Neeraja Aravamudan, Ph.D.

As Director, Neeraja provides strategic leadership to the Ginsberg Center, ensures data-informed alignment between our values and work at the Center and across U-M and works to reduce barriers and challenges to equitable partnerships between students, faculty, and community partners.  She also is part of the editorial team for the Michigan Journal for Community Service Learning (link), a leading journal in the field of community-engaged scholarship, published by the Center. She also co-facilitates the Community-Engaged Course Design Workshop series (link), co-sponsored with Rackham Graduate School, that supports graduate students to create a syllabus for their own community-engaged course.

Since joining the Center in 2015, she has contributed to both strategy & implementation for a number of initiatives at the center including creating the Graduate Academic Liaison (now called Graduate Consultants) Program, expanding our faculty development portfolio, developing our assessment strategy using Salesforce CRM and overseeing our external communications and marketing. 

Prior to joining the Center, Neeraja led graduate student development efforts for 10 years at Northwestern University's Searle Center for Advancing Teaching & Learning. Neeraja has focused her professional career in higher education on helping students and faculty to make their teaching and learning more student-centered, inclusive and equitable. Her commitment to social justice education is rooted in her personal experiences as an immigrant from India and her work in anti-bias education. Community-engaged learning brings together her interests in social justice, teaching and learning, and values-centered practices.  

Neeraja serves on a number of campus-wide committees and advisory boards including Democracy & Civic Empowerment Initiative (link), Institute for Social Prescribing (link), Well-Being Collective (link), and Inclusive History Project (link). She is part of the leadership team of National Campus Compact's TRUCEN: The Research University Community Engagement Network (link). She also serves on community nonprofit boards of the International House of Ann Arbor (link) and Desi Rainbow (link).

In her free time, she enjoys singing, crafting, DIY projects, and spending time with her family.