Ignatian Teaching Fellows

Jerry Edris

INTO SLU
Spring 2026

Jerry Edris is an associate professor of English as a Second Language. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses for international emerging multilingual students. His courses focus on helping his students develop the linguistic, academic, and cultural skills needed to succeed in an American higher education institution. He earned a B.A. degree in English from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and an M.A.T. degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) from Webster University.

He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in higher education administration from Saint Louis University. His research interests include culturally responsive teaching pedagogy, translanguaging practices in education, and refugee education. He will use the opportunity presented by the Ignatian Teaching Fellowship to further develop a new micro credential course in professional English communication skills for international emerging multilingual graduate students.

Whitney Linsenmeyer, Ph.D.

Spring 2026

Whitney Linsenmeyer, Ph.D., is an assistant professor and program director in the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics. She teaches undergraduate courses including Foundations in Nutrition, Advanced Nutrition, Quantity Foods and Research Seminar. Linsenmeyer co-founded the Transgender Health Collaborative at SLU, a faculty-led network of researchers and clinicians working with the transgender community throughout SLU and partner organizations. Her own research centers on gender-affirming nutrition care for transgender and gender expansive communities. 

As an Ignatian Teaching Fellow, Linsenmeyer will be redesigning Foundations in Nutrition, an introductory nutrition course she has been teaching for the past decade. This is a large enrollment course that welcomes students majoring and minoring in nutrition, as well as those fulfilling their Core requirement for Ways of Thinking: Natural and Applied Sciences. She is enthusiastic about the opportunity to reimagine a a course she has now taught over 15 times. 

Kelsey Mesmer (Ph.D., Wayne State) is an assistant professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of Communication. She teaches courses on news writing, reporting for social justice, and qualitative research methods. Her courses focus on ways journalists and other media-makers can produce more equitable media. Her research focuses on hostility toward the press, with a focus on anti-media rhetoric and how such hostility affects the routine practices of local journalists. Mesmer is also the Faculty Advisor for The University News.

Mesmer will use the Ignatian Teaching Fellowship to develop a new course on critical media literacy. Four areas will be of focus in the course: news literacy, social media literacy, visual literacy and digital literacy with a focus on generative AI. The course will serve as a Journalism and Media Foundations course and will focus not only on identifying credible media and practicing sound media consumption practices but also help students communicate media literacy — equipping them with the tools to translate what they know into action, conversation, and education for others. 

Michael A. Mancini, Ph.D.

Fall 2025 

Michael Mancini (Ph.D., M.S.W. University at Albany, N.Y.) is a professor in the School of Social Work. At SLU, he teaches graduate courses that focus on assessment, diagnosis and treatment of behavioral health conditions across the lifespan. His current research focuses on the implementation of integrated behavioral health practices in health and mental health settings. In 2021, he published a book titled Integrated Behavioral Health Practice that focused on the integration of evidence-based behavioral health practices in health settings for common behavioral health issues including depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction and violence. He is currently a member of the evaluation team for, Life Outside of Violence, a hospital-based violence intervention program that provides social and behavioral health services to youth experiencing community violence. He is also a co-Investigator on a four-year federal grant (2021-2025) from the Health Research and Services Administration (HRSA) titled, Strengthening the Behavioral Health Workforce for Children and Youth (2021-2025). This project led to the development of a multidisciplinary fellowship focused on educating behavioral health providers in social work, psychiatry, psychology, and medical family therapy to provide integrated trauma-informed behavioral health services to at-risk children, adolescents and transitional age youth. 

As an Ignatian Fellow, Michael plans to develop a course focused on understanding and implementing antiracist practices in social work. This course, required for all social work graduate students, will focus on social justice, critical reflection and action. By the end of the course students will be able to critically examine and understand the concepts of race and racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity through the critical analysis of social work values and ethics. Students will also be able to implement antiracist social work practices that are affirming to those with identities that have been historically marginalized and targeted at the micro, mezzo and macro levels as well as build collaborative coalitions to dismantle oppressive systems of power and domination in organizations, communities and systems.
 

R. Lauren Miller, Ed.D.

Fall 2024

R. Lauren Miller is an activist, published poet, artist, and mathematician. Lauren is an assistant professor in  the Mathematics and Statistics Department. She is also the faculty coordinator of the college prep program through Saint Louis University’s Prison Education Program. She has over four years of experience working with incarcerated students.  She has experience teaching developmental algebra through calculus III, statistics, and mathematics for education majors. She received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2015. In 2017, she received her master's in mathematics from Saint Louis University. She completed her Ed. D in collaborative high impact instruction from Fontbonne University in May of 2021. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in education policy and equity from Saint Louis University.

Her research and course development focus on math remediation and supporting formally incarcerated and nontraditional students. She will be using the Innovative Teaching fellowship to redesign Intermediate Algebra to use standards based grading, and culturally reposonsive teaching methods. This course is a prerequisite for all math courses and helps students build a solid math foundation.