Current Executive Officers

The Warner Graduate Student Association (WGSA) leadership committee currently consists of three co-chairs: Karen Gibson, Pete Sasso, and Alfred Vitale. We welcome the addition of more co-chairs and look forward to growing the committee. If you are interested in helping to make positive changes for Warner students, contact WGSA at  thewgsa@warner.rochester.edu.

Karen Gibson
Karen Gibson, MSEd, NCC, is a doctoral student in the counselor education program. Most recently she worked at the University of Rochester Medical Center in the department of psychiatry program in geriatrics and neuropsychiatry, coordinating research studies of depression among the elderly. Before shifting gears and becoming a counselor, Karen worked in social justice movements, primarily in the labor movement, but also organizing around issues of national health care, fair trade, increased unemployment benefits, and domestic-partner benefits.

Locally, Karen is a founding sister of Sk8 Club, a roller skating group that initiates projects in the Rochester community to counter harmful dominant paradigms that oppress and harm women and girls. She is also the founder of Good Karma!, an effort that offers people occasional, quick, easy and direct ways to make charitable contributions to the Rochester community. She has an interest in independent film and has worked as a script supervisor, choreographer, and actor in some locally-made short films.

Karen's dissertation ideas are still all over the map, but she is interested in narrative therapy and film. She joined the program with the intent to utilize film to create tools for counselors to use with clients. She would like to combine contributions from social constructivism, psychodrama, narrative therapy, art therapy, and group work for her dissertation.

Pete Sasso
Pete is originally from Washington, D.C. As a recent graduate of Christopher Newport University (CNY), a four-year public, state arts college, Pete majored in psychology with two minors in political science and health education. At the Warner School he is a master's student in higher education administration and is seeking an additional cognate in counseling. As a fresh face within the Warner School Pete hopes to bring some southern traditionalism and utilize his art student background as an undergraduate to offer new ways to approach education. As a new student resident of the campus community and Rochester, he is interested in investing the Warner School students in social and networking opportunities within the urban area. He is currently involved as a chapter advisor and expansion representative for his fraternity, Tau Delta Phi. He is also a member of NASPA, ACPA, and AFA.

He lobbies each spring for the capital fraternal caucus where he seeks equality for educational tax parity benefits for collegiate non-profit organizations. He is also a graduate assistant in the career center. His research interests focus on Greek Affairs program standards and the harm/risk-reduction alcohol education model.

Alfred Vitale
Alfred Vitale is currently enrolled as a student in the master's program in human development, with the aim of pursuing a Ph.D. His main research interests in human development include issues of self-making in modernity, such as the modern creation of a normative psychological subject reinforced by academic research, the overlooked function of fiction and fictional narrative media (such as films, novels, and music) in self-construction, and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to human development.  Alfred received his B.A. in religious studies from the University of Rochester in 2004. 

Alfred grew up in Manhattan and has been in Rochester for five years.  He has been an activist, a DJ (both club and radio, and helped start two pirate radio stations), contract archaeologist (in New York City), bike messenger, photographer’s assistant, restaurant manager, database analyst, well-published writer of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, co-editor of two anthologies, publisher and editor of a nationally distributed literary journal and a number of independent zines, percussionist and now drummer in 2 rock bands, recognized scholar of marginal religious movements in modernity (presenting at five conferences on the subject in the past two years), a father to a wonderful daughter in much of his free time, and an employee of the Warner Center at the Warner School.

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