Affiliated Researchers and Internships

Jacob Apkarian is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. He is currently a Research Fellow at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. His current research focuses on logics of governance in finance and higher education as well as on unionization and collective bargaining in higher education. His research has been cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other news outlets.

Rhiannon M. Maton, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Foundations and Social Advocacy at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland. She is a qualitative researcher whose primary area of research focuses on teachers’ work and unions in K-12 and higher education in the U.S. and Canada. Dr. Maton is Co-Editor of the upcoming (2026) Routledge Handbook on Teachers’ Work, past Co-Chair of the Teachers’ Work/Teachers Unions Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, and Co-Editor of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Teaching and Teachers’ Work book series. She has been awarded a range of awards and distinctions, most recently including the Di Nardo and Waring Outstanding Achievement in Research Award in the SUNY system. Her work appears in a range of journals and book volumes, including Teachers College Record, Gender, Work and Organization, and the Journal of Educational Change.

Dr. Karen R. Stubaus is Vice President for Academic Affairs Emerita at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. A Ph.D. in seventeenth-century American history, she served as a senior academic administrator at Rutgers for many years, most recently as Vice President for Academic Affairs, with responsibility for academic and budgetary issues arising on all three Rutgers campuses in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden, as well as at Rutgers Health. Her many duties included negotiating and implementing the academic collective bargaining agreements for faculty, graduate students, postdocs, and adjuncts, as well as working with academic leadership and general counsel’s office on issues surrounding sexual misconduct and sexual harassment of graduate students and postdocs. Since stepping away from her administrative work at Rutgers Dr. Stubaus has been active as a National Center Visiting Scholar and Affiliated Researcher. Her current research involves how the newer graduate student and postdoc unions are using their collective bargaining agreements to seek more effective institutional responses to the continuing problem of sexual harassment of students and postdocs on college and university campuses. Dr. Stubaus also serves as a Co-Editor of the National Center's Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy.

Ashwini Sukthankar is a lawyer and labor organizer. Ashwini has worked on local, national and global organizing campaigns with many unions in the US as well as with global union federations. Her campaign experience covers both the public and private sector, and services as well as manufacturing. She is currently focused on researching issues concerning international and/or migrant workers in higher education. She is on the boards of several non-profits, including the International Commission for Labor Rights and Global Labor Justice. She holds degrees from Harvard University and Harvard Law School.

Joseph van der Naald is a PhD Candidate in the Program in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work focuses on inequality, labor movements, and social policy. Joseph's dissertation project traces the factors that shaped the historical emergence of public-sector labor movements in the United States, focusing on the interplay between state-level collective bargaining laws and government worker union power. His research has been published in several journals, including Journal of Labor and Society, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Social Science Research, and Social Service Review, the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, and has been featured in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, and The Chronicle of Higher Education among other places.

Erin Ward is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches at Hunter College. Her dissertation research investigates housing price inflation and its role in growing economic inequality. As a researcher at the National Center, she studies how faculty unions engage in collective bargaining around social and political issues in higher education, analyzing contract language that successfully incorporates provisions aimed at eliminating discrimination and expanding academic freedom.