Search Profile: Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dr. Phyllis Curtis-Tweed earned her Ph.D. at Emory University in Educational Studies with a focus on educational leadership and issues in psychology, specifically agency development, and moral development. She pursued postdoctoral training in psychology in the Clinical Research Training Program in Social Psychiatry at Harvard University where she was also an instructor for five years and taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Simmons College and at the Harvard affiliated Hospitals. She previously served as College-wide Dean at Oakland Community College in Michigan and worked in various capacities at Medgar Evers College, CUNY including Assistant Provost for Student Success and Assessment and then interim Associate Provost. Dr. Phyllis Curtis- Tweed is currently the Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at Bermuda College.

At Bermuda College, Dr Curtis-Tweed has developed a new Division of Nursing and Allied Health, formerly the Division of Nursing and added multiple programmes including pre-health and pre-medicine. She has developed strong relations with community and industry leaders in re/insurance leading to the development of numerous internships and scholarships opportunities for Bermuda College graduates. She has also led the strategic planning and implementation initiative, collaborated with college task forces to improve campus culture and develop a shared governance model. She also served as co-editor of Bermuda College’s Voices in Education journal. Dr. Curtis- Tweed has been working with community partners to support the pipeline for higher education by improving reading literacy outcomes for children in elementary education.

Dr Curtis-Tweed is an Executive Board Member and Treasurer for the Association for Moral Education, and is the co-chair for the Association’s Special Interest Group on Race and Social Justice. She is a co-researcher on a project designed to improve the experience of education for teachers and students by addressing issues of race and contexts of racial meaning in education and concomitant intersections with religion and culture via authentic dialogue in response to selected films. She has published and presented at national and international conferences on issues in psychology and education. Dr. Curtis-Tweed has also served as an invited external evaluator for accrediting agencies including the Southern Association of Colleges and School (SACS) and the Western Association of Schools and College (WASC) and is currently a Commissioner-Elect for the New England Commission for Higher Education (NECHE).

Dr. Kenya V. Beard, EdD, AGACNP-BC, ANEF, FAAN, Associate Provost at Chamberlain University, has spent more than two decades in higher education working to narrow the academic achievement gap and strengthen workforce diversity. As a 2012 Macy Faculty Scholar, she founded the Center for Multicultural Education and Health Disparities and propagated research and best practices to move the needle on diversity, inclusion, and health equity. In 2014, as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement at George Washington University School of Nursing, she wrote blogs and co-produced healthcare disparity segments on WBAI-FM for over 400,000 listeners. 

Dr. Beard is a national leader who has amplified the importance of creating learning environments that value diverse perspectives. The Harvard Macy Institute’s Program for Educators in the Health Professions supports her workshop, Leading in a Race-Conscious Society. She is driven by a scientific passion for strengthening workforce diversity, and many of her publications speak to the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She led the New York State Action Coalition in constructing the state’s 2014 Workforce Diversity Toolkit and contributed to the National League for Nursing’s 2016 Diversity Vision Statement. She co- created the Josiah Macy Foundation’s 2018 ground-breaking document, Improving the Environment for Learning in the Health Professions, and more recently, she served as a reviewer for the National Academy of Medicine’s Future of Nursing 2020-2030 report. Her vision of strengthening the preparedness of faculty to meet the needs of today’s nursing students resulted in the creation of the first Nurse Faculty Residency program in the country. Her work has resulted in her receiving many awards, including the National Association of Health Services Executives, NY Regional Chapter’s prestigious President’s Award and the 2022 National Black Nurses Association Trailblazer award. 

Dr. Beard Chairs the New York State Board of Nursing and leads efforts to ensure the professional readiness of nurses. She is a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Nursing, and the Academy of Nursing Education. She serves on the American Academy of Nursing’s Institute for Nursing Leadership and is an editorial board member for the American Journal of Nursing. Dr. Beard completed her AAS and BSN degrees at Phillips Beth Israel School of Nursing and Excelsior College in New York, respectively. She earned her MSN at Stony Brook University and EdD in Educational Administration at Dowling College.

Peter West is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at Mercy College, a federally recognized Hispanic-Serving Institution with campuses in Dobbs Ferry, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Before his arrival at Mercy in the Summer of 2020, Dr. West served in a number of academic leadership positions at Adelphi University, including Chair of the English Department, Associate Dean for General Education and Academic Operations, and Associate Provost for Student Success. During the 2021-22 year, Dr. West served as Mercy’s Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. At both Adelphi and Mercy, Dr. West has co-chaired an institutional self-study process for Middle States reaccreditation.

As an academic leader, Dr. West has successfully led a number of initiatives focused on helping students from all backgrounds engage as college learners, connect with their peers and support networks, and develop a sense of personal and professional mission. In his first year at Mercy, Dr. West secured a $2.146 million Institutional Resilience and Expanded Post-Secondary Opportunity grant through the U.S. Education Department to support students in first-year Math and English classes, expand the use of telehealth simulations across the college’s health science programs (including opportunities for Theatre students to serve as virtual patients), and organize college workshops for high school students in underserved communities.

During his year as Interim Provost, Dr. West partnered with Google and TalentSprint to launch a new certificate program, called TechWise, in which Mercy students are partnered with Google engineers as mentors and earn professional certificates with the support of a scholarship and stipend. He also established the position of Director of Academic Engagement, Equity, and Inclusion to coordinate a range of equity-minded initiatives across the College; led the design and implementation of a distance learning quality improvement plan aligned to new regulations regarding “time on task” and “regular and substantive interaction” requirements in distance education; and worked with the President’s Office and senior leadership to successfully negotiate with the SEIU adjunct faculty union the first Collective Bargaining Agreement following nearly three years of negotiation. As Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, he worked with his Mathematics faculty to design and launch a new model of corequisite education for first-year Math classes and helped establish a new minor in Latin American and Latino Studies. At Adelphi University, Dr. West led an interdisciplinary team of faculty in designing, piloting, and launching a re-imagined First-Year Seminar focusing on high-impact practices and student engagement, redesigned the advising structure for first- and second-year Nursing majors, and created the first staff position at Adelphi explicitly devoted to supporting students in fully online programs.

Dr. West is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and books about nineteenth-century literature and culture, including The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture (The Ohio State University Press, 2008), and is co-editor of a five-volume work about the history of the panorama, The Panorama: Texts and Contexts, 1787-1900 (Pickering & Chatto, 2013), which was described in the Times Literary Supplement as a “monumental collection.”