Faculty Senate and Leadership Committee Members
Faculty Senate Roster
2025-2026 Faculty Senate Representatives
Leadership Committee
2025-2026 Executive Committee
President, Kim Bridges
Dr. Kim Bridges is an associate professor of education leadership in the School of Education. With a background in state education policy, local school board governance, communications, and program administration, her scholarship focuses on K12 policy and oversight to support integrating learning environments for student and system success. In her teaching and ongoing work with, she focuses on team development, inclusive public processes, and sustainable system improvement. A first-generation college student, Kim earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia, M.Ed. from the University of Richmond, and Doctorate in Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She and her husband have lived in Richmond since 1998. Their two children are products of RPS who live and work in Seminole, Florida, and London, England–where she enjoys their guest rooms as often as possible.
Vice-President, Nora Adler
Dr. Nora Alder is an associate professor of teacher education in the School of Education. With 12 years of experience teaching in public schools, she currently teaches curriculum, instruction, and classroom management classes to aspiring secondary teachers. She also works with veteran teachers who are interested in improving their practice. She has served as a representative in the Faculty Senate off and on for years. Nora earned her first two degrees at Oklahoma City University and her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has lived and worked in Richmond since 1996.
Corresponding Secretary, Morgan Snell
Morgan Snell is an assistant professor in the School of Public Health (SOPH) and serves as the Graduate Program Director for the Department of Health Policy’s graduate programs. Morgan served her first year as an elected faculty senator in 2024-2025, after serving as an alternate for the SOPH elected senators the year prior. She currently teaches Health Economics to Health Policy doctoral students and MPH students in the Health Policy concentration, and her research focuses on reducing the harm from nicotine/tobacco and other substance use, with a particular interest in youth and adults with mental health conditions and/or economic vulnerability. Morgan was hired as an assistant professor in 2022, and moved to Richmond in 2023, but previously earned her PhD from the Department of Health Policy in 2020 (commuting from Charlottesville when the department was part of the VCU School of Medicine), where she had one of the school’s first fully virtual dissertation defenses due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Prior to her PhD, Morgan earned her BA in Media Studies and her MPP at University of Virginia. She’s the proud parent of two children, a 6-year old and a 2-year old, and is an avid runner (jogger) and reader.
Recording Secretary/Treasurer, Lyons Hardy
Lyons Hardy is an associate professor in the School of Nursing and serves as the concentration lead for the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner (PMHNP) program. Lyons completed a two year term as a faculty senator and is looking forward to serving as recording secretary and treasurer for the upcoming year. Lyons has worked for VCU Health since 2004 and started in a full time faculty role at VCU in 2016. They teach graduate students in the PMHNP program year round and undergraduate students in a gen ed course taught in the fall semester. They maintain a clinical practice as a PMHNP one day per week at the VCU Center for Advanced Health Management in the Division of Geriatric Medicine. Lyons is a solo parent to an almost 13 year old 7th grader.
Past-President, Maria Rivera
Dr. Maria C. Rivera is a tenured professor at the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability. She earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and completed her Ph.D. in Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research in molecular evolutionary biology has proposed groundbreaking hypotheses on the evolutionary relationships among major groups of cellular life—work that has shaped scientific debates, is included in biology textbooks, and has influenced scholarship across economics, the humanities, social sciences, and philosophy of science. Recently, she co-authored the second edition of Metagenomics for Microbiology with Jacques Izard. She has been at VCU since 2006.
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