Meet Your OVC Colleagues: Winter 2025

Meet Your OVC Colleagues: Winter 2025

Akunna Rosser

Akunna Rosser

Senior Assistant Director for Prehealth Advising
Career Advising & Professional Development

  • My role: I assist in leading the Prehealth Advising team, with a primary focus on managing the Prehealth Advising services to MIT students and alumni. 
  • Years at MIT: 9
  • Favorite hobbies or DIY projects: Being a typophile! I love creating different types of lettering, from calligraphy and graffiti to graphic design. A goal this year is to finally start making cards and prints of my work. 
  • Favorite sports team(s): All NY sports teams. But my favorite is the NY Knicks!
  • On the weekends, I love to: Take walks and bike ride on the Charles, play basketball with friends, or play board games and sports with my two sons.
  • If I won the lottery, I would: Pay off my student loans asap! Then make a donation to Urban Scholars, a college prep program for first gen/low-income Boston Public School students I worked for prior to MIT. 

Paola Rebusco

Senior Lecturer
Experimental Study Group

  • My role: I design and teach physics GIRs and new interdisciplinary subjects, while helping first-years grow into their amazing selves.
  • Years at MIT: 17.5
  • Favorite hobbies or DIY projects: sailing, reading, cooking, crocheting, writing.
  • Last great books you read: The Baron in the Trees (Italo Calvino), Homo Sum (Maurizio Bettini), Walden (Henry David Thoreau).
  • Famous person (living or dead) you’d love to meet, and why: Mahatma Gandhi, because I would like to have a glimpse of where such strength and coherence originate.
  • Guilty pleasure: Why feel guilty?
  • If I won the lottery, I would: Keep my job, but spend some time and resources to learn more and try to make a difference to solve terrestrial challenges.
Melissa Martin-Greene

Melissa Martin-Greene

Assistant Director
UROP/Office of Experiential Learning

  • My role: I manage UROP operations, funding, and application review processes and serve as UROP’s chief data specialist, developing and advising on policies/procedures, guiding students, faculty, and staff on UROP engagement, leading training workshops for UROP mentors, and overseeing our application systems and website.
  • Years at MIT: 28
  • Favorite hobbies or DIY projects: Writing, painting, jewelry design, cooking, hiking, and playing with my furbabies (cats and dog).
  • Dream vacation spot: It’s a tie between Maui, Hawaii and Paris, France because I love both for different reasons!
  • Best Halloween costume you’ve ever had: Morticia Addams.
  • Most influential person in your life: My great-grandmother who taught me how to live with strength, grace, empathy, compassion, curiosity, courage, and love.
  • Guilty pleasure: Binge-watching British TV series.

Janet Rankin

Director
Teaching + Learning Lab

  • My role: In theory, I direct the work of TLL – but really I just try to stay out of the way and let the amazing folks in TLL use their talents, experiences and energies to support the work of educators at MIT.
  • Years at MIT: 23 (including 5 in grad school)
  • Favorite hobbies or DIY projects: Cooking, baking (bread). I am a serious endorphin addict and enjoy doing anything that gets my heart rate up: running (I am lucky to be able to run to work), hiking, biking, skiing, swimming.
  • Last great book you read: I love to read (novels) and recently finished James, by Percival Everett (a 2024 Booker Prize Finalist) which is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective. It was really incredible; and over the break I finished The Brothers K, by David James Duncan – this is a really heartbreaking yet at some points, hilarious novel that weaves together minor league baseball (and baseball in general), Seven Day Adventists, family dynamics, and the Vietnam War.
  • Favorite movie: Though not my favorite movie, Apollo 13 has my favorite scene from a movie…it’s the one where the folks in mission control have come up with a way for the astronauts to make their own air filters using only what’s on the ship … as an engineer at heart – I LOVE that scene.
  • Music or musicians/bands/groups you love: I really enjoy going to live music events – especially to see/hear jazz & funk artists.
  • What was your first job? One of my first jobs was a caddy at a private golf course. It was definitely eye-opening … don’t drink and drive, folks.