ALEXANDRA CARTER | Director
Tufts University, Ph.D., English (candidate)
New York University, B.A., Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Alex’s first experience with Putney was as a student, first on the Community Service Brazil program and then on Pre-College China. She liked it so much that she returned to lead in 2011 on the Pre-College at Amherst program. Since then, Alex has taught History of European Fashion on Putney’s Pre-College Florence program, assistant directed Putney’s Pre-College London and Florence programs, led a New York Times Student Journeys program in London, and directed Putney’s Pre-College Amherst program. Before pursuing her graduate studies, Alex worked in New York City as a tour coordinator at Academic Arrangements Abroad, a company specializing in alumni and museum group travel. She organized logistics for programs traveling to destinations including Italy, Cuba, Holland, Belgium, and northern India. Alex is currently back in her hometown of Boston pursuing her Ph.D. in English; her dissertation is on Renaissance romance literature and constructions of English national identity. Teaching and mentoring students is one Alex’s priorities: she teaches Expository Writing in Tufts’s First-Year Writing program, she was a Tufts Graduate Institute for Teaching Fellow, and she is currently a Robyn Gittleman Teaching Fellow in the Tufts Experimental College. When she is not reading, writing, or working with students, you can find her working diligently on her newfound embroidery hobby.

MATT WEINGAST | Assistant Director
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, M.F.A., Fiction
Columbia University, Rutgers University, B.A., English

Matt began his undergraduate studies in engineering and ultimately earned his degree in English. After graduation, he traveled to Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach high school chemistry. He then spent several years traveling, much of it in Asia, and decided to return to school for a master’s in creative writing. Matt earned his M.F.A. from UMass Amherst, where he also taught college writing courses to undergraduate students and mentored incoming graduate writing instructors. He then went to live and work at a Buddhist meditation center, becoming editor of the Insight Journal and co-editor of the book Awake at the Bedside, an anthology on palliative and end-of-life care. Since then, Matt has traveled extensively and translated a collection of poems by the first Buddhist nuns, along the way becoming a temporary resident at a Buddhist nuns’ monastery in California. He recently returned from Nepal. This is Matt’s second summer with Pre-College Amherst.

BRIAN BENDER | Music Composition and Performance
New England Conservatory of Music, B.A., Contemporary Improvisation

A versatile professional musician based in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, Brian studied at U.C. Berkeley before graduating from the New England Conservatory in 1993 with a degree in contemporary improvisation. Brian has taught jazz ensemble, world music appreciation, and music theory at Suffield Academy, the Williston-Northampton School, the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter High School, the Berkshire Hills Music Academy, and elsewhere. As a performing and recording artist for a range of groups—the Wholesale Klezmer Band, Elixir Contra Dance Band (Celtic), Black Rebels (African Reggae), the Pangeans (World Music), the World Beatniks (World Music), Little Shop of Horas (Klezmer-World Fusion), Fiddle Hill (Celtic), Big Bandemonium (Celtic), MarkaMusic (Latin-Andean fusion), the Brian Bender Quartet (Jazz), the Gumbo Jumbo Dixieland Band, and a long list of other groups (Afrobeat, Funk, R&B, etc.) — Brian has performed in venues worldwide, including Carnegie Hall, the Presidential Inauguration of Bill Clinton, Israel, Alaska, the Cape Verde Islands (West Africa), France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Holland, the United Kingdom, and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Brian has been teaching music at Pre-College at Amherst College for 11 summers.

ALEXA GARVOILLE | Creative Writing; Structured Writing
Virginia Tech, M.F.A., Creative Writing (candidate)
Duke University, M.A., Teaching English
Yale University, B.A., Literature

At Yale, Alexa studied the connection between literature and photography both in New Haven and during her year abroad in Paris. She went on to study teaching at Duke University and taught in Durham, North Carolina, for 10 years, mostly at an arts high school. In her role as the school’s creative writing program chair, she worked with young people to connect the arts to academics. During her time teaching high school, Alexa earned her National Boards Certification and helped young writers design and self-publish books and chapbooks. She also facilitated the publication of six anthologies of short memoirs written and edited by her students. Her passion in life is working with young people to write the stories, poems, and essays that will change them as writers and then change the world. Alexa is now pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, where she writes poetry and researches creative writing pedagogy. Alexa is proficient in French.

MIKE ALVAREZ | Forensic Science; Public Speaking
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ph.D., Communication, Graduate Certificate in Film Studies
Goddard College, M.F.A., Creative Writing, M.A., Individualized Studies
Rutgers University, B.A., Psychology

Mike is the author of two forthcoming books: The Color of Dusk: A Memoir and The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity, a project that grew out of his Henry Rutgers Scholar thesis and for which he was awarded the Charles Flaherty Award for Outstanding Research in Psychology. His doctoral dissertation explored suicidal individuals’ co-creation of meaning and community and rediscovery of hope in a pro-life online forum. Mike has taught courses in film studies, television production, media and culture, interpersonal communication, and public speaking at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he will also teach a brand new course called Death in the Digital Age this fall. Other research and teaching interests include forensic applications of new and emerging technologies and the representation of deviance and criminality in popular culture. He is the recipient of a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, awarded to 30 candidates in a national competition that attracts up to 1,700 applicants annually. Mike was born and raised in the Philippines and speaks Tagalog fluently.

VANESSA LUSA | Entrepreneurship; Political Science
Duke University, B.A., Public Policy and Education

While at Duke, Vanessa focused on education policy and experiential and international learning. She spent time in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New Orleans, the Rio Grande Valley, Sacramento, and South Africa teaching and working with various educational nonprofits on equity issues in their communities. Vanessa also traveled to Brazil, India, and Uganda to investigate social enterprises focused on educational technologies with the School of International Training’s International Honors Program. Besides social impact and education, Vanessa loves to ride horses and spent a summer working at a dude ranch in Montana; in her free time, she currently leads rides for both tourists and students with disabilities. Vanessa now teaches at a bilingual elementary school in La Rioja, Spain, with a Fulbright Scholarship. This fall, Vanessa will be return to La Rioja as a mentor for incoming Fulbright scholars in her region. She is fluent in Spanish.

ANNA HABIB | Biomedical Ethics; Psychology of the Criminal Mind
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ph.D., School Psychology (candidate)
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, M.Ed., Education
The Ohio State University, B.A., Psychology

While pursuing her psychology degree at The Ohio State University, Anna joined a social psychology lab to conduct research on how individuals’ attitudes influence their selection of information. After graduating, she served with City Year, an AmeriCorps program centered on closing the achievement gap in urban schools. As an AmeriCorps member, Anna gained a greater understanding of the many social and environmental factors contributing to high crime rates, failing schools, and extreme poverty rates in many urban areas. During her time with City Year, Anna helped lead a schoolwide positive behavior initiative to reduce suspensions and encourage engagement and learning in the classroom. She is now finishing her Ph.D. in school psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she is conducting research on how classroom contextual variables, such as teacher-student relationships, influence students’ patterns of academic help-seeking and avoidance. During breaks from her program, Anna has traveled to Canada, Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Next year, Anna will be completing her doctoral internship in New York, where she will be conducting psychoeducational evaluations, providing individual and group counseling services, and designing behavioral intervention plans for students with social, emotional, learning, and behavioral difficulties.

GYURI KEPES | Psychology of Personality
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ph.D., Communication (candidate)
University of Hartford, M.A., Communication
University of Massachusetts Amherst, B.A., Communication, Certificate in Latin American Studies

Gyuri recently completed his Ph.D. research and in the fall will be joining Landmark College in Vermont as an Assistant Professor of Communication. His research has taken him around the globe to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he studied the educational uses of public computer kiosks by economically disadvantaged urban youth. For this research project Gyuri was awarded the University of Hartford Outstanding Graduate Research Award. His most recent research has focused on media representations of the opioid crisis in the news. His work has been presented at numerous professional conferences, and was recently published in the edited volume, The Praxis of Social Inequality in Media: A Global Perspective. Gyuri has taught undergraduate courses in writing, mass communication, interpersonal communication, film, television, and audio production, and public speaking at several institutions of higher learning, including UMass Amherst, University of Hartford, Westfield State University, Springfield Technical Community College, Holyoke Community College, and Asnuntuck Community College. Gyuri is fluent in Spanish. This will be his sixth summer teaching for Pre-College at Amherst College; last year he taught the psychology seminars.  

SPENCER HAMILTON | Entrepreneurship; Business & Economics
Johns Hopkins University, M.B.A.
University of Southern California, B.A., Sociology and Communication

While at Johns Hopkins University, Spencer focused on business management and finance and won the coveted capstone competition for best product strategy. He also interned with international private equity fund-to-funds and investment banking companies. Following his interest in companies with a double bottom line, he made his first principal investment in Silicon Energy, a company that lowers the energy costs of manufacturing companies. Spencer has built a career working on companies’ strategic initiatives in the development of products and services such as healthcare tablets and telestroke programs. Recently, he was sent on a Partners of the Americas mission to Guatemala, where he observed the complex socioeconomic environment that contributed to the performance of a fledgling ed-tech company focused on Mayan arts and crafts. Spencer trained the startup’s team to reframe their value proposition and relaunch a successful national campaign. Presently, he is a business advisor for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program. In his former life, Spencer served in a new agribusiness program in Peace Corps Haiti, where he learned about the power of economic behavior in the success of environmental conservation programs.

KRISTIN AUSTIN | Gender Studies; Marketing
Columbia University, B.A., Sociology

While at Columbia, Kristin quickly fell in love with sociology and focused on gender studies and equity in higher education. During her undergraduate career, she had the opportunity to travel in Italy, road trip through New Zealand, and do a summer homestay in Madrid. After graduation, she spent eight months living out of a suitcase as a traveling consultant for a national women’s sorority before landing in Palo Alto, California, where she helped manage marketing and recruitment for the organization’s expansion at Stanford University. Kristin has since returned to Madrid and the world of K-12 education, where she works as a high school English teacher. She is passionate about languages and is fluent in Spanish, with plans to begin learning French or Chinese. This fall, she will continue teaching in Madrid while pursuing a master’s degree in bilingual and multicultural education at the University of Alcalá de Henares.

MADELEINE NEILL | Program Assistant; Fitness Instructor
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, School of Public Policy, M.P.P.A.
Eckerd College, B.A., Latin American Studies and Spanish

While at Eckerd College, Madeleine focused on cultural anthropology in Latin America and Spanish. She spent a semester abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was able to travel throughout Argentina and to Uruguay and Chile. In 2018, Madeleine received her master’s in public policy and administration at UMass Amherst, with a focus on women’s health and family policy. She has been a member of 50/50 Fitness and Nutrition since 2014, and regularly attends small group spin and bootcamp-style classes. She also loves hiking and cycling outdoors. Over the years, she has worked a great deal with children and adolescents—as a nanny and as a substitute teacher—and plans to pursue a master’s in education. This fall, she will be working as a fourth and fifth grade teaching assistant at Hilltown Cooperative Charter Public School. Madeleine is proficient in Spanish.