Future Faculty: Great Alums Make Inspiring Teachers

It’s amazing what can happen when one brilliant Hunter College graduate returns to campus to teach. When Mildred Dresselhaus HCHS ’47, HC ’51 arrived at Hunter, few careers were open to women and she expected to become an elementary school teacher. Then she took a nuclear physics class with Professor Rosalyn Yalow ’41, who immediately recognized Dresselhaus’s gift for science and encouraged her to enter the field. Dresselhaus, later known as “the queen of carbon science,” received the Presidential Medal of Excellence from Barack Obama after a lifetime of groundbreaking research.

Yalow graduated from Hunter with a major in physics, earned her PhD in nuclear physics, and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developingradioimmunoassay, a technique for measuring insulin and other biological substances. She also spent years on the Hunter faculty.

Throughout its history, Hunter has been very successful in luring back brilliant graduates—not just as honorees or guest lecturers, but as professors who devote themselves to teaching and mentoring new generations while continuing their own important research. Honoring that legacy at Commencement last spring, Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab began planting the idea of return in the minds of several high-achieving members of the Class of 2018.

Macaulay Honors Scholar Lindsay Griffiths ’18 excelled as a double major in English and Spanish, earning a 3.9 GPA and an invitation into the McNair Scholars Program, which supports students from traditionally underrepresented to pursue graduate education. Griffiths ultimately won offers to six doctoral programs, choosing Princeton University. She credits her success to the “amazing” Hunter faculty, and perhaps she’ll return to campus to inspire the next generation of Hunter students.

Any anthropology department would be lucky to recruit Elena Adasheva-Klein ’18, who grew up in a small town in Ukraine before coming to New York. With her 3.97 Hunter GPA and ambitious plans for graduate research in Siberia, Adasheva-Klein won acceptance to Yale, where she is pursuing her PhD in cultural anthropology.

McNulty Scholar Emily Lau ’18 can look forward to a promising career as a biology professor. With a 3.95 GPA, dual majors in chemistry and anthropology, and research experience in Professor Mandë Holford’s Hunter lab, Lau earned a five-year National Science Foundation Fellowship for doctoral studies in ecology, evolution and marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. If she returns to Hunter, she will follow in the footsteps of Benjamin Ortiz ’90, who came back to campus as a professor of biology after completing  his PhD at Stanford and a post-doc at UC Berkeley.

Evelyn De Los Reyes ’18—also a McNulty Scholar—who came to the U.S. from the Philippines when she was five, will be in her element as a future chemistry professor. She graduated from Hunter with a 3.9 GPA, a major in biochemistry and minor in math, and acceptance offers from six PhD programs. She will be pursuing her doctorate in pharmacology at Weill Cornell.

And what better choice could urban studies and sociology major Jair Moreira ’18 make than pursuing a career in teaching at his alma mater? Moreira is currently pursuing his PhD in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the focus of his doctoral research is the relationship between immigration and policies governing education and training. For a scholar seeking breakthrough ideas in those areas, no home base could top Hunter and New York, where even as an undergrad, Moreira had the opportunity to work at the City Council.