Maria Dykema Erb, M.Ed. is the Inaugural Executive Director of the Boston University Newbury Center which was established to foster the holistic development and success of first-generation undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Maria has over three decades of higher education experience having worked at the University of Vermont, Elon University, Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and currently at Boston University. She has worked in a broad range of areas including Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging; student recruitment/admissions, enrollment management, academic advising, retention, and outreach; academic dean’s office and graduate/professional school program administration; and student affairs/life.

As a proud first-generation college graduate, Maria holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of New Hampshire and Master of Education degree from The University of Vermont (UVM). She is past president of the FirstGen Forward – Forward Thinkers group.

Maria has shared her scholarship through numerous presentations and book chapters. She has chapters in: Know That You Are Worthy: Experiences from First-Generation College Graduates; A Handbook for Supporting Today’s Graduate Students; A Practitioner’s Guide to Supporting Graduate and Professional Students; and Fostering First Gen Success and Inclusion: A Guide for Law Schools (in press).

Rashné R. Jehangir, PhD. is a learner, a scholar- practitioner and equal opportunity educator. She holds degrees from Lawrence University and two graduate degrees from the University of Minnesota where she is Professor of Higher Education and the Beck Chair of Ideas in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. She is also the founding Director of the First Gen Institute and was recently named the Inaugural Dean of Education Opportunity Programs at her college. She is the inaugural co-editor of the Journal of First-generation Student Success. 

She spent the first decade of her career in student affairs and has strong roots in the federally funded TRIO SSS and McNair Scholars Programs which provided fertile ground for key questions in her research inquiry. Her research focuses on equity and access with specific attention to structural constraints in the academy that impact the experience of poor and working class, refugee and immigrant students, and students of color many of whom are first in their family to go to college and graduate school. Her focus on access and persistence include attention to belonging, pedagogy, and curriculum that is affirming and humanizing, and provides opportunities for career preparation and avenues to enter graduate school and student affairs.

Her scholarship is featured in several journals including Journal of College Student Development, Innovative Higher Education, Urban Education and the Journal of the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education Her book Higher Education and First-Generation College Students: Cultivating Community, Voice and Place for the New Majority was published by Palgrave Macmillan.