Our Leadership
Board Members - Communications
T. Leo Schmitt, VP Communications
VPCommunications@nystesol.org
T. Leo Schmitt has lived in seven countries and visited dozens more.
He has extensive experience in intercultural communication and speaks
multiple languages. He has used this knowledge to enhance his work with
international students both as an administrator and faculty member in a
wide variety of environments over twenty-five years.
He has an MA and MPhil in linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and
is now completing his doctorate. He currently works as Assistant
Professor in the MATESOL program at the New School, New York where he
hopes his own experiences can help a future generation of teachers make
a better world and fewer mistakes. His research interests include
second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics,
intercultural communication, language and power, and the interaction
between these and other linguistic phenomena.
Fran Olmos, Director of Online Communications,
OnlineCom@nystesol.org
Fran has been an ENL teacher in the Yonkers Public Schools for the last 30 years, working with children in Pre K to 8. She received her BS in Elem Ed (N-6) with a concentration in Spanish, from SUNY Oswego and upon graduating spent three years teaching grades 3, 4 and 6 in a bilingual elementary school in Mexico City. Upon returning to NY, she worked two years in the Elmsford UFSD as an ESL teacher while attaining her MS Ed in TESOL from the College of New Rochelle. Fran has been very active in NYS TESOL during the last 20 years. She started out by working on several Hudson Valley ODMACS and then was asked to become Hotel Liaison and then Registration Chair for the NYS TESOL Annual Conference. She joined the NYS TESOL board in 2002 as Membership Chair which led her to becoming 2nd VP - Conference Chair which was held in White Plains in 2007. She then became President of NYS TESOL in 2009. In 2013, Fran was asked to fill a last minute vacancy and became the 2013 Conference Chair which was held again in White Plains. Fran has also presented at NYS TESOL conferences, was Registration Chair for the 1999 TESOL International Convention (NYC) and has been NYS TESOL Publications Chair. She is also active in her school's PTA unit and has won the Honorary Life Membership Award (formerly The Jenkins Award).
Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste, NYS TESOL Journal
Editor-in-Chief
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
lubie@journal.nystesol.org
Lubie works in the position of Professor of English and
Applied Linguistics at NYC College of Technology (CUNY), Department of
English. She is the coordinator of academic ESOL program, director of
the ESOL Language Lab and chair of the college-wide ESOL Task Force.
She has taught ESL courses (all levels), second language writing,
composition and rhetoric courses across CUNY, as well as graduate
courses in applied linguistics and TESOL at Hunter College, New School
University, and Long Island University. She has also presented at
conferences and symposia in the USA and abroad. With her educational
background in literature, theoretical and applied linguistics, and her
long experience teaching ESOL, composition and linguistics, she strives
to both build bridges among these disciplines and cross borders in
research. Her current research interests are related to college writing
and composition studies, classroom methodologies of teaching writing,
second language acquisition, genre acquisition and genre transfer. She
has published papers, reviews, and handbooks, and has recently edited,
and authored a number of essays in the college textbook Urban Reader
for College Writers.
Genie Smiddy, Idiom Editor
editors@idiom.nystesol.org
Mark Aaron Polger, Technical Support
techsupport@nystesol.org
