For Vidur Chopra, joining Teachers College’s program in International & Comparative Education has provided the opportunity to collaborate with Associate Professor of Practice Mary Mendenhall, a leading authority on preparing teachers to work with refugee and displaced populations.

For Mendenhall and the program, Chopra’s arrival has meant the addition of an accomplished scholar who has worked at the intersections of education, forced migration and citizenship studies with UNICEF, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and NGOs in East Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In October, under the auspices of the Columbia Global Centers, Chopra organized and moderated an online panel on forced migration. In early November, he spoke about his own work as part of the Department of International & Transcultural Studies’ Workshop series.

“Vidur immediately raises our game as he joins ongoing research studies and brings ideas for new initiatives,” said Mendenhall, who together with Chopra, is co-leading a project with the LEGO Foundation on helping teachers in refugee settings integrate play-based approaches to support students’ academic and social-emotional well-being.

Chopra is one of nine recipients of the Dr. Bruce Goldberg Postdoctoral Fellowships at TC. The Goldberg Fellows  positions, which currently span six academic departments, are being funded through a $2.5 million bequest by the late alumnus Bruce Goldberg (Ed.D. ’76, M.A. ’75), who died in 2017. Little is known about Goldberg — he was a public school teacher in Brooklyn — but his gift, received upon his death in 2017, establishes TC as a leader in (among other fields) child and adolescent trauma, funding a range of work that currently encompasses: sustainability education; the impact of poverty and stress on functional brain development; physical therapies for Parkinson's disease; exploration of resilience through children's literature; the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning; refugee education and belonging; sexual abuse and resilience in girls; and suicide prevention.

"This gift is a real game-changer that amplifies a really cool interdisciplinary focus at TC," says TC Provost Stephanie J. Rowley.

The Goldberg Fellowships are prompting faculty members to reexamine their own work. For example, Goldberg Postdoctoral Fellow Elizabeth Taveras Rivera has been working with Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Associate Professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education, on studying the impact of school closings in Puerto Rico, an existing problem that grew worse in the aftermath of the more recent hurricanes that have battered the island.

“Elizabeth is contributing an important aspect to the study by connecting the emotional impact of the closing of schools for one Black community with the larger problem of the closing of schools in Puerto Rico as tied to poverty,” Martínez-Roldán says. “She has accessed demographic information and socioeconomic indicators by municipalities in Puerto Rico, situating the research project within the macro context of the socioeconomic conditions of communities in the island in relationship to the closing of schools. Through this work and through her interest in metaphors, she has expanded our initial analysis, which focused on literacy learning.”

But the Goldberg Fellowships are also “a great way to demonstrate how philanthropy can positively shape both an institution and a field,” Rowley says. “Education has been late to the game in terms of postdocs. The natural sciences have them because there’s a recognition that people need an extended clock to build their skills. So, this adds a nice layer in how we prepare our students for research careers. And seeing a new group of scholars trained at TC in this important field will help people understand our value as a research institution.”