Our Program Support Team is compromised of esteemed faculty, dedicated staff, IC alumni, and proud MLK Scholar graduates. We lead with care, attention, and intention.
Each MLK Scholar is connected with one of our Team members as "mentor & mentee." The relationship is established over time and can resemble whatever the two agree upon in the spirit of supporting the 'Scholar and centering the individual needs of each person.
Our Program Support Team
Cliff-Simon Vital serves as the Program Director for the MLK Scholars Program and directly oversees the Program. Cliff-Simon joined the IC community as the Assistant Director for the Center for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Social Change (IDEAS), renamed BIPOC Unity Center in August 2023, and was later promoted to Associate Director and currently Associate Director. Cliff-Simon also teaches and serves as a faculty associate at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity (CSCRE) and teaches the Civil Rights Seminar class.
In addition to his work at IC, Cliff-SImon is also an active community member. He serves as a Big Brother at the Ithaca Youth Bureau, as a board member at the Greater Ithaca Activities Center, and as Vice President of Membership for CSPA-NYS, a higher education professional association.
Mac is the Program Associate for the Martin Luther King Scholar Program and current Assistant Director for the BIPOC Unity Center. She is dedicated to supporting the MLK Scholars and their growth as students and leaders.
With over twenty years of student enrollment experience, Nicole is dedicated to supporting a student-centered approach and engaging audiences in forming authentic connections to IC's living-learning residential community. She does this by leading a talented team who offer professional service and creative solutions as they work with each student to support an informed college search process. During Her tenure at IC, she's served as an active mentor for the Martin Luther King Scholar Program and is an advisor for student organizations such as the Caribbean Students’ Association. For these efforts and more, Nicole received the Ithaca College Student Government Council Administrator of the Year award in 2016.
Belisa González is an associate professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College. Originally from San Antonio, TX, Belisa González earned her PhD in Sociology from Emory University in 2006. While in Atlanta, she was a member and co-chair of the Atlanta Organizing Committee (AOC) for Undoing Racism. It was her experience with the organizers on AOC and others like it that formed the basis of her dissertation “Increasing Collaboration or Conflict,” which focused on sustainable cross racial organizing efforts between African Americans and Latinos in the South. Her role as an organizer and co-facilitator of quarterly Undoing Racism workshops helped her better understand interweaving systems of oppression and their consequences on everyday lives, the power of community and the importance of taking leadership from marginalized peoples. After completing her degree at Emory Belisa held a one year postdoc at the University of Georgia, before accepting a position in the Sociology department at Ithaca College (IC) in 2007.
Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Education. Prior to this role, Dr. Bradwell served as the past director of the Center for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Social Change (IDEAS) and taught in Ithaca College’s Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity (CSCRE). Dr. Bradwell also served as a faculty associate for Ithaca’s Martin Luther King Scholars Program and has research / teaching interests in educational policy/pedagogy, race theory, and social change.
In addition to his research and writing, Dr. Bradwell is also an active community member. He has been appointed as a Tompkins County Heritage Ambassador and in 2020, he was elected to serve his fifth (5th) term on the Ithaca City School District Board of Education. Currently, Dr. Eversley Bradwell serves as President of the ICSD Board.
Marsha is a Student Affairs enthusiast with over thirteen years dedicated to the field of higher education and community outreach.
Proven skill sets specifically in the areas of staff and student development, training and facilitation, leadership, strategic planning, and social justice work. With her values based on mutual respect, understanding, accountability, equity, and service, she is a leader with the ability to initiate a needs analysis and translate the assessment into a specific, reachable strategic goal. Marsha uses high energy and authenticity to impact individuals and learn from different organizations respectively.
Zaira Sylvain is an Ithaca College alumna with a B.S. in Biochemistry. She is a preserving and purposeful individual that finds enjoyment in helping people and organizations successfully reach their goals. She takes pride in representing her employer and acting as a supportive spokesperson for a team. With a passion for combining innovative science with social justice aimed towards providing quality healthcare for all, Zaira's long-term goal includes a career in obstetrics in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the physiology of complex pregnancies.
During her final year at Ithaca College, she developed a research plan focused on identifying biochemical markers for early prediction of preeclampsia. Additionally, as the VP for the United Nations Girl Up Ithaca College chapter, she and members of the organization successfully organized a community-wide sexual assault awareness panel discussion in hopes of creating a respectful and open space for difficult dialogues.
Dr. Horsley is a pleasure seeking activist, visual artist, and scholar. Unapologetically, she is Black and sexually liberated. She uses visual and sonic culture as tools of empowerment for Black girls and women to define and embrace their bodies, seek pleasure and heal themselves. The driving force behind her research is social justice and Black liberation.
Dr. Horsley's commitment to social justice for Black girls and women has led her to explore poor and working-class Black cis and transgender women’s sexual economies of labor and pleasure (which at times can be one in the same). Through the figure/trope of the “freak” in pornography, popular and sonic culture she explores how Black women resist sexual oppression through reclaiming fatness, queer identities and gendered non-conforming bodies. This work further invokes a type of material existence—imagined through Black girlhood, bottom culture, ratchetness and is grounded in the gender troubles of figures such as Sojourner Truth, Marsha P. Johnson, TS Madison, Khia, and Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott.