Bridging Worlds

Professors take their knowledge out into the world—and bring the world back to Williams.

 

On the heels of award-winning research about the impact of extreme heat on the labor market, published in the European Economic Review in August, Williams economics professors Gregory Casey and Matthew Gibson headed to Washington, D.C. They were invited by the White House to spend the 2024-25 academic year sharing their expertise at the intersection of climate change and labor—Casey at the Council of Economic Advisers and Gibson with Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Theirs are not typical sabbaticals, that longstanding tradition in higher education in which faculty take regular, planned breaks from teaching to advance their research, write, paint, compose or pursue professional development. But Casey’s and Gibson’s leaves are equally valued at Williams. 

“Our faculty are often tapped for their expertise in a wide range of areas, from government service to nonprofit work to scientific studies,” says Dean of the Faculty Lara Shore-Sheppard, also an economist. “And the work they do beyond Williams feeds back into the classroom, whether by exposing students to new ideas and ways to apply what they learn or providing them with career-related connections.”

Such work might require a leave for a semester or year. Or it can happen alongside teaching and research. What follows are some examples of professors who are taking their knowledge out into the world—and bringing the world back to Williams.

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One day in 2018, Gregory Mitchell received an unexpected email. An immigration attorney was representing a gay man from Brazil who had been tortured because of his sexuality. The man sought asylum in the United States, but his application was rejected. Now he was facing deportation. The attorney asked if Mitchell, an expert on sexual identity in Brazil, could help.

Mitchell, the Dennis Meenan ’54 Third Century Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, said yes. He wrote a lengthy report explaining in detail why the man’s life would be in danger—that even though gay marriage was legal in Brazil, the LGBTQ murder rate there was the highest in the world, and an openly homophobic president had just been elected.

Mitchell was called to testify about his report in court and says he was “rattled” when the judge cross-examined him aggressively. “I never want to do that again,” he recalls thinking.

To Mitchell’s surprise, the judge approved the man’s request for asylum. And a new avenue opened. Mitchell has since helped six other individuals with similar cases, and with an extremely high success rate. “It’s work like this that really changes people’s lives,” he says.

The experience also helped him shape a 2021 Winter Study travel course called “Race, Sex and Gender in Brazil.” The class involved reading anthropological texts and novels as well as watching films before a trip to Rio de Janeiro. But Mitchell also wanted his students to gain a deeper understanding of the country’s struggles and contradictions. “It’s not all beautiful beaches and Speedos,” he says.

So he assigned affidavits from the cases he was involved in. The testimonies documented, in scrupulous detail, the violence and discrimination faced by members of the LGBTQ community. Had Mitchell declined that first immigration attorney’s request, his students might not have had such a full picture, he says, adding: “I wanted them to understand what the other side looks like.”

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Since 2013, Mount Greylock Regional School has offered juniors and seniors an option to learn Mandarin as an independent study subject—thanks to Williams professor Li Yu and her students.

Yu, the Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Chinese, developed the curriculum based on Williams’ Chinese 101 course. The high schoolers use the same textbooks as Williams students and, like beginning language learners at the college, focus on their listening and speaking skills before digging into reading and writing.

Yu also trains the two Williams students who work as tutors for the high schoolers in basic language-teaching techniques. She says mentoring her students this way has opened her to perspectives on East Asian language pedagogy—one of her main research interests. It has allowed her to see the field anew, pushing her to find new ways of explaining complex theories to undergraduates.

“It has been eye-opening to see how I can break down complicated pedagogical theories into something that is simple to understand, without jargon,” she says.

In addition to giving back to the community and helping to prepare high schoolers for language study in college, Yu says she developed the program to inspire more Williams students to consider careers as K-12 educators.

“We need more talented young people to join the education cause, especially in languages,” she says, adding that teaching students to teach builds not only their language skills abut also their communication and leadership skills. “Being part of this program at Mount Greylock has allowed me to better understand high school students and see what my own students are capable of doing beyond the classroom.”

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Susan Engel has a long list of extracurricular activities beyond Williams that stem from and feed her scholarship on the development of curiosity and invention, children’s ideas, the impact of college and school reform.

In addition to serving on the founding board of directors of Planet World, an interactive museum of language, located in the historic Franklin School in Washington, D.C., she was a cofounder and educational adviser to the Hayground School, an experimental school in Bridgehampton, N.Y. 

Last spring, Engel, senior lecturer in psychology and founder of Williams’ Program in Teaching, was approached by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The global policy forum works with 38 member countries to find international solutions to social, economic and environmental challenges. Engel joined a team studying and developing international education standards to provide a metric for measuring student achievement.

The work brought home just how context-sensitive developmental and educational psychology experiments should be, Engel says. As one example, she describes studies that examine children’s ability to “innovate” by making a hook out of a pipe cleaner in order to hoist a small basket from within a clear cylinder. Children from industrialized Western nations don’t usually figure out the solution until they are around age 8. When the same experiment is done in a non-Western rural and isolated fishing village, children invent the hook at an earlier age. In other words, she says, children across the globe are not always alike. 

Engel’s work with the forum also has broadened the scope of a seminar she teaches at Williams called “Inquiry, Invention and Ideas.” The course focuses on the emergence of curiosity and innovation in children.

“Working with the OECD has reminded me to encourage my students to have a more international view of child development. Researchers in this country can be a little narrow about that,” she says, adding that her goal is for her students “to go back and forth between scholarship and the world they live in.”

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From May 2022 to June 2023, economics professor Greg Phelan worked at the Office of Financial Research (OFR). Established by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, the agency’s mission is to promote stability by measuring and analyzing risks, conducting research, and collecting and standardizing data across the financial industry.

An expert in macroeconomics, financial theory, economic theory and international finance, Phelan led data-collecting initiatives and data analysis, collaborating with other economists on their research and working on his own. He released five working papers during his time there and presented research to policymakers and institutions, including U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler and the International Organization of Securities Commission’s Financial Stability Engagement Group.

Phelan says he gained valuable insight interacting with his peers. “Through my engagement with various working groups, I learned much more about traditional markets, such as money market funds and repo markets as well as innovative markets such as [those] for digital assets,” he says. “These are things that students in finance courses are always interested in.”

In addition to bringing this knowledge back to his Williams courses, including “Macroeconomic Instability and Financial Markets” and “Theory of Asset Pricing,” Phelan retained another important connection from his work with the OFR. One of his responsibilities there was co-organizing the agency’s Rising Scholars Conference. The annual event brings together economists from all over the world who have received their Ph.D.s within the last six years to present research on topics related to financial stability.

Now back on campus, Phelan continues to help organize Rising Scholars. “The connections at the conference have led to seminar invitations for speakers at Williams and will certainly lead to more in the future,” he says.

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It was 2022, and Marlene Sandstrom was eager to return to the classroom after serving six years as Dean of the College. But the Hales Professor of Psychology also knew she’d miss the part of her role that involved supporting students as they navigated the challenges of college life. 

Then she heard that physicians at Northern Berkshire Pediatrics, a clinic in North Adams, Mass., had developed a behavioral component to their practice to offer more holistic care to patients. Sandstrom was eager to put her professional license—which she has renewed every year since joining the faculty in 1999—to use. She contacted the clinic to propose working with the team, and they agreed.

“I felt at home right away,” she says. “And being able to work with real children and families after such a long hiatus changes how I read the literature, and it changes the way I teach.”

Since May, Sandstrom has worked in the clinic one day per week while also teaching courses such as “Introductory Psychology” and “Clinical Psychology.” She sees children with behavioral and mental health issues, helping them to adjust to new medical diagnoses, deal with anxiety or depression, or cope with trauma.

The work has emphasized nuances of mental illness that academic research sometimes overlooks, she says. Now, when introducing her students to research studies, Sandstrom says she is increasingly interested “in trying to shine light on the difference between lab-based studies of clinical work and clinical work as it is offered in the real world.”

She points to anxiety in children as an example. One gold-standard treatment is a cognitive-behavioral approach focused on confronting the source of anxiety—a step-by-step method laid out in the literature that Sandstrom has taught for years. Treating children directly, though, has brought home how children’s anxiety exists on a broad spectrum requiring individualized approaches.

“Trying to apply evidence-based treatment highlights all the nuances,” Sandstrom says. “And those nuances are everything, in the end. They are the difference between an approach working or not.”