Our Faculty – BEC Newark

Jayme Alves

Instructor of Health and Physical Education

Scottye Battle

Assistant Professor of English and Special Education

Kate Beridze

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Straubel Cetoute

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Stephen Crane

Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Health

David Cutts

Principal

David Dowling

Operations Manager, Assistant Professor of Health and Physical Education

Elizabeth Goetz

Assistant Professor of English

Lara M. Friedman-Kats

Assistant Professor of Dance

Alison Mahone

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Kamyar Malakuti

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

John Martin

Instructor of Health and Physical Education

Reynaldo Martinez

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Anand Mhatre

Assistant Professor of Biology

Michael L. Murray

Assistant Professor of English

David D. Oquendo

Assistant Professor of Visual Arts

Jazmin Puicon

Assistant Professor of History

Gopakumar Ram

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Shana Russell

Assistant Professor of English

Tiffany R. Sims

Department Chair of Mathematics and World Languages

Andrew J. Trevarrow

Assistant Professor of English

Betsy Wood

Assistant Professor of History

Biyuan Yang

Assistant Professor of Chinese

Juan Yu

Assistant Professor of Chinese

Lekha Sekhar

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Lara M. Friedman-Kats

Assistant Professor of Dance

BFA in Dance Performance and PreK-12 dance education certification, Towson University; MFA in Dance, Montclair State University

Lara M. Friedman-Kats, born and raised in Central NJ, began her dance training at Kaye-Lynn Dance Studio in Edison. In 2008, Lara received the NJ Governor’s Award for Excellence in Dance. Ms. Friedman-Kats graduated with her BFA in Dance and PreK-12 certification from Towson University in 2013 and earned her Master of Fine Arts in Dance at Montclair State University. In 2011, she won the National Society of Arts and Letters (NSAL) regional competition for Art of the Solo and went on to compete and place nationally. She also received the Outstanding Achievement in Dance Education Award in 2013 from Towson University. Lara has performed with Dissonance Dance Theatre (DC), Deep Vision Dance Company (Baltimore), Deviated Theatre (DC), Mish-Mash Productions (NYC), Nikki Manx Dance Project (NJ), Kaleidoscope Dance Theatre/Sean McLeod Dance Experience (NYC), and most notably, Carolyn Dorfman Dance (NY/NJ) from 2015-2021. She also had her work adjudicated at the American College Dance Festival Association (now ACDA) in 2011. Lara was the long term leave replacement teaching dance at the Academy for Performing Arts in Scotch Plains from 2014-2015, Piscataway High School from 2021-2022, and Alexander Hamilton Preparatory Academy in 2022-2023. Ms. Friedman-Kats continues to teach both dance and fitness throughout studios, schools, and gyms in NJ. She served as adjunct professor teaching Modern II at DeSales University and Dance Appreciation at Montclair State University. To Lara, “Dance is a way of healing and finding acceptance within one’s own life. Socially charged work and personal experiences have motivated my creative endeavors. My mission is to bring awareness to the surface that which remains unseen or unspoken. Everyone has a story to tell- I tell mine through my body.”

Jazmin Puicon

Assistant Professor of History

BA, Union College; MA, New York University; PhD, Rutgers University

Jazmín Puicón is an Assistant Professor of History at Bard High School Early College in Newark, NJ.

Dr. Puicon is also the 2024 New Jersey History Teacher of the Year.

She is a historian of the Americas. Her research focuses on popular democracy, Afro-Colombian women, and working-class culture in urban Colombia. Her writing examines how the working class in Cali, Colombia sustained families and communities by embracing popular democracy despite increased local and national political violence.

Dr. Puicón has received grants from Bard Early Colleges, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, and the International Education Fund Grant from Union College to conduct research in Colombia on oral history and political violence, highlighting the voices of Afro-Colombian women in the Cauca Valley as they fought for peace and community throughout the 20th century.

She has presented papers and her work at conferences in the United States and abroad, including the OSUN Summit on Mobility/Immobility, the International Conference on Women’s History in Bogotá, Colombia and the inaugural ALARI Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

Dr. Puicón has received numerous recognitions for her teaching, research, and commitment to her students and larger Newark community, including from the NAACP for centering the Black experience in her classroom and coursework, an exemplary teaching award from the State of New Jersey’s Amistad Commission, the Mildred Barry Garvin Prize from the New Jersey Historical Commission, given to K-12 educators for outstanding teaching of African American history, or for outstanding performance in a related activity during the annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, Rutgers University’s Excellence in Outreach and Service Award, and the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance’s 2023 Teacher Award for innovation and excellence of teaching Newark history.

She was previously a teaching fellow at the Pulitzer Center and OSUN’s Experiential Learning Institute, and an inaugural fellow of Bard’s IWT CLASP fellowship.

Dr. Puicón currently co-chairs the Lesson Plan Verification Committee for the NJ Department of Education’s Amistad Commission and is a Teacher Coach at the OER Project.

Betsy Wood

Assistant Professor of History

BA, Arkansas Tech University; MA, University of Arkansas; PhD, University of Chicago

Dr. Wood is an American historian with interests in the 19th century, labor and working-class history, and the history of slavery and capitalism. Her first book, Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor & the Rise of a New American Sectionalism, was published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2020 as part of “The Working Class in American History” series. In this book, Dr. Wood shows how North-South conflict shaped legal, political, and ideological disagreements about child labor in America and bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalism to modern American capitalist society.

Dr. Wood has taught both history and English at the college and high school levels. She began her teaching career as a high school teacher in northwest Arkansas where she first fell in love with teaching. She went on to complete graduate degrees in English (MA) and History (PhD) before serving as a Visiting Lecturer in history at the University of New Hampshire and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Most recently, Dr. Wood was an Instructor of History at the Hudson County Community College in Jersey City where she has taught for 3 years.

As an academic, Dr. Wood has sought to make her teaching and scholarship accessible and useful to social justice movements and the public at large. She helped launch the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University and has consulted for various worker justice organizations, including the National Domestic Workers Alliance and slavefreetrade. Dr. Wood has also written extensively for public audiences with op-eds in “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post,” “The Conversation,” and dozens of newspapers around the country. For two years, she also served as a writer and researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

In her spare time, Dr. Wood enjoys poetry, songwriting, camping and hiking with her family, and collecting vintage objects. She’s also a big fan of animated film.