Forum Participants

Dr. Havidán Rodríguez was appointed by the SUNY Board of Trustees as the 20th president of the University at Albany in June 2017. He took office in September 2017 after more than 25 years as a leader in higher education.

Before coming to UAlbany, Dr. Rodríguez was the founding provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Rodríguez was instrumental in creating UTRGV, a new public research university, and building the university’s new medical school from the ground up. Rodríguez had previously served as interim president and provost and vice president for academic affairs at The University of Texas Pan- American, which merged with The University of Texas at Brownsville to become UTRGV.

Prior to his leadership positions in Texas, Rodríguez spent seven years at the University of Delaware as deputy provost, vice provost for academic affairs and international programs, and professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. He also directed UD’s acclaimed Disaster Research Center, the world’s first research center devoted to the studying the complex social problems that result from natural and technological disasters and other community-scale crises.

Rodríguez has also held faculty and administrative positions at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, and served as Director of the Minority Affairs Program for the American Sociological Association (1995-1998). A respected scholar, he studies the socioeconomic impacts of disasters and the economic well-being of minority populations in the United States and Puerto Rico.

Rodríguez received a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Maryland, an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He and his wife, Rosy Lopez, have three grown children.

Dr. Kesavadas was the founding director of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Health Care Engineering Systems Center (HCESC), the largest endowed center in the University of Illinois system. In the center he managed research, IP and commercialization, data warehouse management (HIPAA), regulatory affairs, IRB and human subject protocols, student exchange, graduate programs, external partnerships, government relations, etc. HCESC has 186 members and affiliates. The Center collaborated and funded research in engineering, social and behavioral sciences, education, applied health sciences, medicine, and veterinary medicine. Twenty research laboratories and institutes, and affiliated hospitals, including Mayo Clinic, are supported through the program. A professor of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a member of the inaugural faculty of the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine, Dr. Kesavadas was named a distinguished University Presidential Executive Leadership Fellow in 2019.

Dr. Kesavadas previously served as a faculty member at the University at Buffalo, where he advanced his research interests in medical robotics, virtual reality/augmented reality in healthcare, manufacturing automation and design of systems.

Dr. Kesavadas received his B.Tech degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Calicut, India in 1985, his M.Tech degree in Aircraft Production Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1987, and his PhD in Industrial Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 1995.

Dr. Golden is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the University at Albany’s Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities. She joined the University at Albany in 2002 and has been affiliated with the CEMHD since 2005. Her research focuses on how individuals navigate their relationships with organizations, in the context of particular community settings, with an emphasis on how these relationships impact individual health and well-being. For the past several years (beginning with formative research supported by the CEMHD’s Export Center, and progressing on to a major 5-year study funded under CEMHD’s P20 award), her specific focus has been on the interactions among low income African American women in a smaller urban setting and local health and human service providers. In collaboration with academic and community based research partners, she has investigated how women’s preventive reproductive healthcare seeking is affected by particularities of the place in which they live, including privacy concerns created by the nature of their social networks, organizational images of healthcare providers, shared ways of talking about fears associated with reproductive health screenings, and disjunctures in the local communication networks linking residents and organizations. This line of inquiry has yielded important findings about the interrelationships between the material environment and residents’ experiences of that environment, which have highly consequential implications for the design of health communication interventions to encourage positive health-related behaviors.

Dr. Golden is currently collaborating with Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership and New York Presbyterian Hospital on a project funded by the New York State Health Foundation to identify perinatal telehealth barriers and benefits, and elevate voices of women of color in both development of telehealth services and in day-to-day interactions with providers.

Paul L. Morgan, Ph.D., was the Henry and Marion Eberly Fellow and Professor of Education and Demography in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State, where he was also the Inaugural Director of the Center for Educational Disparities Research. Dr. Morgan’s work has appeared in Pediatrics, Journal of Pediatrics, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Learning Disabilities. Dr. Morgan’s findings on health and educational equity have been reported on in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Politico, CBS News, NPR, NBC News, Fox News, USA Today, Forbes, Bloomberg, the Atlantic, Kaiser Health News, and Salon as well as repeatedly cited by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, and the U.S Commission on Civil Rights. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, and the Spencer Foundation.