John Jay College of Criminal Justice has announced the appointment of Charles D. Hammerman and Alisse Waterston to the John Jay College Foundation Board of Trustees. Each board member brings stellar credentials in both the private, nonprofit and academic sectors.

Charles D. Hammerman
Charles D. Hammerman is President and CEO of The Disability Opportunity Fund (DOF). He brings many years of involvement with initiatives for people with disabilities and significant experience in the financial markets.  Prior to the creation of The DOF, Hammerman founded the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, an organization to advance civic, economic and social participation of persons with disabilities in a global society.  In 2007, Hammerman was appointed Director of CDFI Initiatives at Syracuse University. Hammerman follows in the footsteps of his uncle, Dr. Burton Blatt, an advocate for integration of the disabled community in the 1960s and the inspiration for the DOF.

Hammerman was a senior member of Private Executive Services, a division of Merrill Lynch’s Global Private Client Group.  He also spent four years with Merrill Lynch’s Equity Capital markets division and four years in the Office of the General Counsel. Before Merrill Lynch, he was an Assistant United States Attorney in New York and began his career as an associate at Morgan Lewis and Bockius. At Merrill Lynch, Hammerman spearheaded the creation of its “Disability Awareness Professional Network” in its world headquarters.  As a result of his leadership, Merrill Lynch was recognized by Diversity Inc. magazine as the “number one company for employment of people with disabilities” in 2005 and 2006.  Hammerman received his B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and his J.D. from Fordham University.

Alisse Waterston 
Alisse Waterston, Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is a cultural anthropologist who studies the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. Her areas of specialty include urban poverty and policy issues in the United States related to destitution, homelessness and substance abuse, health, welfare and migration. Her most recent work focuses on the processes and aftermaths of political violence, ethnic and religious conflict, displacement and transnationalism, remembering, diaspora, cultural trauma and identity formation. Waterston is author of My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory and the Violence of a Century an intimate ethnography in the Routledge Series on Innovative Ethnographies.

Waterston is President-elect of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and will serve as AAA President in 2016-2017. She is also the Editor of Open Anthropology, the public journal of the AAA. In 2006, Waterston was named Chair of a new AAA board on the Future of Electronic and Print Publishing, a committee to oversee the Association’s transition to digital publishing with AnthroSource.

In 1992, along with her sister Adriana, Waterston co-founded Surveys Unlimited, a Horowitz Associates division dedicated to the social, cultural and ethnic research for urban markets. In 1998, Waterston was awarded the NAMIC Excellence Award for Research. She was also Editor of North American Dialogue (the publication of the Society for the Anthropology of North America). She, who earned her Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center, is a Soros International Scholar affiliated with the Gender Studies Department, Tbilisi State University, Republic of Georgia. Waterston serves as Chair of the Faculty Campaign at John Jay College.