Elizabeth H. Bradley, PhD has served as President of Vassar since 2017. She is an unabashed supporter of liberal arts education and is deeply engaged with research on the performance and quality of higher education institutions in the U.S. With her leadership, Vassar has established partnerships in India, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom to develop models of liberal arts higher education in these settings. In addition, Vassar has collaborated with Columbia University to create a 5-year BA-MPH program; the University of Edinburgh to create a 5-year BA-MSc in Planetary Health and Sustainability; and SUNY New Paltz to create an expedited BA-MBA. Prior to becoming the President of Vassar, she was on the faculty at Yale for more than 20 years. A noted public health expert, she has published more than 330 peer-reviewed papers, 35 book chapters, and has co-authored three books including The American Healthcare Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025.

Michele M. Tugade ’95 Michele Tugade is a Professor of Psychological Science on the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowed Chair at Vassar. She teaches courses on Health Psychology, Social Psychology, and Affective Science and directs the Resilience Laboratory, which investigates how positive emotions help people build resilience to cope with adversity. She is a public lecturer on mental health, well-being, and women’s leadership. Her column, “Everyday Resilience,” appears in Psychology Today and her research has been featured on NPR, and in The New York Times, Huffington Post, CBS, and NBC.

Paulina Bren is a writer and award-winning historian who teaches at Vassar on the Pittsburgh Endowment Chair in the Humanities. Her previous book, the best-selling The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and has been widely translated. Her new book, She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street, was named among The Washington Post’s, Town & Country’s, and Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2024 and Untapped New York listed it among the 100 Best Books about New York of all time.

Dara Greenwood is an Associate Professor of Psychological Science and Media Studies at Vassar College, where she teaches Social Psychology, Media Psychology, and the Psychology of Humor. Her research focuses on the intersection between media engagement and emotional well-being. Her popular writing can be found in Psychology Today (“Mirror Mirror: Reflections on/of self and others in popular culture”), MSNBC, and Scientific American, and her work/voice has been featured by the BBC, The New York Times, and the documentary podcast series The Comeback.

Wesley “Wes” Eugene Dixon serves as the Deputy to the President and Secretary of the Board of Trustees at Vassar. Wes also serves as the host and producer of Vassar’s podcast, Conversations at the Salt Line, where he engages a broad range of guests in conversations that aim to identify “Salt Lines” in the personal or professional lives of the guest. Wes also recently hosted and produced an oral history project with the African American Alumnae of Vassar College, as part of the College’s Inclusive History initiative.

Lynette Clemetson is Director of Wallace House Center for Journalists at the University of Michigan, home of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists and the Livingston Awards. A longtime journalist, she previously worked as Senior Director of Strategy and Content Initiatives at NPR; Domestic Correspondent for The New York Times; and Correspondent for Newsweek magazine, in the U.S. and in Hong Kong. She serves on governance and advisory boards of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, PBS Frontline, the Knight Press Freedom Fellowship, and Forbidden Stories, an international investigative news organization dedicated to completing the work of reporters who have been killed or threatened for their journalism.

Journalist, author, and podcaster Eric Marcus ’80 is the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast, which brings LGBTQ+ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it. In addition, Eric is co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Eric is the author and co-author of a dozen books, including the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis, and he was a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum.

Mike Gillis is the Head Writer for The Onion. He has written pieces for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Tricycle, ClickHole, Cards Against Humanity, and the Supreme Court (in the form of an amicus brief (PDF)). Gillis teaches humor writing at DePaul University; his short stories have shown up in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Blackbird, The Pinch, and PULP Literature. He is writing several novels and has written for video games at Netflix Games, Annapurna Interactive, BLENDO Games, and Day of the Devs-affiliated studios.

John Andrews is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology who also contributes to Vassar’s Media Studies; Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies; and American Studies programs. He teaches courses such as Feeling the Present: Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Social Life and Fake News: Truth and Media in a Post-Fact Society. His research and teaching interests range from the sociology of emotion and affect to global political economy, labor, and inequality to the sociology of knowledge, science, and medicine.