Commencement 2022

As a professor in the Graduate Center Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, Stephen Brier taught courses on the history of public education. He founded the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program at the Graduate Center in 2002, served as its coordinator for 18 years, and designed and taught the program’s core courses and independent study program. He is a historian who has published widely on issues ranging from U.S. social and labor history and the history of public higher education to the uses of digital technologies and tools to improve academic teaching, learning, and research. He was the founding director of the Graduate Center American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, which he headed for 18 years, and was the executive producer of the project’s award-winning “Who Built America?” multimedia curriculum, including textbooks, videos, and CD-ROMs. He has co-produced other award-winning websites, including “History Matters,” the “September 11 Digital Archive,” and the “CUNY Digital History Archive.” He served for 11 years as a senior administrator at the Graduate Center, as the senior academic technology officer and the co-founder and co-director of the Graduate Center New Media Lab. He also taught labor history at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Raj Korpan joined Iona College as an assistant professor of computer science in 2021. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2021, an M.S. in Statistics from Baruch College (CUNY) in 2015, and a B.S. in Economics and Finance from Bentley University in 2010. After a few years of working in the financial industry, he pursued an academic career because of his love for research and teaching. His research in artificial intelligence and robotics is focused on human-robot interaction, explainable AI, and cognitive models. He has previously taught courses at Hunter College (CUNY), including Introduction to Computer Science, Computers & Money, and Capstone for Majors. In addition to teaching, he has served as a volunteer judge at the New York City Science and Engineering Fair for high school students, co-chair of the Doctoral and Graduate Students' Council at the Graduate Center, and as a member of the search committees for both the president and provost at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, American Statistical Association, IEEE, Cognitive Science Society, and AAAI.