Faculty and Fellows

Peter Levine is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life. He also appointments in the Tufts Philosophy Department, Political Science Department, and the Tufts Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He was the founding deputy director (2001-2006) and then the second director (2006-2015) of Tisch College’s CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. In addition, Levine co-leads the Civic Studies major, teaches the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, and organizes the annual Frontiers of Democracy conference.

Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. From 1993-2008, he was a member of the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. During the late 1990s, he was also Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Levine is the author of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, 2013), five other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Street Law Inc., the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, Discovering Justice, the Kettering Foundation, the American Bar Association Committee’s for Public Education, the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

Diane Ryan joined Tisch College in 2017 as the Associate Dean for Programs and Administration. She has devoted her career to public service, serving in the U.S. Army and spending the last nine years as a faculty member and senior leader at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership. There she established a capstone course that engaged more than 750 West Point cadets in community engagement initiatives with local high school students.

During her career in the U.S. Army, Diane served in a variety of roles, including with the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad. While in Iraq, Diane worked closely with a number of NGOs and founded the U.S.-Iraqi Army Women's Partnership Project.

Alnoor Ebrahim is a Professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His current research addresses two core dilemmas of accountability facing social enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and public agencies: How should they measure and improve their performance? How should they address competing demands for accountability from diverse stakeholders? These questions are addressed in his new book, Measuring Social Change: Performance & Accountability in a Complex World. He is also author of the award-winning book, NGOs and Organizational Change: Discourse, Reporting, and Learning, and is co-editor of Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics. Professor Ebrahim presently serves on advisory boards to the Global Impact Investing Network and Acumen Fund on the topic of impact measurement, and he previously served on a working group established by the G8 to create global guidelines on social impact measurement. He has also worked with the NGO Leaders Forum, an annual gathering of CEOs of the largest humanitarian development organizations based in the US.

Brian Schaffner is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies at Tufts University. Before coming to Tufts, he was a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a faculty associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on public opinion, campaigns and elections, political parties, and legislative politics. He is co-author of the book Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail; co-editor of the book Winning with Words: The Origins & Impact of Political Framing; and co-author of Understanding Political Science Research Methods: The Challenge of Inference and author of Politics, Parties and Elections in America. His research has appeared in more than 30 journal articles and has received over $2 million in external funding.

Hilary Binda has a PhD in English and is a Senior Lecturer in the Visual and Critical Studies Department. She is also the Director of the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Founding Director of the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College.

Binda’s research includes a collaborative study with Carolyn Rubin and Jill Weinberg of the impact of college-in-prison on formerly incarcerated people. Binda also works on the relationship between the literary and the visual registers as this productive tension informs the emerging discourse of time in early modern England and as this tension resonates in the contemporary discourses of queer/feminist theory.

Julie Dobrow has an A.B. from Smith College in Anthropology and Sociology, and holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in media studies from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Much of her research centers on the content and effects of media on children; on issues of gender and ethnicity in media; and on how children make sense of these images in the world of animated programming. Dobrow’s other main research interests are in the intersection of history and communication studies and in biography.

Her book, Outside Emily's Door: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet, was published by WW Norton and Company in 2018. Dobrow has worked professionally as a journalist and runs workshops on media literacy training for parents, teachers, and students. She has written a blog on children and media issues for the Huffington Post, in addition to writing  freelance pieces for the Boston Globe Magazine and other publications.

Dobrow’s work at Tisch College focuses on developing and teaching courses in the area of Civic Media, mentoring Tisch College faculty, advising students in the Civic Studies major, coordinating internships for students that focus on issues of media and civic engagement, and putting on events such as the annual Edward R. Murrow Forum on Issues and Journalism.

Outside of Tufts, Dobrow has volunteered extensively on town boards and committees in her community in educational and environmental realms. She also serves as vice president of the Boston Authors Club.

Fahad Dogar is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. His research interests span networked computer systems, including mobile and wireless systems, cloud-based systems, and the Internet. Performance, reliability, and cost of using these systems are some of the important considerations in his research.

Fahad's Faculty Fellowship will support the continued development of the course "Computing for Developing Regions" which was first offered in Spring 2017. This course focuses on understanding, designing, and evaluating innovative technological solutions for developing regions of the world. Fahad will work towards identifying suitable project ideas for the students, and making this course accessible to a wider audience at Tufts.

Deborah Donahue-Keegan is a Lecturer in the Education department. Her research and teaching focus on the ways in which prosocial education approaches can synchronously foster positive school climate, racial literacy, equity, and academic achievement in/across school systems. She is dedicated to advancing education practices that foster social-emotional development, deep learning, and cultural competence in all schools. Deborah co-leads the MA Consortium for Social-Emotional Learning in Teacher Education. She is also on the steering committee for the MA Social-Emotional Learning Alliance. Deborah began her career in the education field as a high school teacher, for seven years, beginning in Kingston, Jamaica. Before coming to Tufts, Deborah was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Wellesley College. She is currently writing a book that builds on her dissertation research--a qualitative study of public high school teachers' efforts to foster socio-moral and civic learning through constructive controversy.

Moon Duchin is an Associate Professor of mathematics at Tufts University and serves as director of Tufts’ interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society program. Her mathematical research is in geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, and dynamics. She is also one of the leaders of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, a Tisch College-supported project that focuses mathematical attention on issues of electoral redistricting.

Duchin's research looks at the metric geometry of groups and surfaces, often by zooming out to the large scale picture. Lately she has focused on geometric counting problems, in the vein of the classic Gauss circle problem, which asks how many integer points in the plane are contained in a disk of radius r. Her graduate training was in low-dimensional topology and ergodic theory, focusing on an area called Teichmüller theory, where the object of interest is a parameter space for geometric structures on surfaces.

Duchin has also worked and lectured on issues in the history, philosophy, and cultural studies of math and science, such as the role of intuition and the nature and impact of ideas about genius. She is involved in a range of educational projects in mathematics: she is a veteran visitor at the Canada/USA Mathcamp for talented high school students; has worked with middle school teachers in Chicago Public Schools, developed inquiry-based coursework for future elementary school teachers at the University of Michigan, and briefly partnered with the Poincaré Institute for Mathematics Education at Tufts.

Jonathan Garlick is a Senior Fellow at Tisch College of Civic Life and Professor at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, School of Medicine, School of Engineering. His NIH-funded research laboratory has pioneered the use of stem cells for tissue engineering to develop new treatments for oral health, cancer and complications of diabetes. As a science educator, Jonathan teaches students to explore the impact of science in their lives as a bridge towards moral responsibility and social action. At Tisch College, he directs a science education and civic engagement initiative known as Civic Science, which strives to inform public learning about science issues in order to promote inclusive public dialogue about divisive science issues in ways that strengthen civic life. Jonathan received his D.D.S. and Ph.D. from Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine and his Oral Pathology training from Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He has been awarded Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, the President and Chancellor’s Award, the State University of New York’s highest teaching honor, and he was recently inducted into the Monticello High School Hall of Distinction for contributions to society.

Penn Loh is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Masters in Public Policy Program and Community Practice at Tufts University’s Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. He holds an M.S. in environmental science and policy from Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley and a B.S. in electrical engineering from MIT. He has served on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council’s Health and Research Subcommittee, the Massachusetts Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, and on the boards of the Environmental Support Center, the Environmental Leadership Program, New World Foundation, and Community Labor United. He is currently a trustee of the Hyams Foundation and member of the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board and the Massachusetts Energy Efficiency Advisory Council.

Jerold R. Mande is Professor of the Practice, Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and a Senior Fellow, Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University. Mande joined the Tufts faculty in May 2017.

In addition to his faculty duties, Mande is leading an initiative on advocacy, food policy change, and public health impact. Mr. Mande understands the complex intersection of nutrition science and policy and that merely supplying people with the right nutrition information is not enough to ensure a healthy public. Far beyond issues of personal responsibility, real change in public health requires changing our food environment.

Mr. Mande brings a wealth of experience in public health, nutrition, and public policy to the job. In 2009 he was appointed by President Obama and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack as Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety, and after two years transitioned to focusing on reforming the national feeding programs. Mande brings prior academic experience as well. Before joining the Obama administration, he was the associate director for public policy at the Yale Cancer Center, and on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. There, he devised a national model that leveraged state leadership to increase cancer prevention and control, including diet and cancer, and was affiliated faculty with the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Nutrition.

Earlier in his career, as senior advisor to the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, he helped shape national policy on nutrition, food safety, and tobacco and led the design of the Nutrition Facts label that now appears on virtually all packaged foods. Following his tenure at FDA, Mr. Mande served on the White House staff as a health policy advisor, working on food, cancer, and tobacco policy, and was deputy assistant secretary for occupational health at the Department of Labor. He began his career as a legislative assistant for Al Gore in the U.S. House and Senate, managing Gore's health and environment agenda, and helping Gore write the nation's organ donation and transplantation laws.

Dr. Megan Mueller is the Elizabeth Arnold Stevens Junior Professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, and is the Associate Director of the Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction. She teaches in the M.S. program in Animals and Public Policy at the Center for Animals and Public Policy, as well as in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. Dr. Mueller received her B.A. in psychology and M.A. and Ph.D. in child study and human development from Tufts University.

Dr. Mueller’s research, teaching, and service focuses on assessing how relationships with animals can promote healthy children, families and communities through pet ownership, animal-assisted therapy, and animal-based community programs. Her ongoing projects involve human-animal interaction in military families, the integration of animals into science and engineering education, the effects of equine and canine-assisted therapy in promoting mental health, and accessibility of veterinary care to underserved human and animal populations.

As a Tisch College Senior Fellow, Mueller focuses on issues related to public policy regarding animals and the role pets can play in improving education, health, and other aspects of civic life.

Diane O’Donoghue is the director of the Program for Public Humanities and Senior Fellow for the Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. She became affiliated with Tisch College, first as a Faculty Fellow and then in her current roles, after two terms as the chair of the Department of Visual and Critical Studies, a Tufts University department located at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. An art historian, her areas of specialization include the visual culture of early China, about which she authored a monograph on reflection as object and idea in the Bronze Age. From these art historical and archaeological interests came scholarship on issues of the representation of surface and depth, and memory and memorialization, work informed by visual and cultural studies, gender and postcolonial critiques, and the practice and theories of psychoanalysis. Her writings on these issues have been awarded the CORST, Deutsch, and Silberger Prizes and she is a scholar member and on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

“These Words,” an exhibition project created in 2016 with the Chinese Historical Society of New England, circled back to research with Chinese archival sources in the service of both public history and advocacy. She joined the John Nicholas Brown Center of Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University as Visiting Professor of Public Humanities as of the fall of 2018. Her fellowships include two visiting appointments as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vienna, during which time she co-founded an organization of descendant families to advocate for the preservation of Jewish cemeteries and related sites in Austria. Diane O’Donoghue’s new book, On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (Bloomsbury, 2019) was the recipient of this year’s Robert S. Liebert Award, given in recognition of interdisciplinary work in psychoanalysis and the humanities. The award and its memorial lecture are sponsored by Columbia University and its Psychoanalytic Center.

Nancy has spent her career developing entrepreneurial solutions to community issues. Inspired by her work as a community foundation program officer, Nancy is passionate about building community resources/resilience. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she launched a charter school, a family giving network, numerous community forums, as well as a college mentoring/scholarship program for first generation college students. She also started a teen grant-making program in partnership with the Packard Foundation, and has been teaching youth and college philanthropy ever since. Currently, in addition to philanthropy consulting, Nancy works as the Director of Arts & Environment at The Umbrella Community Arts Center in Concord, where she is most excited about developing program partnerships with environmental groups and neighboring towns, including Lowell, Framingham and Maynard. She serves on several local nonprofit boards, and is a facilitator in a local restorative justice program.

Chris Swan is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a strong focus on engineering education and outrach efforts. He previously served as a Tisch College Associate Dean, and serves on the steering committe of the Tisch College Community Research Center. Prof. Swan received a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT in 1994 and both Bachelor (BS) and Master (MS) of Science degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984 and 1986, respectively. Prior to obtaining his ScD. Dr.Swan worked for GZA Geoenvironmental, Inc., a national engineering consulting firm specializing in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering projects.

Grace Talusan is a lecturer in the Department of English and in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. She teaches two courses for participants in Tisch College programs: the Tisch Scholars foundation course "Civic Identity, Reflection, and Action," and the Tufts 1+4 course "Communicating for Change." Talusan is an award-winning author who was recently awarded the 2017 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Nonfiction for The Body Papers, a memoir that chronicles her life as a Filipina immigrant and survivor of trauma and illness.