Aaron Sachowitz, Ph.D. is Professor of Media Technologies and Culture and Past-Chair of the Academic Senate. Building on his time working on Hispanic Serving Institutional initiatives as a 2022-2023 American Council on Education Fellow at San Francisco State University, Dr. Sachowitz continues to consult higher education institutions on how to transform institutional structures to better serve Latinx students. He's held a range of academic leadership positions at Saint Mary's including Chair of the Communication Department, Director of the January Term program and Masters of Arts in (Intercultural) Communication, as well as Interim Director of the Center for International Programs. Dr. Sachowitz specializes in the intersection of media technologies and culture with a primary concern for the examination of power, particularly as it relates to traditionally marginalized positions. Among his other published research on media and representation, he has published award winning scholarship on topics as diverse as queer family and food justice, in addition to works on hip-hop, film, and media theory. In addition to teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses in Communication, he's taught five courses on food justice both in the U.S. and Nicaragua, and traveled with students to Costa Rica, Japan, and India He is currently working on a long term project with collaborators across the U.S. to harnesses the multimedia capabilities of the web to collect and map stories about food so users can explore and understand the power that food stories hold for cultural and individual meaning-making.After six years serving on the Board of Directors of COLAGE, a U.S. non-profit serving people with one or more LGBTQ parent, Aaron decided to enter the arena of social entrepreneurship, combining his interest in social justice, his experience with organizational governance, and his passion for food justice, co-founding the social enterprise Doselva, a Central American organic spice and herbs company in 2017. Though also registered as a public benefits corporation in the US, Doselva's helps hundreds of mostly coffee farmers in Nicaragua earn 3-5x more with spices that with coffee and basic grains. In 2023, Doselva expanded into Honduras, where the company is focused on the cardamom supply chain. Doselva processes and sells these primarily organic spices to premium markets in the US and Europe, capturing more value in country and providing positive social, economic, and environmental impacts to its small farmers.