sites helping to preserve the local flora and fauna.

ADVICE FOR STUDENTS
Find a mentor you like and who likes you, but follow your own passion.

ON THE GRADUATE CENTER
I loved the program’s four-field approach and its support of fieldwork. My training gave me a world view that guides me through my life and career.

Frank Fabozzi

CAREER PATH
I discovered my aptitude for economics and mathematics as an undergraduate at City College. After completing my Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, I spent twenty years in academia (the last six at MIT), then fifteen years as a professional consultant, and now I’m back in academia teaching structured finance at Yale. I’m semi-retired from consulting, although I still work with several financial institutions and am on the board of BlackRock closed-end mutual funds and the advisory council of Princeton’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering. In 2002 I was inducted into the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame and in 2007 the CFA Institute honored me with the C. Stewart Sheppard Award.

WRITING
I’ve authored/coauthored fifty-eight books in various areas of financial economics, three with the late Nobel-prize winner, Franco Modigliani, a colleague at MIT, and edited/coedited eighty-two books, one with the Nobel-prize winner Harry Markowitz. I’m also the editor of Journal of Portfolio Management.

INTELLECTUAL CURIOSTY
It’s important to remain intellectually curious. New theories have been developed in financial economics in the last fifty years; however, complete implementation of these theories is just now taking place. This challenge requires nontraditional mathematical and statistical techniques.

ON THE GRADUATE CENTER
Doctoral work provided me with the skills needed to retool. I remember several very supportive professors, Malcolm Galatin, Damodar Gujarati, and Elliot Zupnick.

Katerina Harvati

CAREER PATH
I left my hometown, Athens, Greece, to earn my B.S. and Ph.D. in New York, taught for a few years at NYU, then joined the Max Planck Institute in 2004.

RESEARCH
I’m fascinated by the human skeleton. Neanderthals attract me because, being our closest relatives, they’re very similar to us, and yet also strikingly different. My work focuses on defining those differences and assessing their magnitude and importance, thus contributing to our understanding of our own origins, and has received international public attention. Recently, I organized a cutting-edge conference, “Neanderthals Revisited,” in New York City with Terry Harrison, an NYU colleague; these papers are forthcoming as a book. I also conduct fieldwork in Northern and Southern Greece and East Africa.

EXPERTISE RECOGNIZED
A recent find in Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, suggests Neanderthals survived much longer in Europe than previously thought. In September 2006, the national and international press called upon me and Eric Delson, professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center and Lehman College, to comment on the findings.

RESEARCH
The doctoral program in anthropology at the Graduate Center, and within the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology, offers rigorous training that is exceptional both for its breadth and depth of study. My years of doctoral work were very tough but very rewarding.

Frank Braconi

CAREER PATH
I was an economist in the corporate sector for twelve years, then served for over fifteen years in a non-profit policy research organization. As chief economist since 2006 for NYC’s Comptroller, I’m the principal analyst on issues relating to the City’s economy and tax policies. As a frequent participant in professional conferences, I enjoy the opportunity to debate, and sometimes influence, the direction of urban policy. One of the most interesting opportunities was when I was a guest at Windsor Castle, England, for a week-long “consultation” among international experts on community development.

CAREER GOAL
I want to help New York remain the world’s premier city and to help all of its residents benefit from that.

HOUSING POLICIES
It’s vital to reduce housing costs for the young, single, college-educated, ambitious people who pour into the City every year. We underestimate their importance in maintaining the City’s economic and creative vitality.

TRANSPORTATION POLICIES
The NY region must rethink its land use, transportation, and school finance policies and how they interact with one another.

ON THE GRADUATE CENTER
The faculty really treated students as individuals and sought to work on their shortcomings and cultivate their aptitudes. Michael Grossman, Linda Edwards, and Thom Thurston deserve the highest praise for developing an economics program that puts a priority on teaching.

Eduardo Lago

CAREER PATH
I was working in Spain, my native country, as an editor, teacher, and translator of American fiction when a translation contract (Barthes’s The Sot-Weed Factor) led me to New York City. I soon began studying at The Graduate Center, and within a few years I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Then, I won the 2002 Fundación Bartolomé March award for excellence in literary criticism and, to my amazement, the prestigious 2006 Premio Nadal for my first novel Llámame Brooklyn (Call Me Brooklyn). My knowledge of American and Spanish culture serves me well at the Cervantes Institute, where my mission is to make Spaniards, Latinos, and Latin Americans more aware of North American and Latino culture and vice versa.

RESEARCH INTERESTS
The connections between literature from the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish America, and the Latinos of North America. I also write frequently about North American fiction for El País, the most widely circulated newspaper in the Spanish-speaking world.

FUTURE PLANS
I have a whole new novel in my head, and I want to go back to teaching in a few years.

THE GRADUATE CENTER
Years of anonymity and hard work, a monk’s life! I cherish memories of long hours reading in the library, stimulating discussions with fellow students, great classes, and Distinguished Professor Isaias Lerner, my wonderful mentor. I am very proud of being a CUNY alumnus.

Nicholas Milton

Ashok Puri

Carol Reich

Mira Goral

Dae Young Kim

Stephen White