The votes have been tallied, and the CGC Board is delighted to welcome our newly elected CGC Board members: Secretary Angelo Pitillo, Treasurer Andrew Davis, Members at Large Honor McElroy and Katharine Brown, and returning Member at Large Eric Grunwald, who will continue his leadership as Communications Committee Chair.
Each will contribute expertise and leadership to advance CGC’s ongoing and new initiatives at a time of rapid change in higher education, research, and graduate studies across the globe.
“It’s an honor to be able to serve the wonderful CGC community as your next secretary,” says Secretary-Elect Pitillo, director of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan. “I am looking forward to working with the rest of the board to support this amazing organization as it enters its second decade!”
Treasurer-Elect Davis, a lecturing fellow in the English Language Support Program at Duke University, says, “I am grateful to have the opportunity to serve the board and the greater CGC community as the new treasurer. I believe that together we can continue to grow and adapt in our shared calling to support graduate student communication.”
Katharine Brown, associate director of University Writing at Auburn University, says, “When I joined CGC, I found a community that has deepened my knowledge about supporting graduate writers and energized my work. I am so excited to join the CGC Board as a Member at Large. It is an honor to support an organization that has meant so much to me.”
Honor McElroy, a graduate research editor in the Graduate Resource Center at Bowie State University, says she is “honored to be elected. . . . I look forward to contributing to the expansion of our research base, with a focus on how graduate students develop as writers, scholars, and professionals across contexts.”
“This organization has helped me and continues to help me tremendously in my duties as teacher and administrator at MIT,” says the re-elected Grunwald, who directs the English Language Studies program there, “and so it’s been a pleasure to be able to try and give back these past couple of years by being on the Board and getting the Communications Committee going. The CGC continues to evolve and improve, and I’m excited to be a part of that.”
The new Board members’ positions will take effect July 1st.
“We’ve got work to do!” says Co-Chair Kristina Quynn. “We are grateful for these members’ willingness to serve on the Board and excited to work with them in new ways over the coming years.”
Author: Eric Grunwald
Eric Grunwald is director of and lecturer in MIT’s English Language Studies (ELS) program. An instructor in ELS since 2012, he draws on a wide breadth of scholastic and vocational experiences to help students across the disciplines improve their academic and professional communication skills. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, studied math, physics, computer science, and astronomy before switching to the humanities and graduating with a degree in history. He began teaching English in Berlin, Germany, during the German Reunification, and then worked for several years in technology transfer at Stanford before obtaining his master’s in creative writing at Boston University. (See ericgrunwald.com.) After serving as managing editor at the literary journal Agni, he returned to teaching in 2007 and now teaches a variety of communication courses for bilingual MIT undergraduates and graduate students. He presents regularly at conferences in the U.S. and abroad and has received Institute grants to design an undergraduate creative writing course just for bilingual students and to design a website—writingprocess.mit.edu—to instruct students in a formal writing process. Grunwald became ELS director in July 2022 and serves on the CMS/W Writing Council. He is a member-at-large on the CGC Board and chairs the CGC Communications Committee.
