Outstanding Alum Branches Out

The position of President of Human Management Resource Solutions sounds daunting, but it’s only one of the ventures at which Michele Paludi, PhD psychology graduate, has been successful. And heading her own firm is not all she’s doing right now.

“I decided to start the business because I wanted to help companies and educational institutions become safer places in terms of preventing and effectively dealing with intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, and workplace violence. We provide assistance with developing effective policy statements and investigatory procedures, training programs, risk management, needs assessments, and web-base training,” explains Paludi.

In addition to her consulting, she serves as an adjunct professor at the Graduate College of Union University and the department of psychology at Union College that has twice honored her with the Thurgood Marshall Award for Teaching. At the Graduate College of Union University Paludi is responsible for developing an MBA concentration and certificate program in human resource management. Previously she held tenured positions at Kent State University and Hunter College, where she was director of women’s studies and the masters program in psychology.

In the early 1990s, Paludi was a consultant and member of former New York Governor Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment, and she is chairing the August 2005 convention of the International Coalition Against Sexual Harassment (ICASH). “This is important to me,” she notes. “It’s necessary to provide legal, management and social science research to human resource personnel, clinicians, attorneys and activists and to provide input into public policy and legislation.”

But the work doesn’t stop there. Paludi’s concern about harassment led to the most prominent of her numerous publications. She edited

Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus

and co-authored

Workplace Sexual Harassment

, which attracted widespread attention in both higher education and the workplace. As a result, she has appeared frequently in the media and on college campuses, as well as in print. Ivory Power received the 1992 Myers Center Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States.

Paludi graduated Phi Beta Kappa and

summa cum laude

from Union College. In 1980, she received a PhD in psychology from McMicken College. The women’s studies department recognized her work with a Distinguished Alumnae Award in 1998. She recalls, “I was thrilled to receive the award and happy that my former mentors and friends and my family could be present at the ceremony. It has been a goal of mine to mentor students with whom I have worked in the way I was mentored by faculty at UC. McMicken’s psychology department and College of Education prepared me well for an academic career, as well as building partnerships between psychologists and businesses/educational institutions for implementing health and safety policies and procedures.”