
Alexandra Brewer
Assistant Professor, Sociology
Dr. Alexandrea Brewer has been a Sociology Professor at Wake Forest since Fall 2020. In her research, Brewer examines the impacts of social inequality in the healthcare system. Through her work as an ACE Fellow, Brewer hopes to bring a community perspective to her course Opioids in American Society by partnering with Twin City Harm Reduction Collective. Brewer is excited for her research to connect with the community so that she might learn more about the practical ways to fight the opioid crisis in Forsyth County.

Erin Brinkley
Associate Professor, Counseling/School Counseling Program Coordinator
Dr. Erin Brinkley serves as an associate professor, counseling and the school counseling program coordinator at Wake Forest. As an ACE fellow, she will work alongside Brian Calhoun – associate professor of practice in the Department of Education – bringing both their experience and expertise together to create a podcast highlighting the different ways that individuals and organizations on Wake Forest’s campus serve the Winston-Salem community. Through their podcast, Calhoun and Brinkley will highlight the various activism-focused volunteer efforts in the Wake Forest and Winston-Salem communities, helping to generate enthusiasm and participation with OCCE initiatives.

Brian Calhoun
Associate Professor of the Practice, Education
Brian Calhoun is an associate professor of practice in the Department of Education. He teaches classes with the College to Career series in the undergraduate college with a research focus on career interventions that assist students with developing and learning more about their career options in the world of work. As an ACE fellow, he will work alongside Dr. Erin Brinkley – associate professor of counseling and school counseling program coordinator – bringing both their experience and expertise together to create a podcast highlighting the different ways that individuals and organizations on Wake Forest’s campus serve the Winston-Salem community. Through their podcast, Calhoun and Brinkley will highlight the various activism-focused volunteer efforts in the Wake Forest and Winston-Salem communities, helping to generate enthusiasm and participation with OCCE initiatives.

Courtney Di Vittorio
Assistant Professor, Engineering
As an assistant professor of engineering, Dr. Courtney Di Vittorio plans to include her students in bridging the gap between civil engineering scholarship and community organization decision-making. Dr. Di Vittorio is excited to inform local water quality management in local watersheds to make decisions that are socially, economically, and environmentally responsible based on her research in hydrology and remote sensing. Dr. Di Vittorio is especially interested in the cohort component of the fellowship and is looking forward to sharing ideas, strengthening ongoing initiatives and identifying and collaborating on new opportunities with her colleagues.

Andrea Gómez-Cervantes
Assistant Professor, Sociology
Dr. Andrea Gómez Cervantes studies how immigration policies impact LatinX individuals and communities. In her new course “Immigration Lab” Dr. Gómez Cervantes plans to guide sociology students in their understanding of immigration policies by partnering with immigrant-led/immigrant-serving organizations in Winston-Salem. Through the fellowship, Dr. Gómez Cervantes is looking forward to meeting other faculty with similar interests, and enhancing her teaching pedagogies as it relates to community engagement and service-learning.

Hannah Harrison
Assistant Teaching Professor, Writing
As an assistant teaching professor of writing, Dr. Harrison is hoping to deepen her students’ direct engagement with local leaders in the Winston-Salem community through collaboration. She is looking forward to developing a unit of her course that examines how food-based organizations use rhetoric and marketing to express their mission, allowing students to write for and with local food actors. As an extension of the course, she hopes to turn the classroom-based experience to create a small internship program where students would work hand-in-hand with a community partner to develop a marketing plan for the semester, using writing and visual design to promote their mission and goals.

Lauren Miller
Assistant Teaching Professor, Spanish
As an assistant teaching professor of Spanish at Wake Forest, Dr. Lauren Miller is looking to develop a long-term partnership with Speas Elementary – a dual immersion school -and a Hispanic-serving, English-only elementary school in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School system that would allow Wake Forest students to tutor minority and majority language-speaking children and encourage bilingualism in our community. Her hope is that this work would create additional partnerships and internships for graduate students enrolled in the Interpretation and Translation Program at Wake Forest.

Ryan Shirey
Associate Teaching Professor, Writing/Director, WFU Writing Center
As an ACE Fellow, Dr. Ryan Shirey plans to work with local writing centers by piloting a “training trainers” model that would help community members enhance their peer writing tutoring and mentoring skills so that they can work with their peers and neighbors in various community contexts. A key aspect of his work is developing a durable, sustainable network of community-based writing centers. He hopes to build relationships with organizations and community members by providing workshops, training sessions and writing feedback.

Mir Yarfitz
Dr. Mir Yarfitz is excited to explore how his scholarship as an associate professor of history intersects with the Winston-Salem community. Dr. Yarfitz is actively involved in social change in Winston-Salem and is specifically interested in the intersection between Latin American Studies and LGBTQ+ history. One of his goals as an ACE Fellow is to continue to develop Neighbor-to-Neighbor – a mutual aid project he began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has helped more than 300 families throughout the Piedmont Triad – with more connective opportunities for members of the Wake Forest community.