Ed.D. Program Welcomes New Leadership

The Executive Leadership program has welcomed new leadership at the Rochester campus and Iona University extension site. Dr. Angela Clark-Taylor joined Fisher on July 1 as the new chair of the program as well as an associate professor, and Dr. Anthony P. Chiarlitti was appointed interim site director at the Iona extension site. In addition, Alex Hopkins-Ives joined the Rochester campus in June as senior administrative assistant to support candidates throughout the program.

Clark-Taylor joins Fisher after serving Case Western Reserve University, most recently as a research assistant professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Science and executive director of the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women. During her time at Case Western, she oversaw executive coaching and leadership development programs on campus, in Cleveland, and across the country for higher education professionals. She also served as the interim director of the LGBT Center at the university.

Prior to her time at Case Western, Clark-Taylor was an affiliated assistant professor in higher education at Bowling Green State University and also served as the director of the Center for Women and Gender Equity. In her time at Bowling Green, she co-founded the Violence Prevention Center. From 2008 to 2015, she also served as program assistant and later as a program manager at the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Rochester. Following her time at UR, she was a visiting assistant professor in counseling and higher education at the University of Redlands. In 2016, she was named the Inaugural Rochford Initiative Faculty Fellow. In this role, Clark-Taylor oversaw the executive leadership component of this program that provided mentorship and workshops for PK-20 administrators in the Redlands School District.

Clark-Taylor began her career in community-based organizations including Children’s Institute, Hillsides Alternative for Independent Youth and Emergency Series, and Planned Parenthood of Western New York. Overall, she has nearly 20 years of experience as a scholar-practitioner to her new role across education, health, and community-focused organizations. Her leadership has been recognized by the American Association for Women as an emerging leader, Internal Council for Research on Women through the Community Innovation Fellowship program, and the National Women’s Studies Association’s mentor award.

Clark-Taylor’s research examines the relationship between leaders’ social identities and institutional structures to illuminate pathways for organizational change that serve the public good. Her scholarship has been honored by the American Education Research Association committee for Research on Women and has been published in the Journal for Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, the Journal of College and Character, Violence Against Women, and the Journal About Women and Gender in Higher Education. Her current projects focus on how organizational cultural and workplace trauma shapes workers’ well-being and retention.

She earned an associate’s degree in liberal arts and science from Farmingdale State College in 2003, followed by a bachelor’s degree in American studies and communications from SUNY Old Westbury in 2005. She pursued a master’s degree in liberal arts with a concentration in non-profit management from SUNY Brockport in 2008 before completing a master’s degree in administration in 2012 and a doctoral degree in educational leadership in 2016, both from the University of Rochester.

A graduate of the program, Chiarlitti currently serves as a visiting assistant professor at the Iona extension site where he lectures extensively on leadership and action research while supervising doctoral-level research on a variety of social justice and leadership topics. He has a wide range of leadership experience in both public and private sector organizations, as well as 25 years of teaching experience in higher education.

Chiarlitti holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in criminal justice from Iona University. His dissertation in the Ed.D. program focused on the effect of lawsuits on police discretionary actions. 

Hopkins-Ives comes to Fisher from SUNY Brockport where he served as an assistant director for new student programs in the Academic Success Center. While at Brockport, he also served in the roles of second-year, transfer, and mentoring programs coordinator and in an interim capacity as orientation director. Prior to Brockport, Hopkins-Ives was coordinator of operations in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department at Nazareth University and assistant director of the Computational Biology Institute at The George Washington University.

He is a member of the American College Personnel Association, the American Educational Research Association, NASPA Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and he has served in advisor roles for various clubs and organizations at his prior institutions.

He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from SUNY Fredonia, a master’s degree in higher education student affairs and administration from Nazareth University, and is currently an Ed.D. in educational leadership candidate at New England College.