NSU Faculty Members Named Top Black Educators of 2021

Nova Southeastern University’s Charlene Desir and Olympia Duhart were recently named among Legacy South Florida magazine’s Top Black Educators of 2021.

Duhart, J.D., serves at the director of legal research and writing and professor of law at NSU’s Shepard Broad College of Law. Duhart, who earned her Juris Doctorate as a magna cum laude at NSU in 2003, was founding member of the Critical Skills Program at NSU before joining the faculty at the university.

Her scholarship focuses on government accountability for historically marginalized groups of people. She has published extensively on Hurricane Katrina survivors, and has most recently written about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among veterans and members of the military.

Charlene Désir, Ed.D., a full professor at NSU’s Abraham S. Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice, received her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2006. Désir’s academic interest is in the social, psychological, and spiritual adjustment of immigrant students, schools’ social curriculum, and psycho-social trauma occurring in schools.

She was the 2012 president of the Haitian Studies Association. She has developed cultural literacy projects in Haiti, and for immigrant children in the United States.

Legacy South Florida magazine is a publication serving South Florida’s Black community with insightful articles and information on business, careers, politics, education, culture and social commentary. It is published by M•I•A Media Group LLC, one of the nation’s largest Black publishers of its kind, with more than one million readers bi-monthly.

Established in 2004, M•I•A’s publications are distributed through the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspapers.