Staff and Faculty

The Founding Director is Sherry H. Penney, the first holder of the Sherry H. Penney Endowed Professorship in Leadership in the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  Dr. Penney previously served as the Chancellor of UMass Boston, 1988-2000.  She also served as interim president of the University of Massachusetts system in 1995 and interim president of SUNY Plattsburgh 1986-1987.  She brings her experience of over thirteen years as a CEO to her position in an endowed professorship of leadership.

Previously she was the Vice Chancellor for Academic Programs, Policy and Planning for the SUNY system and prior to that appointment she was Associate Provost at Yale University.

She serves on the Boards of NSTAR (Fortune 1000 company), TERI—The Education Resource Institute (which she chairs), South Shore Hospital, and HERS (Higher Education Resource Services).

She has published several articles in professional journals and is the author of Patrician in Politics: Daniel Dewey Barnard of New York which deals with New York politics in the 19th Century.  She also is co-author with James D. Livingston of a biography of the l9th century feminist and abolitionist Martha Coffin Wright entitled A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women’s Rights U Mass Press (2004).  She has taught at Yale University, Union College, SUNY Albany, and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

She has received honorary degrees from Albion College in Michigan and from Quincy College.  Other recognition includes the Pinnacle Award for lifetime achievement from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the New England Women’s Leadership Award, the Distinguished Citizen Award for Racial Harmony from Black/White Boston, the College Club Award, and the Abigail Adams Award from the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus.

She is a frequent speaker on higher education, governance issues, and leadership.

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Patricia Neilson holds an Ed.D. in Leadership Education. She currently serves as the Director of the Center for Collaborative Leadership in the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Dr. Neilson’s professional background reflects her life-long interest in social justice issues. She began as a community outreach worker in Hawaii, and rose quickly to become an administrator within the non-profit community to design, implement and lead programs that addressed underserved populations.

Upon arriving in Massachusetts in 1986, she began her work in higher education at North Shore Community College as the Director of Displaced Homemaker program, where she launched an academic-skills training program for underserved and under-represented women. With this success she moved on to become an Academic Dean where, in addition to scheduling courses and overseeing degree programs, established numerous entrepreneurial programs within an academic setting. These highly innovative programs, which ranged from delivering dual diagnosis certificate programs at the Essex County Jail to building career ladder degrees in early childhood education, were contractually funded and operated external to the institution. These programs were so successful that many have been sustained for more than two decades to the present day.

Dr. Neilson’s research interest in the under-representation of Asian-American senior administrators in higher education has led her to join a national effort to advocate for the development of pipelines for this talent. She has served for ten years on the Asian-Pacific Americans in Higher Education Board of Directors and mentored promising APAs. As part of the pipeline effort, Dr. Neilson serves as faculty in the Leadership Development Program in Higher Education (LDPHE).

As Director of Center for Collaborative Leadership, Dr. Neilson is responsible for curriculum development, evaluation/assessment, recruitment of corporate, government, and non-profit participants into the program and alumni affairs.

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Sue Reamer, PhD is a Senior Scholar at the Center for Collaborative Leadership.  She holds both a nursing home administrator license and a registered nurse license and has extensive experience in nursing home administration, public health nursing and public health nursing education.  She sits on the University of Massachusetts Boston Foundation Board, the University of Massachusetts Foundation Board, the Fielding Graduate Institute Board, the Dean’s Advisory Council, Boston University School of Management and the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus Board.  She is the recipient of the Wonder Woman Award of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus and the Alumni Distinguished Service Award, the Boston University School of Management.

She holds a B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Chicago, a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University and a M.Ed. in Nursing Education from Columbia Teachers College.  Her MBA is from the Boston University School of Management and her PhD, in Human and Organizational Development, is from The Fielding Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.

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Maureen Scully, Ph.D., studies change programs in the workplace.  She is a faculty member in the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  She is also an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons School of Management in Boston.  She is a research consultant for the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program.  Her previous academic experience includes a faculty position at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a fellowship at the Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Stanford University and her B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges.

Prof. Scully has studied how employee resource groups improve the climate for diversity in organizations.  She has conducted research and done consultations on the role of bystanders in supporting workplace diversity, the emergence of team-based work in a variety of settings, and the challenges and opportunities for teams that work “virtually” across space and time.

Prof. Scully is the co-author of a textbook that is widely used in MBA programs, Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes.  She is co-editor of The Reader in Gender, Work, and Organization.  Her research papers have appeared in several academic publications, and she won the 2001 “Breaking the Frame” research paper award from the Journal of Management Inquiry.

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Andrea Wight is the Assistant Director of the Center for Collaborative Leadership and the Emerging Leaders Program at UMass Boston. She is responsible for the logistical planning of the Emerging Leaders Program, organizing the monthly forums, additional professional development programs, and events. Along with the ELP Alumni Board, she plays a critical role ensuring the ELP alumni continue to have strong networks and communication outlets through monthly newsletters, emails and the Center’s website. Andrea has over eight years of experience in higher education administration from UMass Boston’s College of Public & Community Service where she was the Academic Services Coordinator. Andrea received her BA from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.

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Glendalys Cabrera is the Center for Collaborative Leadership’s Administrative Assistant. She will be pursuing a degree at UMass Boston’s College of Management starting fall of 2009.

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Emerging Leaders Program Faculty

Ping-Ann Addo descends from a Chinese Malaysian mother and an Akan Ghanaian father. Her birth, upbringing, and education all happened in different locations in “the (post-colonial) West.” Her scholarship grounds her firmly in the non-West, however: South Pacific islands. She is a scholar of migration, diaspora, identity, and art-making by women from the Pacific. Her fieldwork on these issues has taken her to New Zealand and to California. Her activism on behalf of Pacific Islanders in the United States includes her 2004 curation of a community-based Pacific barkcloth exhibit, as well as the production of a film on Tongan arts in diaspora. Another project she is developing examines the multicultural expression and celebration of Caribbean peoples in diaspora and primarily focuses on Carnival costume creation and performance in the US North East. Ping-Ann Addo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UMass Boston, specializing in the area of cultural preservation and representation.

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Peter N. Kiang is Professor of Education and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research, teaching, and advocacy related to Asian American immigrant/refugee students and communities in both K-12 and higher education have been honored or supported by the National Academy of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Massachusetts Association for Bilingual Education, the NAACP, and the Anti-Defamation League. He holds a B.A., Ed.M., and Ed.D. from Harvard University and is a former Community Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.

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David E. Matz, JD, has been active in the conflict resolution field for over 20 years. He has served as director of the Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution at UMass Boston since 1986 and on UMass Boston’s faculty since 1973. In 1989-90, he served as Fulbright Professor of Law at the University of Tel Aviv. He has mediated a wide variety of cases, with particular emphasis in commercial disputes, employment disputes, health care disputes, family business disputes, and disputes within organizations and universities. He serves on panels for the Superior Courts of Massachusetts, on the Massachusetts Office of Dispute Resolution Environmental Panel, and on the American Arbitration Association Employment Disputes Panel.

He has also designed and conducted trainings in mediation, negotiation, and conflict systems design for attorneys, judges, engineers, university faculty and deans, environmental staff, prison superintendents, doctors, business executives, school teachers and school committees, and other government officers. His publications include: Massachusetts Alternative Dispute Resolution (with David A. Hoffman, 1994); “Ignorance and Interests” (Harvard Negotiation Law Review, Summer 1999); and “Party Autonomy and Mediator Pressure” (Negotiation Journal, October 1994).

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Robert McCulley graduated from UMass Amherst and Boston College in the areas of Psychology Education and Visual impairments. After 12 years at the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, Bob came to the Institute for Community Inclusion at UMB with a mission to address a severe regional and national shortage of teachers and related service providers professionally prepared to work with children and adults with visual impairments. At the center, Bob successfully established partnerships between the University and community leaders across the six New England states and the federal government to fund the newly established “Northeast Regional Center for Vision Education” with an annual operating budget of one million dollars employing 10 full time professional staff and supporting scholarships for over 120 graduate students. Bob is also an openly gay male who came out to friends and family while in high school in the late 70’s. He became politically active in the 80’s as a board member of the Mass Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, and has continued to testify at hearings and lobby against legislation that restricts gay and lesbian rights such as the “Defense of Marriage Act’ put forth by conservative representation in Massachusetts.

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Lorna Rivera is an Associate Professor and Director of Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is also the faculty director of the national Latino Leadership Opportunity Program. In 2001, she completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at Northeastern University. Dr. Rivera received grants from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1999) and the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2000) for her doctoral dissertation, “Learning Community: An Ethnographic Study of Popular Education and Homeless Women in a Shelter-Based Adult Literacy Program.”
Her dissertation research studied a group of fifty homeless and formerly homeless women, who were enrolled in adult basic education (ABE) classes at a family shelter in one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Based on this research she published several articles: “Changing Women: An Ethnographic Study of Homeless Mothers and Popular Education,” (2001), in, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, “Learning Community: Popular Education and Homeless Women,” (2004) in Women’s Studies Quarterly, and a book chapter, “Literacy for Change: Latina Adult Learners and Popular Education.” In R. Ybarra & N. Lopez (Eds.), Creating Alternative Discourses in the Education of Latinos & Latinas: A Reader.
In 2003, Dr. Rivera was awarded a Faculty Scholarship Grant from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a National Academy of Education (NAE) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2003-2005) to conduct follow-up interviews with women who were participants in her dissertation study. As a NAE Postdoctoral Fellow she wrote the book, “Laboring to Learn: Women’s Literacy & Poverty in the Post-welfare Era” (2008, University of Illinois Press).

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Tim Sieber is a Professor of Anthropology at UMass Boston and also teaches American Studies and Applied Linguistics. He is an urban and educational anthropologist, who studies contemporary cultural politics in US and Portuguese cities, especially related to education and urban planning.  In the last 10 years, informed by 33 years of working at UMass, he has been writing about teaching, diversity, and university-community relations. At UMass Boston, he is on the boards of the Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy and Community Development, the Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture, and the Center for Improvement of Teaching, and a member of the university’s Urban Mission Coordinating Committee.  He coordinated the assessment team who prepared UMass Boston’s recent successful application to the Carnegie Foundation to be recognized as a “Community Engaged University,” one of fewer than 2% of all universities and colleges in the US.  Like many UMass Boston students, Tim was the first in his family to attend college, and grew up in rural Appalachia. Maybe for that reason, he has always been fascinated with cities, and has lived in them since he was 21 years old.  He is a resident of Dorchester, is involved there in research and community activities in Cape Verdean neighborhoods, and walks to work at UMass.

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Karen Suyemoto is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor in Psychology and Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where she teaches and mentors undergraduate and doctoral students. For the past 10 years she has been researching, teaching, and consulting to teachers and counselors about issues related to gender, race, and culture. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Asian American Psychological Association and is past co-chair of AAPA’s Division on Women. Her current research interests include racial and ethnic identities in multiracial and Asian American individuals and groups, and the psychological and educational needs of Asian American urban students. Karen received her B.S. in English and Psychology from Tufts University, received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and completed her internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Lee Teitel teaches courses on leadership development, partnership and networking, and understanding organizations and how to improve them. He directs an innovative multischool effort that focuses on bringing high quality teaching and learning to scale in urban and high need districts. The program, the Executive Leadership Program for Educators, builds on several prior initiatives at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Business School, and Kennedy School of Government, and works with state commissioners of education and school superintendents, along with their leadership teams and key stakeholders. Teitel’s research has focused on principal and superintendent leadership development, including those in “alternate” or nontraditional settings, and on interorganizational collaboration and other partnerships, especially between schools and universities. As a consultant, he has worked with numerous individual partnerships, networks, and with a statewide school and teacher improvement efforts. Teitel has worked extensively on executive leadership development with principals and school superintendents, collaborating with KSG colleagues Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky to set up superintendent networks in Massachusetts and Ohio, and co-facilitating the Connecticut Superintendent Network with HGSE colleague Richard Elmore. Teitel has taught at HGSE for the last seven years as a part-time lecturer and visiting professor (2004-2005). He comes to the School full-time after more than 15 years in teaching and writing about educational leadership at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he was full professor and associate chair of the Department of Leadership in Education. Dr. Teitel has an Ed.D. from Harvard University.

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Eben A. Weitzman is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Programs in Dispute Resolution, and in the Public Policy Ph.D. Program, both at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  He received his Ph.D. in social and organizational psychology in 1994 from Columbia University.  His work focuses on conflict within and between groups, with emphases on organizational conflict, cross-cultural conflict, and intergroup relations, and on research methodology.  He does conflict resolution and organizational development work with a wide variety of individuals and organizations in both the public and private sectors, including organizations in health care, education, government, law enforcement, social services, business, and the courts.  He is Reviews Editor for the journal Field Methods, and has consulted on numerous large qualitative research studies in health care and human services.  His recent publications include Problem-solving and Decision-Making in Conflict Resolution, in The Handbook of Conflict Resolution; Interpersonal Conflicts of Women in Nursing Homes: An Administrative Perspective, in the Journal of Clinical Geropsychology; Interpersonal Negotiation Strategies in a Sample of Older Women, in the Journal of Clinical Geropsychology; Responding to September 11:  A conflict resolution scholar/practitioner’s perspective, in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy; Analyzing Qualitative Data with Computer Software, in Health Services Research; and the book, Computer Programs for Qualitative Data Analysis (Sage).

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