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Máire Ford, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development
Máire (pronounced ‘Mora’) Ford, Ph.D., serves as Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development. In this role she supports the professional growth and success of faculty members at LMU through the Center for Faculty Development. This center focuses on three areas: teaching and learning, professional and leadership development, and scholarly and creative practice.
As Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development, her responsibilities include providing strategic direction for the CFD in a manner that supports LMU’s mission and strategic goals, creating and implementing faculty development programs in the three areas mentioned above, and facilitating events that encourage knowledge-sharing and community building for faculty across disciplines. Máire is invested in promoting a sense of community and belonging amongst faculty while also providing them with opportunities to develop new skills in a supportive and inclusive environment.
Máire joined the faculty at LMU in 2006 as a psychology professor. She teaches a variety of courses that fall under the broader umbrellas of social psychology and health psychology, and she also teaches a course on statistical methods. As a professor she works to cultivate knowledge and intellectual curiosity in her students and to provide them with the tools and motivation that they need to be lifelong learners. Máire is a recipient of the Fritz B. Burns Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Máire’s primary research sits at the intersection of social psychology and health psychology. In her research lab she investigates the role of the self in shaping perceptions of events that occur in close interpersonal relationships and subsequent responses. Her primary focus is on how the self shapes health-related responses to events such as rejection, exclusion, and other threats to belonging. Additionally, she studies various ways of imparting resilience for those experiencing threats to belonging. Máire also conducts research that contributes to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). She has an active research lab staffed by several excellent LMU undergraduate students. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Máire has served as the Associate Chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences, a member of Faculty Senate, and a member of several advisory boards for various programs and centers at LMU.
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Rosalynde (Roz) LeBlanc Loo, M.F.A., Director for Scholarly and Creative Practice
Rosalynde LeBlanc Loo (pronounced Lo) is a Peabody Award-winning producer and BESSIE-nominated performer, as well as a choreographer and educator who has spent over thirty years in dance. Her research examines movement as both a conveyor and archive of the lived experience. She is a full professor and the current Chair of LMU Dance and directs their Educational Partnership with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. She is also a 23-24 Lynne Scarborough Cabinet Associate, working under CFO, Aimee Uen.
Rosalynde was appointed the Director of Scholarship and Creative Practice at the Center for Faculty Development in 2024. As the new Director of Scholarship and Creative Practice at the CFD, Rosalynde assists faculty in navigating the area of scholarly and creative work as it relates to the larger triumvirate of Teaching, Scholarship, and Service at LMU. This includes listening and info-gathering sessions, one-on-one mentoring, small-group work sessions and non-traditional scholarship work sessions to build camaraderie and accountability, discipline-specific writing and grant workshops, as well as cross-disciplinary communities for the sake of spurring new and diverse perspectives on habituated processes. Rosalynde employs her movement background, offering whole-person approaches in which the body, mind, and spirit are engaged, to help examine and mitigate one's own impediments to progress. Rosalynde welcomes faculty of all ranks.
Prior to her academic career, Rosalynde was a principal dancer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, and the Liz Gerring Dance Company. As a guest artist, Rosalynde danced with multiple independent choreographers and in productions with the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Salzburg’s 250th Mozart Celebration. Her choreography has been commissioned by student and professional companies around the country. She still performs for stage and screen and is represented by Bloc commercial dance agency.
Rosalynde produced and co-directed the critically acclaimed documentary film, Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters. Earning grants from the Graves Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, the film won the 2023 Peabody Award and was a 2022 Chita Rivera Award nominee, a N.Y. Times Critic’s Choice for 2021, and was on the ‘Year’s Best Films’ lists of Vulture, Esquire, IndieWire and Ebert Voices. She is also an avid writer and her autoethnographic essays on movement and memory have been published in Dance Magazine, Ballettanz, and in the journal, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies. In 2020, Rosalynde’s work in dance and service to education earned her an honorary induction into the Jesuit Honor Society, Alpha Sigma Nu. She holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from Hollins University.
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Rebecca Sager, Ph.D., Director for Leadership and Professional Development
Rebecca Sager is an award-winning teacher and scholar who examines the intersection of religion, politics and social movements. Rebecca is currently the Department Chair of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and the Director of Professional and Leadership Development at the Center for Faculty Development. As the Director of Professional and Leadership Development at the CFD, Sager works with others in the CFD to guide and mentor LMU faculty, helping them achieve both personal and organizational leadership goals. This includes one-on-one mentoring sessions, workshops around leadership, including resume writing, trainings around leadership issues such as hiring, and collaborative workshops with various leaders at LMU.
Rebecca is currently the Lynne Scarboro Cabinet Associate working with Provost Poon on creating collaborative courses across LMU. Sager has also served on the LMU Faculty Senate, is the current Vice President of the BCLA Executive Council, and has served on a number of additional college and university committees. Sager holds a doctorate of Sociology from the University of Arizona and since coming to LMU in 2007, she has received a number of grants and fellowships. This includes being one of the inaugural Academy of Catholic Thought and Imagination fellows at LMU, as well as external awards, including a postdoc from Princeton University and grants from the Haynes Family Foundation and the Louisville Institute
Sager has published a number of articles on religion and politics, and her book, Faith, Politics, and Power: The Politics of Faith-Based Initiatives (Oxford), looks at the role conservative evangelical movement actors played in promoting the faith based initiative at the state level. Her most recent project is funded by the National Science Foundation and examines the role of religion in local government interactions as well as how religious groups work with local political officials. This research has already won several awards including Outstanding Paper from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the President's Award from the The Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. Sager has also consulted with a number of groups including the Federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Center for Civility at UC San Diego, Sager has also written in OpEds in the LA Times and Politico.
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Sarah Adeyinka-Skold, Ph.D., Faculty Associate for the Center for Faculty Development
Dr. Sarah Adeyinka-Skold serves as a faculty associate for the Center for Faculty Development. In this role she is supporting faculty by designing CFD events, with a focus on writing retreats and writing workshops.
Sarah is an assistant professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University. Her research interests include exploring queer and straight Black women’s experiences of dating and relationships. Her work has been published in various academic forums and featured on other platforms such as The Laverne Cox Show and Therapy for Black Girls. Sarah’s work in the CFD is focused on creating opportunities to write communally, community building, and infusing radical rest and self-care into the academic profession. When not working, she can be found watching reality tv, playing with her two young children, on date nights with her partner, or sanding furniture