Dr. Acker is Professor of Social Work and the Chairperson of the Social Sciences Department.  She teaches social research and generalist social work practice courses.  Her research interests include: Burnout among mental health care providers, role stress, social support, social workers' attitudes toward managed care, and role expectations of social work students.  She is certified as a Psychoanalytic oriented psychotherapist by the Long Island Institute for Mental Health.   

My research is on the relationship between hegemonic masculinities and organizational inequality, which includes examining issues pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class.  In addition, I examine how sports are used in the workplace by employers and employees to construct competitive masculine discourses of embodiment.

My broad research interests include sex and gender identity, roles, and inequality; socioeconomic stratification and inequality; race and ethnicity; higher education; work and occupations; science; educational and political philosophy; and research methods. My current research focuses on the effects of mass higher education, particularly community college attendance, on the long-term educational and occupational attainments of low-income women and their children. I am also examining the effect of higher education on women and men’s occupational trajectories and occupational segregation. Upcoming projects include studying gender, work, and power using qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Trained as a sociologist and social worker, Dr. Oglensky teaches the senior field seminar, social welfare policy and history, and sociology courses in religion and self & society. She has recently been invited to be a Consortial faculty member at CUNY's New Community College, having served on the planning team for the innovative first-year curricula. Dr. Oglensky's primary research interests concern authority, workplace relationships, and professional socialization. Current projects focus on cross-disciplinary expansion of a cutting edge pedagogy of record-writing. Dr. Oglensky has co-authored the book, The Part-Time Paradox (with C.F. Epstein, C. Seron, and R. Saute, Routledge, 1999), and is known in the field of organizational behavior for her articles on mentorship that integrate psychoanalytic and sociological perspectives.

Dr. Rosenthal is a Professor of Social Work at York College and The Graduate Center. She teaches social research and social policy. Her research focuses on 1) stressors (e.g., perceived racial discrimination, experience with domestic violence, experience with serious accidents) and psycho-social outcomes (e.g., Posttraumatic Stress Disorder symptoms, college performance, upper respiratory illness) among older adolescents; and on 2) resilience factors (e.g., emotional social support, religiosity, sense of personal control, emotional reactivity) that protect older adolescents from negative outcomes to stressors. Dr. Rosenthal has received four continuous NIH grants covering the period 1996-2013. She has mentored more than 2 dozen students in multiple disciplines. Dr. Rosenthal is considered one of 15 “leading U.S. social work researchers” in undergraduate social work programs; she recently received the York College Presidential Award for Scholarship

Xiaodan Zhang's research focuses on changing labor relations under the economic reform in China. It is part of her larger intellectual inquires into construction and reproduction of power relations in society. The theoretical questions are centered on the relations between institutions, human actions and social changes. She also examines the cultural factor; but her interest is in finding out how and why certain cultural elements survive different social systems. Gender is another area of study. She is interested in women’s social movements in China and how it adopts, applies and redefines feminist theories from the West.