Thursday, April 28th, 2022
7:00-8:30 PM ET (6:00-7:30 PM CT)
Register Here to Receive the Broadcast Link

Join Dr. Mays Imad and Dr. J. Cody Nielsen as they help us to synthesize what we have learned about healing ourselves, healing the system of higher education, and reckoning with the issues of racial injustice and inequity on American college campuses. In dialogue, Drs. Imad and Nielsen will center pedagogies of healing and practices of reimagining that any member of the college and university community can employ to heal themselves, their respective institutions, and their corners of the world.

They will provide us with tools on how we might begin to heal ourselves and higher education, collectively, through the practice of radical reimagining toward the emergence of new understandings of what it means to be a human being within institutions of higher education.

CMind Executive Director Dr. David Robinson-Morris will moderate the dialogue.

Mays Imad received her undergraduate training from the University of Michigan–Dearborn where she studied philosophy. She received her doctoral degree in Cellular & Clinical Neurobiology from Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. She then completed a National Institute of Health-Funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Arizona in the Department of Neuroscience. She joined the department of life & physical sciences at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona as an adjunct faculty member in 2009 and later as a full-time faculty member in 2013. During her tenure at Pima, she taught Physiology, Pathophysiology, Genetics, Biotechnology, and Biomedical ethics. She also founded Pima’s Teaching and Learning Center (TLC). Imad is currently teaching in the biology department at Connecticut College.

Mays is a Gardner Institute Fellow and an AAC&U Senior Fellow within the Office of Undergraduate STEM Education. Dr. Imad’s research focuses on stress, self-awareness, advocacy, and classroom community, and how these impact student learning and success. Through her teaching and research she seeks to provide her students with transformative opportunities that are grounded in the aesthetics of learning, truth-seeking, justice, and self-realization.

Outside of the classroom, Dr. Imad works with faculty members across disciplines at her own institution and across the country to promote inclusive, equitable, and contextual education–all rooted in the latest research on the neurobiology of learning. A nationally-recognized expert on trauma-informed teaching and learning, she passionately advocates for institutions to make mental health a top priority and to systematically support the education of the whole student.

Dr. J. Cody Nielsen holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from Iowa State University and masters degrees in mental health counseling and divinity.  He is the founder and Executive Director of Convergence on Campus, a North American volunteer led social change organization which seeks to dismantle longstanding systems of marginalization of religious, secular, and spiritual identities in higher education.  His 2013-2015 study Multifaith in Higher Education explored the campus climates through a policy and practice lens of over 150 institutions across the United States and Canada. The former Expert in Residence for Religious, Secular, and Spiritual identities for NASPA, Cody is an emerging voice in national calls for equity of religious minorities and non-religious identities on campus.  A scholar by practice (not by nature), Cody’s dissertation considered the institutional climate of Penn State University and its Pasquerilla Center, the largest multi faith center at an institution of higher education in North America. He is a father to Levi and an avid runner, writer, and board game enthusiast. On the weekends you can find Cody on a bike trail, in a hammock reading, or in the kitchen baking bread or trying recipes out of cookbook he probably found in a used bookstore.

This series will be moderated by David Robinson-Morris, PhD. Dr. Robinson-Morris serves as the Executive Director for The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (CMind), and is the Founder and Chief Reimaginelutionary at The REImaginelution, LLC, a strategic consulting firm working at the intersections of imagination, policy, practice, and prophetic hope to radically reimagine diversity, equity, and inclusion toward racial justice and systemic transformation by engendering freedom of the human spirit. Dr. Robinson-Morris is a scholar, author, philosopher, social justice and human rights advocate-activist, educator, philanthropist, community organizer, DEI practitioner, and administrator. He is the author of a research monograph, Ubuntu and Buddhism in Higher Education: An Ontological (Re)Thinking, published by Routledge.