Russell A. Spinney is an independent historian and instructor at the Thacher School in Ojai, California.

Peter Hayes is Professor Emeritus of History and German and Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and a former chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his thirteen books are The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (co-edited with John K. Roth), How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, and Why? Explaining the Holocaust, which also has appeared in German and Spanish translations and shortly will be in Chinese, Polish, and Slovak, as well.

Julie Gruenbaum Fax was a senior writer and editor at the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and has co-authored six personal history books. She is currently writing a book about her grandmother’s Holocaust experience.

Rachael Cerrotti is an award winning author, producer and documentary storyteller as well as the inaugural Storyteller in Residence for USC Shoah Foundation. She is the granddaughter behind 'We Share The Same Sky' and the host of 'The Memory Generation' podcast. Learn more at www.rachaelcerrotti.com.

Lucy Sun will be a senior in the Fall 2020 semester. She is majoring in History and minoring in Psychology and Law.

Rachel Zaretsky is the 2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Ms. Zaretsky just completed the first year of her MFA in Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She earned her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, and her art practice takes the form of performance, video installation and photography. She has created past artistic responses to the Miami Beach Holocaust memorial and to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin.  

Mehmet Polatel is the 2019-2020 Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He received his Ph.D. degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul with his dissertation focusing on the emergence and transformation of the Armenian land question in the late Ottoman Empire. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he earned a BA in International Relations from the University of Middle East Technical University in 2007, and an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, Istanbul in 2009.

Sam Gustman has been chief technology officer (CTO) of the Shoah Foundation since 1994. Gustman is also associate dean and CTO at the USC Libraries where he oversees IT for the Libraries and started the USC Digital Repository.

Daryn Eller manages the Institute’s institutional media collection and participates in cataloging the Visual History Archive testimonies. She previously worked as a magazine and book writer, has an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, and a masters in library and information science from San Jose State University.

Stephanie Abadom joined the communications department at USC Shoah Foundation in March of 2020. She is currently a second-year graduate student at USC Annenberg’s School for Communications and Journalism where she is studying Strategic Public Relations. Stephanie is an Annenberg fellow and also works as the operations manager for the Annenberg Media Center. She will be graduating in Spring 2021.

Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests extend from Holocaust studies to modern European Jewish history, modern Germany, memory, oral history, gender, and antisemitism. Chad’s dissertation, “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka,” investigates the spatial and social networks of Jewish resistance inside this extermination camp.

Chaya Nove is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. She is currently working on a project to investigate variation and change in the vowel system of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York. She is also conducting acoustic analyses of European Yiddish using archival recordings. Visit her CUNY website profile here.