Faculty membership is conferred upon individuals who exemplify the society’s mission through significant academic accomplishments, a demonstrated record of research and teaching excellence, and a commitment to promoting equity and excellence in graduate education. These esteemed faculty members embody academic and personal excellence, create supportive and inclusive environments, and serve as role models in scholarship, leadership, character, service, and advocacy.
University of Miami Nominees (2024-2025)
Nominee applications are currently being reviewed by the Membership Selection Committee. New members will be announced on March 1, 2025.
School of Education & Human Development
School of Architecture
College of Arts & Sciences
University of Miami Inductees (2023-2024)
School of Communication
Dr. Ronald L. Jackson II is a Professor of Communication, Culture & Media Studies at University of Miami. He earned his B.A. in communication and M.A. in organizational communication at the University of Cincinnati. Subsequently, he graduated from Howard University with a Ph.D. in rhetoric and intercultural communication. He began his academic career at Xavier University of Louisiana and Shippensburg University, then spent twelve years as a professor at Penn State University and University of Illinois. He was appointed Head of Africana Studies followed by an appointment as Associate Dean of Faculty Development & Research in the College of Media at University of Illinois before coming to University of Cincinnati as Dean of the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences. While at University of Cincinnati he was elected to and served a 5-year term as leader within the National Communication Association, culminating in his role as President in 2018.
Most recently his research has focused on racial trauma. Most of his research articles, chapters, and reviews (75+) have appeared in communication and interdisciplinary research journals. He has also authored or edited 15 books and five thematic issues in academic journals. His areas of inquiry have been consistently related to cultural identity, social justice, and/or media, using a variety of methodological approaches. He has chaired or been a committee member of 66 graduate committees at the Master and Doctoral levels.
College of Arts & Sciences
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is the Marta Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. She has a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught at the University of Puerto Rico, Princeton, Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in colonial and postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean literatures. She is the author of Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Iberoamericana, 1999); Caribe Two-Ways?: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Ediciones Callejón, 2003); From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Bucknell, 2008); and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (Palgrave, 2014). She has co-edited Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (with Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Palgrave, 2016); Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (with Sarah Tobias, Rutgers University Press, 2016); The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) (with Santa Arias, Routledge, 2021) and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (with Michelle Stephens, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020). Yolanda has been funded by Ford Foundation, Fulbright, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholar Program at Harvard University. For more than thirty years she has been an advocate for diverse and first generation students and faculty thru her mentoring, program building, teaching and research.
Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Sciences
Dr. Traylor-Knowles is an Associate Professor at University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Sciences. She leads the Cnidarian Immunity Laboratory which investigates the mechanisms of coral immune function. She received her B.S./M.S. in Cell and Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins University and her PhD. in Biology from Boston University. She was a NSF Ocean Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow and Burroughs Wellcome Fund Postdoctoral Scholar at Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University where she studied coral immune response to heat stress. She’s an award winning mentor/scholar whose work has been featured on Miami Local 10 News, Fox Weather, WLRN SunDial, and Scientific American. She’s a committee member of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine “ Increasing Diversity in the U.S. Ocean Studies” committee. She’s also a Fulbright Scholar and an elected council member to the International Coral Reef Society. She’s the Director of the Voss Marine Invertebrate Collection at the Rosenstiel whose mission is to further scientific knowledge and education of marine invertebrates through the sharing and development of invertebrate taxonomic information. Additionally, she is the Founder and Director of Black Women in Ecology, Evolution and Marine Science, a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded to help combat the isolation and abuse in STEM against Black women. She’s an advocate for Black women in science and is determined to disrupt the system by creating a new narrative and structure.
University of Miami Inductees (2022-2023)
Miami Herbert Business School
Uzma Khan is an associate professor of marketing at University of Miami. She received her Ph.D. from Yale School of Management. Prior to joining University of Miami, she was faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business and at Carnegie Mellon University. She is an expert on consumer behavior, marketing strategy, and decision-making. Her research focuses on corporate diversity, equity and inclusion, consumers goals and motivation, risk perception, and choice architecture. Dr. Khan has published in top journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology-General, and Psychological Science. Her research has won several prestigious awards including AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award, SCP-SHETH Doctoral Dissertation Award, Frank A. & Helen E. Risch Faculty Development Professorship in Business Chair, CMU, Ormond Family Faculty Scholar, Stanford GSB, Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award, Marketing Science Institute’s Young Scholar, and multiple Provost Research Awards at the University of Miami. Dr. Khan serves on editorial review boards for Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology, and has served in important leadership roles at the University of Miami, including Chair of the Academic Standards Committee of the Faculty Senate and as member of the Business School Council. She teaches graduate and executive-level courses, and has won multiple awards for her teaching excellence and mentorship. She has consulted for clients in finance, startup, airline, consumer packaged goods, education, and high-tech industries.
College of Arts & Sciences
Roger M. Leblanc is a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Miami (UM), Miami, Fl. His teaching and research are oriented in Physical Chemistry, Surface Chemistry, and the Principle of Spectroscopy in the Ph.D. graduate program. In Dr. Leblanc’s career, more than 100 Ph.D. students (plus post-doctoral fellows) were awarded a Ph.D. degree from 1994 to present. To support this assessment, in 2014 he received the “Faculty Mentor Award” from the Miami Graduate Ph.D. Program. This award is competitive among all the Colleges, including the Miami School of Medicine. Dr. Leblanc’s research activity is multidisciplinary encompassing chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, and engineering. Since his arrival at UM in 1994, he has experienced that diversity is highly valued as it strengthens both social groups and workplaces. Additionally, the objective of any project in his team must have strength of the project without disparity on either gender or race. The most important award regarding education is namely: (1) Cooper Fellowship from the College of Arts & Sciences at UM in recognition of the excellence in contributing to the core missions of scholarship, teaching and service (2011); (2) “2006 Florida Award” of the American Chemical Society in recognition of the significant and meritorious achievements of prominent Florida Scientists; (3) Provost’s Award for Scholarly activity in recognition for excellence in research (2002). Dr. Leblanc served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at UM from 1994-2002 and again from 2013-2021.
Jason Mizell
School of Education & Human Development
Dr. Jason D. Mizell is a faculty member in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami. His scholarship, research, teaching, and service agenda lies within four distinct, yet interrelated areas. He focuses on cultivating and providing a platform for minoritized youth civic literacies, languaging equity, dismantling deficient frameworks regarding the languaging and literacies practices of racialized students, and the expansion of the representation of Afro-Latinés in children’s literature. As a praxis-oriented activist-scholar, Dr. Mizell collaboratively developed and implemented a community-driven literacies project that became an integral part of two summer K-8 camps and various afterschool programs. Those projects incorporated youth participatory action research and Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics. He uses those lenses to apprentice youths, pre-and in-service teachers, and their community accomplices in order to learn that that language is a socially constructed tool that evolves to meet the needs of its speakers, while also explicitly teaching them about the value of languaging equity and diversity, register shifting, and translanguaging.
Dr. Mizell has been recognized as a 2022-2024 Literacy Research Association Stars Fellow, 2022 North American Systemic Functional Linguistics Association Promising Scholar, and a 2022-2023 University of Miami Engaged Faculty Fellow. He is a faculty affiliate with the University of Miami Center for Global Black Studies. Additionally, Dr. Mizell volunteers at a local elementary school in Miami-Dade County. In addition to working with students and teachers in the United States, he also leads an intergenerational community-based research project with an Afro-descendant community in Ecuador.
College of Arts & Sciences
Shouraseni Sen Roy is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of Miami. She received her pre-doctoral education from the University of Delhi, including B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. She completed her Ph.D. in 2005 from Arizona State University and joined the faculty in University of Miami. Her core area of research over the last two decades has concentrated on expanding our understanding of long-term trends in climatic processes and impacts of climate change. Her research footprint includes the USA, India, China, South Africa, Burundi, and Iran. She has recently published a book on the gendered impacts of climate change in the Global South. Currently she is working on the understanding the local-level vulnerability to the impacts of climate change in the low-lying islands of the Indian Sundarban Delta. Her research has been funded by the National Geographic Society, Fulbright Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies, American Association of Geographers, and National Science Foundation. She teaches courses on climate change, spatial analysis, and crime mapping. She regularly publishes with her students on collaborative research projects. She was a member and chair of the Equity and Inclusion Committee (formerly Women and Minorities Committee) at the University of Miami. During her tenure in this committee, she worked actively to make the university more equitable and inclusive, including the creation of an ombudsperson position, paid parental leave benefits, and a university wide salary analysis. She aspires to continue working on various initiatives on equity and inclusion.
College of Engineering
Helena Solo-Gabriele is a Professor in the Department of Chemical, Environmental, and Materials Engineering at the University of Miami, where she teaches courses in environmental measurements, environmental engineering microbiology, and design of water quality control systems. Her research focuses on evaluating the transport of contaminants in the environment for the purpose of evaluating impacts on human health. She leads local, state and federally funded grants that evaluate infectious disease spread from measurements of wastewater, that evaluate sources of microbes to coastal environments, that evaluate contributions of the chemical PFAS to the environment from landfills, and that assess children’s exposure to contaminants in the home through dust. Her research teams are diverse and her studies are inclusive of under-represented communities. Dr. Solo-Gabriele has published over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles receiving numerous awards for her scholarship. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Throughout her research endeavors, Dr. Solo-Gabriele has shown a commitment to graduate education by serving throughout her career in service roles inclusive of the graduate coordinator for her Department (5 years), College representative on the University level Graduate Council (6 years), and as the Associate Dean for Research (16 years) where she facilitated the implementation of new graduate and undergraduate programs. Dr. Solo-Gabriele currently chairs the Exemplary Scholar Hires in Engineering (ESHE) committee within the College. The goal of the ESHE committee is to facilitate the hiring of exemplary and diverse candidates within the College of Engineering Departments by encouraging applications from under-represented minorities.
