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Shed Boren at the Coral Gables Museum, where A Matter of Time: Examining Forty Years of AIDS While Living through a Pandemic runs through July 18
A worldwide epidemic decades before the pandemic: 40 years of AIDS artifacts and stories aim to teach recent history and honor millions lost
Social work professor Shed Boren’s labor of love offers lessons and memories through an ambitious new exhibition at the Coral Gables Museum
April 8, 2021 at 3:45pm
Huston Ochoa MSW ’20 weeps silently as his former professor and another man unfurl the 12-foot-square, stitched-together fabric. He sees there at the bottom, for the first time in nearly three decades, the colorful rectangle that his 3-year-old self and extended family decorated in honor of his deceased parents.
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Newly graduated Stempel Ph.D. takes on the world as a professor and researcher dedicated to bettering the lives of refugees
Mitra Naseh grew up in Iran and had a first-hand view of what those fleeing neighboring war-torn Afghanistan experienced
January 20, 2021 at 10:22am
Mitra Naseh this month won a national award for a dissertation that presents “a multidimensional model for understanding poverty among refugees.” But the 2020 graduate of the Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work has had little time to celebrate the good news. She’s too busy.
The native of Iran, who earned a bachelor’s in computer science engineering and a master’s in urban planning and development in her homeland before arriving at FIU in 2015, recently completed her first semester as an assistant professor in the school of social work at Portland State University. She is also reworking her dissertation into a series of three articles that should each
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Students and faculty take stock of yesterday and today in Miami’s neighborhoods
A professor acts on his beliefs
Iqbal Akhtar thought living his faith should translate into buying a home in a community where he could do the most good. So he and wife Jafreen Jaffery started to look around. At the time the pair resided in a rental apartment on Miami’s famed Brickell Avenue, known for fancy condos and high-end lifestyles. Every day, the couple he a professor of religious studies and political science in the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs, she then-working for the Children’s Trust and now a researcher with a nonprofit public health organization saw around them a bewildering contrast: shops and restaurants catering to the well-to-do and, just a few blocks away, the kind of poverty that puts the city of Miami among the 10 poorest in the country.
The Stempel College alumna uses her disaster management expertise in the battle against an unrelenting pandemic
December 10, 2020 at 8:30am
Bridget Pelaez rushes in where there’s disaster. Last month that meant commanding a federal team of 20 critical care physicians and others as they answered a call for help at a hospital out west that was overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. (She declined to identify the exact location out of privacy concerns.)
The 36-year-old alumna of the Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work and assistant director for FIU’s Division of Operations and Safety has parlayed her compassion and deep training she holds EMT-paramedic certification, a nursing degree and a master’s in disaster management into a life of service to others.