As Director, Neeraja provides strategic leadership to the Ginsberg Center, ensures 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. Prior to this role, Neeraja served as the Associate Director of Academic Partnerships, overseeing Ginsberg's work with academic partners, supporting departments looking to foster community-engaged scholarship in their units, as well as indivdual faculty, academic program staff, and graduate students who want to integrate community engagement into their courses, research, and programs. In this role, she provided strategic leadership, offered consultations and workshops, oversaw the Ginsberg Center's Faculty Grants program, served on the editorial team for the Michigan Journal for Community Service Learning, and created the Graduate Academic Liaison program (doctoral students from across the University who facilitate workshops to prepare students and support other projects at the Ginsberg Center).
Prior to joining the Ginsberg Center, Neeraja led graduate student development efforts for 10 years at Northwestern University's Searle Center for Advancing Teaching & Learning. She also worked for 10 years as an anti-bias training facilitator with the Anti-Defamation League's A WORLD of DIFFERENCE Institute. 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 the Board of the International House of Ann Arbor, and on the Leadership Team of Campus Compact's The Research University Community Engagement Network (TRUCEN).
In her free time, she enjoys attending and participating in local theatre, DIY projects, volunteering at her childrens' schools, and spending time with her family.
Contact Neeraja if you want to learn more about:
- Institutional partnerships with the Ginsberg Center
- Collective impact through campus and community partnerships
- Research on how community engagement and service learning impacts community partners, students and faculty
- Strategic approaches to leadership education for social change
