News > The College Welcomes New Faculty
The College Welcomes New Faculty There are now ten additional faculty on staff at The College of The Bahamas, as the institution further develops and expands its academic programmes in response to industry needs. The new faculty members are eminently qualified in a diverse range of academic areas and will be teaching in the schools of Nursing and Allied Health Professions, Sciences and Technology, Communication and Creative Arts, English and the UWI/COB Law Programme when classes begin later this month. Six of them hold doctoral degrees and possess a strong background in research, critically important as The College prepares to assume its university status and create the kind of knowledge that will help drive national development. The group recently underwent a period of orientation, learning more about academic affairs, institutional processes and human resources matters and generally becoming familiar with their new environment. The new academic year for The College is one filled with promise as more than 1,700 new students have been accepted into programmes at the institution’s various campuses. Additionally, The College has launched its baccalaureate degree programmes in Small Island Sustainability and Spanish, two strategically important areas as the world is facing extreme challenges with climate change and global warming, environmental degradation, food security and sustainable development. Also, globalization is making it increasingly important to acquire at least a second language. Shamel Sands, a Grand Bahama transplant with more than 17 years of nursing experience expressed optimism about her new role as a lecturer in Medical and Surgical Nursing in the School of Nursing and Allied Health Services. Ms. Sands spent the majority of her nursing career at the Rand Memorial Hospital as a clinical nurse and played an instrumental role in the hospital’s continuing education programme. “I am very excited with every day that passes. I know that there is no utopia, but it is my expectation to do well at The College. I never went to The College of The Bahamas but I am very impressed by what I have learnt so far,” she said. California native Dr. Lachelle Hannickel was barely able to contain her enthusiasm as she explained how excited she was to learn about The College’s vacancy for an Assistant French Professor. “It was exactly what I wanted and precisely the type of job description that I was looking for. It’s a ground floor position and would allow me to help build the French department and ultimately offer a four year degree programme,” she said. “I’m really optimistic about encouraging, empowering and challenging the students in French. I think learning the language can be intimidating but I think sometimes with this can come a little bit of reticence and laziness and I am ready to jump in and push them.” Dr. Hannickel was the President’s Postdoctoral Scholar Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Department of Feminist Studies. Her academic background is in French Literature. She completed a dissertation in Cultural Transgressions to Literary Transformations: Recasting Feminine Archetypes in French Caribbean Women’s Autobiography. This year, the UWI/COB LLB Programme has two new faculty members, one of whom is former Supreme Court Justice Ruby Nottage who had previously held the position of Council Secretary at The College before her stint on the bench. The other, Hellen Mukuri-Smith, will lecture in Poverty and Offshore Law. Mrs. Mukuri-Smith, a former attorney in private practice for a brief period, views herself as an academic at heart who was finally led to pursue her passion for teaching. “I like speaking to different people and teaching so I contacted the law office and had an interview and here I am,” she said. “My interest is in Poverty Law and alleviating poverty and finding out the root causes and doing something about it using law. I am sure I will be going into the communities to conduct field studies. There are a lot of people living below the poverty line and we need to research and get some data on that.” The remaining new faculty are: Dr. Andrew Moxey, Assistant Chemistry Professor; Dr. Dion Hepburn, Assistant Chemistry Professor; Dr. Yan Lyansky, Assistant Mathematics Professor; Ms. Paola Alvino, Journalism Lecturer; Dr. Raymond Oenbring, Assistant English Studies Professor and Dr. David Harwell, Assistant English Studies Professor. The College of The Bahamas has approximately 240 faculty in a variety of academic disciplines.
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