From Professionals to Profs

Jay Duckworth calls it the “golden thread” of education—the invisible, continuous links of knowledge that bond students to their professional ancestors.

“For people in theater, the golden thread goes all the way back to Thespis, the first actor who ever stepped out onto a stage, in ancient Greece,” said Duckworth, an associate clinical professor of theater at Pace University’s Sands College of Performing Arts.

“That thread goes through all of us, right down to my students,” he said.

Each year, Pace recruits some of the world’s greatest educators—practitioners like Duckworth—to join the University’s full-time faculty. With authority and unrivaled expertise, Pace’s professors help students tie their own threads to careers in health care, humanities, law, business, performing arts, education, and technology.

As Pace’s Spring 2025 semester approaches, seven of the University’s newest full-time faculty, experts who’ve reached the pinnacles of their professions, share what motivates them, and how they’re working to develop the next generation of leaders.

From Practitioners to Professors

Duckworth may be the most influential props designer alive today. A self-defined “proptologist,” Duckworth has created for film, television, music videos and more than 65 Broadway shows. He’s worked with Broadway heavyweights like Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda and actors like Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and John Lithgow.

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And yet, last year, after some 36 years in the props business—solving design puzzles like an edible arrest warrant (Measure for Measure) and a 13-foot guillotine that never falters (Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams)—he left it behind to become a full-time Pace professor.

“I've worked on huge shows and with incredible people, but during the pandemic I decided that I wanted to start teaching full time,” he said. “I was taught that the price you pay for living in a good community is community service, so it was important that I give back."

Like many of his colleagues, lived experience underpins Duckworth’s pedagogy. His father was a construction worker (“He taught me how to build”), his mother an artist (“I learned about colors from her”). But the golden thread that pulled him in was sewn by a former monk-turned props virtuoso. “During a carpentry job at George Street Playhouse, the prop master said to me, ‘If you ever want to stop building boxes—which is all sets really are—and use your talent, I can teach you.’”

The offer “set me on the road to becoming a prop master myself,” Duckworth said.

"When a student comes with passion for the arts, I can help them harness it so that they can become the best at whatever they want to be.”

That transaction, almost a spiritual connection to the work, is what Duckworth hopes to transfer to his students. “I can teach anybody to build. What I can't teach is passion,” he said. “But when a student comes with passion for the arts, I can help them harness it so that they can become the best at whatever they want to be.”

Like Duckworth, Professor Ty Defoe, a clinical associate professor and Writer-in-Residence at Pace’s Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, is a visionary in his field. But Defoe’s medium is sentient, and his outputs are new communities committed to what he calls “radical acceptance and radical care.”

“To me, building community relates to the concept of decolonizing, moving things into the center that have been historically invisible or forgotten,” Defoe said. “At Pace, I’m drawing upon a lot of Indigenous philosophies to imagine and create a different kind of future” for our students.

As a writer and interdisciplinary artist, Defoe’s award-winning work spans a range of genres and forms, from Indigenous activism to environmental justice. He engages a wide range of forms, from Indigenous activism to environmental justice, using dance, music, and the written word to unite people in exploring contemporary challenges through the lens of traditional culture, history, and values.

One such workshop occurred in November 2024, when, for the first time in Pace’s history, an indigenous group from the Wampanoag Nation joined students, faculty, and staff to mark the National Day of Mourning, an annual demonstration to dispel myths surrounding the Thanksgiving story in the United States. In a university setting, especially one in New York City, such an event brings attention to Indigenous voices and practices that are often overlooked or misunderstood. This blending of academic space with cultural practice is rare and reflects Pace's growing emphasis on inclusivity and cross-cultural understanding.

“Here we were, having this conversation, removing the chairs in Pace’s Art Gallery and standing in a circle together to hear Wampanoag traditional music and listen to life lessons,” Defoe said. “It was revolutionary.”

“Fostering civic engagement and collective actions and bringing people together in new ways—this is why I’m here.”

Another project Defoe is focused on at Pace is The Ground Beneath Our Feet, an experiential humanities research and curriculum initiative to connect Pace’s students to the stories of the places on which their classrooms sit.

The project’s objective, said Defoe, is to unite the Pace Community through the exploration of its history. “Fostering civic engagement and collective actions and bringing people together in new ways—this is why I’m here.”

An Eye on the Future

For students, what happens at Pace may be second only to what comes after college. Carrieann Sipos, a clinical assistant professor at Pace’s School of Education, understands this, too.

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Whenever Sipos needed to fill an opening at the Ossining school district, in Westchester County, where she worked for 34 years before becoming a full-time professor, she’d make two piles of resumes on her desk. The first included applicants with degrees from Columbia University, Bank Street College of Education, and Pace.

The second pile? Everyone else.

“Pace students were always among the best hires we made,” said Sipos. “Anyone graduating from the School of Education was incredibly well prepared.”

As a new full-time faculty member, it’s now her job to ensure that Pace’s students remain at the top of the stack.

“My students are ambitious and want to make a difference; I see a lot of my younger self in them,” said Sipos. “But the teachers I train will be up against very different challenges than what I faced. Take diversity. Ossining, when I began teaching, looked very different from the Ossining of today.”

Sipos tells her students that to thrive as a modern educator, they must become “equity warriors,” committed to embracing diversity in all its forms. She emphasizes the importance of community, student-centered learning, and equity in education.

“My students are ambitious and want to make a difference; I see a lot of my younger self in them.”

“To really know what a child needs in a highly diverse classroom, teachers must have a deep relationship with their students,” she said. “It’s that sense of care I hope to instill in my students at Pace.”

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Preparing students for the future of work is also what motivates Birgit Elchoueri, a clinical assistant professor at the Lubin School of Business. With more than two decades of experience in global finance, leadership, and strategic management—most recently as chief of staff to the CEO at Allianz North America—she joins the full-time ranks with a focus on helping students prepare for how new technologies, like OpenAI, will affect their careers as future business leaders..

Preparing students for the future of work is also what motivates Birgit Elchoueri, a clinical assistant professor at the Lubin School of Business. With more than two decades of experience in global finance, leadership, and strategic management—most recently as chief of staff to the CEO at Allianz North America—she joins the full-time ranks with a focus on helping students prepare for how new technologies, like OpenAI, will affect their careers as future business leaders.

“Teaching business strategy at Pace University is exciting because of the rich diversity that students bring to the classroom. My students come from all different domains, such as management, general business, marketing, finance and accounting, this diverse knowledge and expertise allows us to create innovative team projects” said Elchoueri. “The interesting thing about new technologies and innovations is that they affect everything, from how business is conducted to how we interact with others as global societies.”

“Teaching business strategy at Pace University is exciting because of the rich diversity that students bring to the classroom."

Her teaching philosophy is grounded in a student-centered teaching approach that focuses on integrating theoretical concepts with real-world scenarios into her lesson plans to illustrate the practical and strategic implications of new technology trends. To hammer the point home, Elchoueri plans to introduce new hands-on OpenAI technology assignments in her classes this semester, including one critiquing generative AI’s outputs.

“My goal as an educator is to teach my students how to become strong leaders with the ability to analyze strategic and ethical dilemmas," she says. "It is important to embrace new technologies but at the same time business leaders must understand and anticipate potential unintended negative consequences of their innovations.”

Learning from the Doers

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Several of Pace’s newest full-time faculty remain professionally active outside the classroom, particularly those in rapidly changing fields.

Rhonda D'Agostino, DNP, a clinical assistant professor at the College of Health Professions, and Camila Bustos, JD, an assistant professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law, are among these “practicing” professors.

“I’ll be working a weekend shift at the hospital, thinking, ‘Hey, this is a great case study I can bring to my class next week.’”

For D'Agostino, the office is a hospital. After earning her bachelor’s in nursing from Pace in 2003, and a master’s in acute care nursing from New York University three years later, she landed a job as a critical care nurse practitioner at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Among her innovations: she built advanced nursing practice teams for critical, rapid response, and sepsis care, and was the inaugural associate medical director for the hospital's critical care center.

Today, on top of a full-time teaching load, D'Agostino works several shifts a month at a medical center near her home in Middletown, New York. The work helps her stay relevant as an educator, she said. “What I did 20 years ago as a nurse is completely different from what I'm doing today.”

The arrangement benefits her students, too. “I’ll be working a weekend shift at the hospital, thinking, ‘Hey, this is a great case study I can bring to my class next week.’”

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Bustos, whose work focuses on human rights, environmental, and climate change law, agrees that staying professionally involved strengthens her teaching.

“I try to stay connected to these cases. It's important for me professionally, and for my ability to teach effectively.”

In 2023, she testified in front of the Canadian Senate about global migration and climate change, and presented similar testimony in Barbados last year. She also frequently files amicus briefs, expert advice or information presented to courts by non-parties in a case.

“We recently submitted briefs before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a regional human rights court for the Americas, which is issuing an advisory opinion on climate change and human rights,” Bustos said. “I try to stay connected to these cases. It's important for me professionally, and for my ability to teach effectively.”

For other newcomers, like Soheyla Amirian, PhD, an assistant professor at the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, research is their second career.

Amirian leads the Applied Machine Intelligence Initiatives and Education (AMIIE) laboratory at Pace, collaborating with a multidisciplinary team of faculty, students, and investigators to design, build, validate, and deploy AI algorithms in various real-world applications, including public health, imaging informatics, and AI-powered education.

“In my lab, students work on real-world challenges, gaining hands-on experience in AI development."

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One of her projects focuses on using responsible, explainable, and fair AI to computationally analyze knee joint space in older populations, a critical factor that helps to investigate the mobility of aging adults.

“In my lab, students work on real-world challenges, gaining hands-on experience in AI development while understanding its societal impacts,” Amirian said.

Prestige Without the Ego

In the Pace academic catalogue, the emblematic faculty member is someone who can “balance academic preparation with professional experience to bring a unique dynamic to the classroom.” That’s true. But to the University’s newest full-timers, a Pace professor is so much more.

To many of these newcomers, warmth and approachability distinguish the Pace faculty. “Brilliant and humble,” Bustos said of her colleagues. “Prestigious without ego,” said D'Agostino of hers. They’re also “beautiful” (Sipos), “interdisciplinary” (Amirian), and “supportive” (Elchoueri).

To Jay Duckworth, the props master at Sands, another adjective comes to mind: exceptional.

“At Pace, you've got teachers who’ve worked with the best of the best in every aspect of their industries, right here, in the city where the future auditions.”