The Class of 2023 embarks on its Clark University experience

What do a trapeze artist, map collector, national swimming champion, and an interpreter for refugees have in common?

They are all members of the Clark University Class of 2023.

Clark began the 2019–2020 academic year by welcoming its largest first-year class in a decade. A total of 665 first-year students — 17.5 percent of whom are first-generation college students — from 25 countries, along with 47 transfer students, attended their first Clark classes on Aug. 26.

The University also welcomes seven tenure-track faculty members to campus this fall, with an eighth arriving in the spring.

• Elizabeth Blake, assistant professor, English
• Hamidreza Ahady Dolatsara, assistant professor, Graduate School of Management (GSOM)
• Fei Fang, assistant professor, GSOM
• Da (Will) Wu, assistant professor, GSOM
• Elizabeth Imber, assistant professor, history
• Shadrock Roberts, assistant professor, International Development, Community, and Environment Department
• Shuo Niu, assistant professor, mathematics and computer science
• Arden Ali, assistant professor, philosophy (starting in spring 2020)

In July, Nadia Ward, M.Ed, Ph.D., joined the Clark community as the new director of the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise, which will focus on the behavioral health of adolescents and young adults, particularly young men.

Along with new faces comes a significant name change. The LEEP Center is now the LEEP Student Success Network, which includes the Academic Advising Center and Career Connections Center as well as the offices of Community Engagement and Volunteering, Prestigious Fellowships and Scholarships, Student Accessibility Services, Study Abroad and Away, and the Writing and Quantitative Skills centers.

In the classroom, students can enroll in new history courses, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. and Gender and Women Workers. Students also can take advantage of a new data science minor, in which they’ll learn to collect, analyze, and draw knowledge from empirical data. Data science classes are taught by faculty from the mathematics, computer science, and mathematical biology and bioinformatics programs.

The Clark community can look forward to a wide variety of events on campus this fall. On Sept. 19, the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies will host an open house for the Colin Flug Graduate Study Wing, which supports the work of the Center’s Ph.D. students. The event will celebrate not only the new wing but also two decades of doctoral education in Holocaust and genocide studies.

The Visual and Performing Arts Department has a full schedule of events planned for the semester, and continues its exciting Geller Jazz series with Manuel Valera and the New Cuban Express on Sept. 25 at 7:30 p.m. in the Grind.

The campus-wide climate change initiative, A new Earth conversation, will host discussions on a range of topics, from the thawing of Siberia to the hard reality of “ecocide.” Filmmaker Roy Maconachie kicks off the fall programming with “Voices from the Mine,” his documentary about diamond mining in Sierra Leone on Oct. 21 at 6 p.m. in the Fireside Lounge at Dana Commons.

The Higgins School of Humanities’ fall symposium will focus on “Bodies.” A highlight is a conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom, hosted by Professor Toby Sisson, on Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. in Atwood Hall.