Faculty

Barbara Colombo

Biography

Barbara Colombo, Ph.D., is Professor at Champlain College, USA, where she runs the Behavioral Neuroscience Lab. Her research and writing, deeply embedded in her teaching, is focused on exploring the role of the cognitive reserve and non-invasive brain stimulation in promoting emotional and physical health in different populations (young adults, adults and aging population). Her recent research focuses on the effect of the cognitive reserve as a mediator in different adverse health conditions (sleep disorders, chronic pain, COVID related PTSD). Her passion for health and health equity led to a line of research aimed at reducing health disparities for aging populations living in rural areas as well as aging individuals who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. She has also been exploring the relationship between doctors and patients, with a specific focus on trust and shared decision making, and how this can influence health outcomes.

Dr. Colombo earned two master’s degrees, one from Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milano (Social sciences) (Italy) and one from the Open University (Psychology) (London, UK). She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milano, where she worked as tenured assistant professor of Psychology until her move to Champlain in 2014. She also deepened her postgraduate education at Harvard Medical School, focusing on Clinical Research and Biostatistics.

Her passion for applied teaching, service learning, and inclusive education is matched by her academic profile, which consists of 2000 citations on high impact journals, Impact Factor of 24, and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications (many of which with her students as co-authors). She is an editor and reviewer for several high Impact Factor journals.

Her professional expertise includes working in a clinical private practice, in hospitals as clinical neuropsychologists, and running hundreds of workshops focused on health and wellbeing, peer education, professional decision making, and inclusivity.

Publications & Abstracts

Publications & Abstracts

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Annemarie Conlon

Biography

Dr. Annemarie Conlon teaches social work foundation courses. She is a licensed clinical therapist specializing in anxiety-related disorders. Her experience includes working at MD Anderson Cancer Center, providing family-centered counseling to people diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. She has also spent one year as a pre-dissertation intern with Dr. Jimmie Holland at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Annemarie received the American Cancer Society Grant in Clinical Oncology Social Work as a doctoral student and was a Hartford Pre-dissertation Awardee, Cohort III. Before coming to Vermont, she was the social work lead on three federal and foundation grants centering on the interprofessional education of students, faculty, and health care providers who attend to the health care needs of older adults. Annemarie got her start in health care as a graduate intern at Legacy Community Health in Houston, Texas, where she worked with people diagnosed with HIV.

Before entering the health field, Annemarie spent over a decade at American Express in New York City, where she held positions of increasing responsibility. These included the titles of pricing analyst, financial analyst, sr. financial analyst, financial systems lead, and manager of international business development. She worked with a multi-disciplinary team in that position to develop the American Express Card as a franchise in emerging overseas markets.

Distinctions & Awards

Francine Page Excellence in Teaching Award (2023)

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Akette Cowart

Biography

Akette Cowart currently serves as the Manager of a Cyber Investigations Program with the federal government where he conducts forensic analysis related to internal investigations. He has spent over 25 years in the Information Technology field with a majority dedicated to Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics. An Air Force veteran, he has also worked with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps as a Cyber Security and Defense professional. Prior to his current position, he served as a Digital Forensic Examiner for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and US Customs and Border Protection.

Favorite Quote

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Krista Crawford

Biography

Krista has a professional background that includes over twenty years of human resource and executive management experience in a variety of settings and organizations, including financial services, philanthropic, healthcare, and industrial production. Her professional and academic group presentations have taken her to many points around the globe and include topics such as moral ethics, positive organizational development, telemedicine, physician leadership, international recruitment, and stress management. Her work has addressed the timely topic of e-leadership, the use of technology in leading organizations, as well as her doctoral research in cultural intelligence, the ability to adapt to other cultures. Her dissertation topic was a result of leading service learning groups to the country of Belize with a philanthropic service organization, www.peacework.org.

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

Vistage

Curriculum Vitae

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Favorite Quote

“I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.”

—Estée Lauder

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Amanda Crispel

Biography

Amanda is the Acting Dean of the Division of Communication and Creative Media, the Chair of the Game Studio (a seven-program cohort of faculty and students), and a Professor of Game Design. She has been a faculty member of Champlain College since 2005, and has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art focused on games as a persuasive communication medium.

Amanda Crispel is a veteran of the game industry. She has worked for companies such as Brøderbund Software, Mattel, Lego, Leapfrog, The Learning Company and Nickelodeon, and she specializes in games and interactive media for children and families and games with persuasive or educational purposes.

She has also worked on several research grants in the serious game space targeting the prevention of sexual violence against women.

What are your hobbies?

Dragonboat Paddling, Woodworking, Skiing

Favorite local eateries and things to do in Vermont:

Being on Lake Champlain, or enjoying a beautiful evening at a lake shore eatery.

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Ines de Haro

Biography

Inés Luisa de Haro was born in Madrid, Spain, and is passionate about all things Spanish food and history. Inés greatly enjoys teaching in the Core Division by encouraging diverse perspectives in her classes, which strive to engage students in pragmatic discourse. Her Core classes seek to invite differing thoughts to flourish in respectful and professional academic environments. Inés is a Champlain College alumni from the Education and Humanities Department (now the School of Social Innovation), has worked professionally in the educational field in Vermont since 2019, and graduated with her Master’s in History from The University of Vermont in 2023.

Distinctions & Awards

Connor Glassett Spirit of Adventure Award – Education & Human Studies Division Wide Award – Champlain College 2020

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
• Fascism in Spain 1923-1977 by Stanley G. Payne

Favorite Quote

“Every child deserves a champion: an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists they become the best they can possibly be.”

—Rita Pierson

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

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Allison Dean

Biography

Allison has always loved science and began working in the field as a lab technician at the Vermont Cancer Center, shortly after her graduation from UVM. One of the things she loved about her position was the opportunity to work with students, which encouraged her to begin teaching. Since her teaching career began, Allison has been teaching a variety of science courses, including Human Anatomy and Physiology, Nutrition, and Intro to Forensic Science. What Allison most loves about teaching is the challenge to meet the needs of all students in an environment that is constantly changing. Allison is passionate about creating learning environments that support student learning, are inclusive and engaging, are safe learning spaces where students can feel comfortable asking questions and that help students to push past barrier and their fear of science courses. Although she has high expectations for students in their educational journeys, she works hard to develop courses that help students to apply what they learn and help them to discover how important science is to their everyday lives.

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Christopher DeGuise

Biography

Christopher DeGuise is a professor at Champlain College and the founder and game developer at Instance Entertainment. DeGuise is an entrepreneur and a technologist with more than 20 years of experience working as an IT professional. DeGuise has an equal interest in the technology and business sides of his field, and believes technology has the ability to automate and simplify our lives.

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Weiling Deng

Biography

Dr. Weiling Deng is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College. She currently serves as the Core Division’s Third Year Faculty Lead and helps developing the new curriculum of Digital Humanities. Weiling received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests span a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary fields, which include Global Asias, Urban Humanities, comparative and international education, human geography, gender and feminist studies, technology and race, postcolonial theory, and postsocialist studies. Weiling emphasizes place- and project-based experiential learning and promotes transnational thinking of Vermont primarily through immigration, diaspora, border, and urban space.

Weiling is currently working on two book projects. The first book, co-authored with Dr. Jonathan Banfill of Champlain College, Los Angeles-based artists Sara Velas and Ruby Carlson, focuses on panorama museum as a critical form of public humanities and art. It challenges the Euro-American convention of panorama production by way of incorporating 20th-century Soviet and Chinese techniques of visual historiography and grounding museum-making in feral DIY Los Angeles art scenes and landscaping. This book releases the study of panorama from its traditional field of art and media history to embrace critical, grassroots, and community-oriented creation of alternative art space in a postcolonial Californian metropolis.

Weiling’s second book develops from her dissertation to examine the creation, transportation, and readjustment of feminist and gender empirical knowledge, with a special focus on transpacific and digitally mediated Chinese feminist and queer activism. It questions the eclipse of race in contemporary Chinese feminist and queer narratives by the binary state-activist approach and maps these narratives between postcolonial and postsocialist feminist works. This book maps the place-based tension instigated by the trans-lingual, transnational, and transmedial practice of the concept of “gender” onto the post-Cold War geopolitics of liberal academic knowledge production.

Weiling’s work has been published on South Asian Review, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies, Los Angeles Review of Books, and academic anthologies including Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice.

Publications & Abstracts

• “Death and Life in the Bordersand: On the Queer Remembrance of Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand,” South Asian Review 45, no. 1-2 (August 29, 2023): 66–76.
• “Grappling with the ‘China Crisis’: Positionality, Impasse, and Potential Breakthrough of Chinese Feminist Diaspora in Post-Cold War North America.” In Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice, edited by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Routledge, 2021).
• “The Chinese Restaurant on Main Street, USA: On Zai Liang’s From Chinatown to Every Town,” Los Angeles Review of Books (September 23, 2023).

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015
• Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, London: Picador, 2020
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2019

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Tamie-Jo Dickinson

Biography

Tamie-Jo Dickinson is a National Board Certified Business Teacher and teaches business and entrepreneur classes at CVU High School, Champlain, CCV, VTC, Castleton, and through the Governor’s Institute of Vermont. She has decades of teaching under her belt and is skilled at making complex topics seem easy and attainable. Her passion is teaching entrepreneurship and business social responsibility. She provides training opportunities for teachers around the state on how to implement entrepreneurship into their curriculum, and her students have been winners of many state-wide business plan competitions. She teaches Managerial Accounting at Champlain, and she works as an educational consultant for the Vermont Small Business Development Center.

Hobbies and Interests: Tamie is a certified Jazzercise Instructor, which means she is actually a franchise owner! She teaches adult classes twice a week, and she teaches programs for young children during the summer.

Favorite Quote

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

—George Bernard Shaw

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Bethany Dietrich

Biography

Beth joined Champlain College with experience as a law librarian at Syracuse University College of Law, skill as a business librarian at Saint Michael’s College, and practice creating unique programs and events to encourage students to engage with the library. As Outreach & Engagement Librarian, Beth works collaboratively across campus to design, implement, and promote meaningful and impactful library programming and activities for both on-campus and online populations. She also delivers in-class information literacy sessions and provides research and reference support to the Champlain community. Beth has served as the Vice-President and President of the College & Special Libraries Section of the Vermont Library Association. She has also served on the Vermont Library Conference planning committee.

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

Association of College & Research Libraries

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Matthew Dismuke

Biography

Dismuke works in the game industry and taught an Advanced Seminar class.

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Christopher Dreisbach

Biography

Christopher Dreisbach is an award-winning filmmaker, musician, and fine artist with over a decade of professional experience.

American Film Institute Conservatory, Master of Fine Arts (specializing in Directing)
Hampshire College, Bachelor of Arts

Distinctions & Awards

Alfred P. Sloan Science & Film Award

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Film: Housekeeping (1987), Directed by Bill Forsyth
• Music: Talk Talk – Laughing Stock (1991)
• Book: The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

Favorite Quote

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

—Robert Bresson

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Jeevan DSouza

Biography

Dr. Jeevan D’Souza has been an adjunct professor of computer science and mathematics at Champlain College Online since 2017. Prior to joining CCO he has worked as an academic, IT manager, computer programmer, and electronics engineer.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) from Shivaji University, India, in 2000, a master’s in EE from the University of Texas in 2003, a graduate certificate in computer engineering at Polytechnic Institute of NYU in 2005 and a PhD in computer science from Nova Southeastern University in 2012.

His teaching interests are in the fields of digital circuit design, computer programming, robotics, and embedded systems. He currently lives in Miami and is enjoying the sunshine.

Publications & Abstracts

View on Google Scholar

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Damian Dunbar

Biography

Dr. Dunbar thoroughly enjoys bringing his leadership expertise into the educational environment to share his experiences and bring coursework alive. He is highly experienced in employee development and training, human resources, financial analysis, budget operations, personnel development, and leadership management. He served in the United States Army as an analyst for the United States Government. While on active duty, he served as an instructor, writer, developer, and program evaluator at the United States Army Finance School located at Fort Jackson, SC. His primary motivation for working in education is his experience, interest, and passion for developing others’ talents and defining their goals.

Throughout his career, he has been highly dedicated to the learning, training, and advancement of others. He incorporated professional and adult learning and education into each position. He has 30 + years of experience developing programs to assess workforce capabilities and deficiencies, allowing individualized programs to enhance employee skills and he enjoys doing this for his students. His goal in the online classroom is to create a comfortable and interactive learning environment based on respect rather than fear of the subject matter. To achieve that, he builds a strong rapport with his students to be presented in an environment conducive to learning. Likewise, communication is essential to an effective teaching and learning process in the academic setting.

Distinctions & Awards

Certified Defense Financial Manager (American Society of Military Comptrollers)

Publications & Abstracts

PUBLICATIONS & ABSTRACTS

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

Kappa Alpha Psi, Woodbridge Alumni Chapter

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
• A People’s History of the United States
• Reckless Endangerment

Favorite Quote

“Education and work are the levers to uplift people.”

—W.E.B DuBois

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