‘22 Grads Blaze Ahead Into New Jobs and Opportunities

The Class of 2022 makes a big impression – both for their tenacity in finishing graduate degrees during a pandemic and their incredible scholarship, which fulfills the CUNY Graduate Center’s mission of research for the public good. We celebrate their accomplishments and their bright futures. 

Maya Harakawa (Ph.D. ‘22, Art History), whose research focuses on Black artists and Harlem in the 1960s, is joining the University of Toronto’s art history department as an assistant professor of Black and Latinx Diasporas — one of the multiple tenure-track positions she was offered during her job search. She explains what made her stand out as a candidate. 

Zaira Simone-Thompson (Ph.D. ’22, Earth and Environmental Sciences) focuses her research on reparations for slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. She explains how she became a tenure-track professor in the African American Studies department at Wesleyan University.

Adewumi Bakare is the first graduate of the new master’s program in Nanoscience and says he’s ready to start work in the growing field of optical engineering.

Jennifer Zhu (Ph.D. ’22, Biology) is helping to clean the water in New York Harbor and build living breakwaters in her new role as a marine habitat resource specialist for the Billion Oysters Project. 

Veeshan Narinesingh (Ph.D. ’22, Physics), a self-described “diversity-in-STEM warrior,” uses physics to understand the Earth’s climate and predict what it might do in the coming decades. Next month, he’ll continue his research as a postdoc at the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System (CIMES), a collaboration of Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Caitlyn Bolton (Ph.D. ’22, Anthropology) will start a tenure-track position in a new department at Boston College devoted to formative education.

Shay Culpepper (M.S. ‘22, Data Analysis and Visualization) explains why she credits much of her success as a union organizer at The New York Times to the skills she learned at the Graduate Center.

Max Osborn (Ph.D. ’22, Criminal Justice) researched how LGBTQ individuals are affected by the criminal justice system, an area known broadly as queer criminology, and will continue his work as a tenure-track assistant faculty role at Villanova University. Osborn, who is transgender and uses he and they pronouns, shares how they were drawn to the subject area partly for personal reasons.

Sejin Oh (Ph.D. ’22, Linguistics), who studies the physical processes by which speech is produced, shares why her new postdoc position at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris is “a dream-come-true moment.”

Maureen Coyle (Ph.D. ’22, Psychology) studied the psychology of ghosting. She wanted to teach at a small liberal arts college, and with a tenure-track faculty appointment at Widener University, she’s getting her chance.

Taryn Malcolm (Ph.D. ’22, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences) explains her research into how differences in grammar between Jamaican Creole and English would impact someone with language difficulties (aphasia) following a stroke  – and how the Graduate Center prepared her for a tenure-track job in the Department of Communication Disorders at Mercy College.

Jennifer Rossberg (M.A. ’22, Women’s and Gender Studies) landed a new role as a publicity manager at NYU Press, which she calls a perfect combination of her academic passions and professional experience. “My job involves a lot of rigorous academic reading, which was a huge part of my experience as a student at the Graduate Center,” she says.

Nasim Farahmand (Ph.D. ’22, Chemistry) crossed continents to study chemistry at the Graduate Center, where she conducted research at the Advanced Science Research Center. Now she is applying her chemistry and materials science knowledge as a senior scientist at L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company. 

Rocio Kiman (Ph.D. ’22, Physics) studies low-mass stars as a postdoctoral scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has plans to do three years of research at CalTech, too. She credits her Graduate Center faculty advisers with giving her the “encouragement, but also freedom to develop myself through trial and error.”