Congratulations to the MCFI Ambassadors for the academic year 2026–2027! These exceptional faculty will serve as peer mentors to guide and inspire future cohorts and provide valuable input for the ongoing development of MCFI programming.
Ernest Gonzales
Ernest Gonzales is an Associate Professor and the James Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University, Silver School of Social Work, where he leads the Center for Health and Aging Innovation and Grand Challenge on Advancing a Long, Healthy, and Productive Life. As a critical gerontologist, he investigates risk and protective factors affecting health throughout the lifespan. His research on productive aging—covering education, work, civic engagement, and caregiving—highlights individual, neighborhood, and institutional elements that enhance health, economic stability, and social connections. His recent textbook, Social Gerontology: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, 11th Edition, published by Pearson, is the premier text on aging.
Sarah Narendorf
Sarah Narendorf is an Associate Professor at NYU Silver School of Social Work. Dr. Narendorf’s research focuses on ensuring successful transitions to adulthood for young adults who face this transition while navigating intersecting structural barriers. She has conducted research in partnership with collaborators across the United States to understand risk and resilience characteristics for young adults experiencing homelessness, and has examined the intersections of housing instability and mental health crises. She is currently conducting an intervention development study for a new intervention, Charge Up!, which adapts Critical Time Intervention and Cornerstone Coordinated Community Care to support mental health for young adults transitioning from homelessness to supported housing. She is Co-Director of the NYU Youth and Young Adult Mental Health Group and is actively engaged in the work of the lab to develop new interventions to support young adult mental health.
Lara Saguisag
Lara Saguisag is Associate Professor and Georgiou Chair in Children’s Literature and Literacy at New York University. Her monograph Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers UP 2018) received the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society and the Ray and Pat Browne Award from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. Climate justice and energy justice movements inform her current research. Through a new book project, she is investigating the ways children’s cultural forms naturalize and interrogate human relationships with fossil fuels. Dr. Saguisag is an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, recently completing her term as ChLA President (2025–2026). She is also Associate Editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (2025 Eisner nominee for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism) and was a founding Editorial Board member of Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.
Amanda Watson
Amanda Watson is the Librarian for English and Comparative Literature at the New York University Libraries. Her work focuses on supporting student and faculty research in literary studies and related fields, and building collections in those areas; a recent area of interest is facilitating research for creative work as well as for traditional scholarship. Her research interests include book history, the history of poetry readership, and the emerging field of queer bibliography. Her first book, Original and Selected: Poems, Commonplace Books, and Readers in Nineteenth-Century America (currently under contract), examines archival evidence for readers’ engagement with popular poetry throughout the nineteenth century in the northeastern United States. She is a field bibliographer for the Modern Language Association International Bibliography and a member of the advisory board for the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.