Dean of Student Affairs; NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Anita is an experienced Senior Student Affairs Administrator who has had a professional career at New York University spanning 35 years. In 2010 she assumed the role of Dean of Student Affairs at NYU-Poly where she played a key leadership role in overseeing the merger of NYU and Polytechnic School of Engineering, the second-oldest engineering school in the country. She is a winner of the 2015 NASPA Excellence Award (National Association for Student Personnel Administrators) for work on the merger that included expanding services in her 8 departments and launching new programming initiatives for 4500 engineering students.
Anita began her career at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she served as Director of MBA Academic Advisement and Director of Diversity Admissions. She served on the Board of Directors for the Consortium of Graduate Study in Management, an organization dedicated to providing fellowships and corporate career opportunities to Black and Hispanic MBA students. She is particularly proud of the large number of graduate students of color who she recruited through this organization who are now senior corporate executives, entrepreneurs and CEOs of their own companies. She then assumed the role of Dean for Freshmen at the NYU College of Arts and Science for many years, where she was responsible for freshmen retention, student affairs and all program development ensuring that new first year students (and parents) made a smooth transition into college life.
Her current professional passion is to address the low percentage of women in the engineering workforce which is 14%, as well as increasing the pipeline of African-American and Hispanic engineers who together represent under 8% of engineers in the United States. To that end in 2011 she launched an annual Women in STEM Summit – which exposed female STEM students as well as K-12 young women to some of the most accomplished and inspiring women in the field. Anita and the slate of speakers shared the triumphs and challenges in the tech and engineering workplace and also the rewards and strategies for sustaining, excelling and advancing in those fields. In Fall 2015 she launched the first Diversity in STEM conference with the theme “Bridging Engineering With Business, at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering which targets students, alumni, faculty, the corporate tech sector, and business executives of color. This was indeed a “full circle moment” uniting her early business school roots with her current engineering and technology passion and interests. This event has sustained and become an annual tradition at Tandon.
Anita has also forged special partnerships with professional organizations who support these same STEM missions such as the American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE) dedicated to uniting African-American energy professionals in the field and engaging the Black community in energy policy discussions as well as environmental issues. Last year she partnered with the AABE New York professional chapter to launch the first AABE student chapter in the northeast. In Spring 2016 she was presented with a Community and Education Award by the American Association of Blacks in Energy.
She has also dedicated a great deal of time to collaborating and sponsoring programs with organizations whose goal is to build STEM and STEAM awareness for K-12 students. Those organizations include Black Girls Code, the Brooklyn AKAs, and the Greater New York Girl Scouts organization to empower young men and women of color to learn about the tech marketplace, while teaching them hands on skills in computer programming and digital technology.
