Alumni, students, faculty and friends convened on campus on Oct. 18 for TC’s Alumni Day, a reunion that emphasizes the transformative power of community and celebrates the College’s Alumni Award Recipients as well as innovative faculty research. Reflecting a shared commitment to creating a better world, the vibrant celebration united the TC community for networking opportunities, engaging discussions and a celebration of the impactful work of TC’s 2025 Alumni Award recipients.
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Jane E. Brown (M.A. ’10), President of the Alumni Council, giving remarks in Milbank Chapel (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
President Thomas Bailey addresses the audience (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
KerryAnn O'Meara, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost, and Dean of the College, giving remarks (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
Alumni could mix and mingle during lunch in Grace Dodge Dining Hall (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
After formal programming, alumni continued on to Everett Lounge for networking and dessert (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
“The concept of ‘community,’ the centrality of that connection to the TC experience, is very important to me, and something all of us at the College work to uphold,” said President Thomas Bailey in his welcome remarks. “Our scholarship is important. Our research changes lives. We continue to do the work that brought you all to TC, whether it was in the 1950s or last year.”
Alumni in attendance spanned generations, with graduates from the Class of 1952 to the Class of 2025 gathering in Morningside Heights on a crisp fall day. Alumni also gathered for regional events in Los Angeles and Guangzhou, China.
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A group of 16 alumni convened in Los Angeles to share food and stories of their time at TC (Photo: TC Archives)
Eleven alumni gathered in Guangzhou, China for a day of thought exchange and networking (Photo: TC Archives)
“Whether you walked these halls five, 10, 20, 30 or 50 years ago, being a part of the TC community is very special. We come from different places, different backgrounds, but we share a commitment to the TC vision to create a better world,” said Jane E. Brown (M.A. ’10), President of TC’s Alumni Council, in her welcoming remarks. “Whether you went on to a career in education, health, psychology or beyond, you share this vision with all of us.”
Alumni Reflect on the Day
Celebrating the Alumni Awards
During the day’s festivities, Teachers College honored the five recipients of this year’s Alumni Awards for profound contributions to their respective fields, the TC community and beyond.
From left to right: Rebecca Winthrop (Ph.D. ’08), Monique Herena (M.A. ’17), William Baldwin (Ed.D. ’82, Ed.M. ’81), Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn (Ed.D. ’16) and Gabrielle Oliveira (Ph.D. ’15, M.A. ’14) (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
The 2025 honorees represent the breadth of the Teachers College alumni community. Collectively, they exemplify the impact of TC graduates working to build a more equitable, informed and connected world.
Diving Deeper into Applied Expertise
Following the awards announcement, Distinguished Alumni Award Recipients Monique Herena (M.A. ’17), Chief Colleague Experience Officer at American Express, and Rebecca Winthrop (Ph.D. ’08), Senior Fellow and Director of Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, sat down for a conversation about their views on leadership, student agency, their careers and the impact of their TC education.
“Monique and Rebecca, two incredible leaders, embody the deep components that define leadership: values, potential and thinking of others,” said Roberta W. Albert (M.A. ’97), Vice President for Institutional Advancement, who moderated the conversation. “We feel and practice these values in the halls of TC.”
The discussion provided insight into Herena’s approach to change leadership at American Express as well as Winthrop’s recent book — The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better — and the different modes of learning students occupy.
From left to right: Roberta W. Albert (M.A. ’97), Rebecca Winthrop (Ph.D. ’08) and Monique Herena (M.A. ’17) (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
“I think about leadership from a very early stage, and I think that very much aligns with Teachers College and its mission,” said Herena, who established the Herena Family Endowed Scholarship Fund with her husband, Lou, in 2018 to support students in the Executive Master’s Program in Change Leadership (XMA). “How someone is developing self-awareness, or not, at a very early stage in their career, or life if you’re lucky enough, impacts your leadership.”
“Nobody learns just to learn. We are hardwired, evolutionarily, to learn because we want to do something,” said Winthrop, who was inspired to research student disengagement after observing her own children’s changed relationship to learning during COVID. “Anything that we can do that pairs knowledge acquisition with knowledge application in the school setting will be incredibly helpful…Schools should be training our kids to be good thinkers…to learn things and solve problems with their knowledge.”
George Bonanno, Professor of Clinical Psychology (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
Professor of Clinical Psychology George Bonanno, author of The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD and one of the world’s foremost scholars on human resilience, condensed his 35 years of research into an engaging keynote about resilience to trauma. The presentation came at a timely moment in American history and in TC’s history, as KerryAnn O’Meara — Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost, and Dean of the College — noted in her introductory remarks, which also emphasized the broad reach of faculty research at the College. “Our faculty continue to win awards for their scholarship, and for their leadership roles with journals, centers and institutes,” she said. “[But] what is perhaps more important…is the impact that our faculty are having in their respective fields impacting the public good.”
The keynote examined the components of resilience and why two thirds of people overcome trauma, as Bonanno’s research has found. “We get through these events by flexibly adapting ourselves to the challenge,” said the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab Director. “We work out the right behavior for the right situation at the right time and we correct as needed.”
From left to right, Charles Lang, Maria Hamdani (M.S. ’10) and Erik Voss (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
The day’s program also featured a panel on generative artificial intelligence and education moderated by Charles Lang, Senior Executive Director of the Digital Futures Institute and coterminus professor, shedding new light on the emerging technology and its shifting role in education. The conversation between Erik Voss, Assistant Professor in the TESOL program, and Maria Hamdani (M.S. ’10), VP of Assessment & Strategic Partnerships at the Center for Measurement Justice — who both leverage AI tools in their work — covered potential applications of generative AI in assessment and language learning, concerns about rapid adoption of new technologies and the future of AI.
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Alumni council member Stuti Munjal (M.A. ’24) getting know other alumni during lunch (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
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Rhonda Clements (Ed.D. ’88) chatting with an alumnus (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
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Vera Shao (M.Ed. ’20), President-elect of the Alumni Council, address the audience (Photo: Nina Wurtzel Photography)
TC Alumni Day concluded with networking and dessert in Everett Lounge, providing everyone an opportunity to strengthen connections through community and conversation. Current students, called “aspiring alumni” by President Bailey, mixed and mingled with alumni across generations.