“Being a member of NAC is important to me because members work to bridge the longstanding gap between neighboring communities and ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½. I hope to make ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ more welcoming to members of the neighboring communities. Furthermore, I hope to bring awareness to issues facing the communities that I am a member of and to be a positive change in these communities.â€
- NAC Member Amber Byrd
NAC student representative Amber Byrd is a graduate teaching assistant at ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ who is pursuing a PhD in sociology. Representing the Hough neighborhood (Ward 7), Byrd is a highly engaged member of the university community, where she serves as a graduate student representative on the search committee for the Department of Sociology and previously served as the vice president of the Sociology Graduate Student Association.
Byrd also applies her research interests—which include race and racism, gender and sexualities, urban sociology, mass incarceration, and class and classism, among others—to her work as a research assistant in two ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ labs. She has provided support for the Culture Change for Climate Change (CC4CC) Research Study, which aims to harmonize and scale climate action at and by ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½. She also assists with studies on retail racism and discrimination, and gender and medicine.
This past summer, she taught an English Language and Culture class to international students who are enrolled in the School of Law LLM program. She currently works as a Spoken English Language Partner at the School of Graduate Studies and next month, she will teach English Language and Culture to students at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
Byrd earned her bachelor’s degree in communication from Wheeling Jesuit University and her master’s degree in communication, media studies and public relations from University of Hartford.