NSF-Funded Initiative Helps
FSU Advance Underrepresented Faculty

Campus News

Campus News

NSF-Funded Initiative Helps FSU Advance Underrepresented Faculty

A recent initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has helped Framingham State recruit and promote four new faculty members from underrepresented backgrounds into full-time positions since launching in 2022.

Framingham State University is the lead institution on an effort that includes Bridgewater State University and Worcester State University to develop a model to develop more STEM faculty of color. It is funded by a $3 million grant from the NSF.

“We are thrilled by the early success of this important new initiative,” says Kristen-Porter Utley, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Framingham State University. “We have a long way to go, but we are moving

toward having faculty demographics that better represent our students and our society.”

All of the new faculty are from Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) populations, which include African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Native Pacific Islanders.

The new AGEP faculty at FSU are:

2024 FSU Cohort

Dr. Sandra Sanchez
Department
of Biology

Dr. Sanchez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology (2024) at Framingham State University. She earned her B.S. in Biology with a concentration in Microbiology from California State University Northridge in California in 2013. In 2019, she successfully obtained her PhD in Microbiology from Indiana University in the lab of Dr. Dan Kearns.

Dr. Giuliano Espino ’16
Department of
Political Science

Dr. Espino was raised by a family of Cuban-American refugees in Natick. He attended Framingham State University for his undergraduate degree and finished his PhD at Northeastern University in 2023, writing his dissertation on the role of international organizations in shaping domestic policymaking.

2023 Cohort

Dr. Forrest R. Rodgers
Department of Sociology
and Criminology

Dr. Rodgers received his PhD in Sociology with emphases in criminology and race/ethnicity from the University of Oklahoma. His teaching and research interests focus broadly on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ crime, victimization and injustice.

Dr. Njesa Okoro Totty
Department
of Mathematics

Dr. Totty earned her PhD in Mathematics from Oregon State University. Her research interests are in applied statistics, imbalanced classification and machine learning.

2022 Cohort

Dr. Rachel Avard
Department
of Biology

Dr. Avard is a Mary Miles Bibb Teaching Fellow at FSU who received her PhD in Chemistry from Columbia University. She specializes in biophysical chemistry, the study of the physical properties of biological molecules at the chemical level.

Dr. Chantrell Frazier
Department of Chemistry
and Food Science

Dr. Frazier has a PhD in Biochemistry from Florida International University, and her research focuses on the application of human scent forensics in subject identification. She recently accepted a full time faculty position at Roger Williams University.