Dr. Toni Cela
Education & Development Consultant
Dr. Toni Cela joins Third Act III Development as an Education & Development Consultant. Dr. Cela has had an extensive career as a higher education administrator and youth advocate.
As an Education Advocate at Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), she spent several years representing at-risk youth in the NYC Department of Education facing illegal suspensions and assisting special needs youth and their families navigate the Special Education system. In this role, she fought against prolonged educational disruptions and protected student rights while facilitating their access to additional resources and services. She later transitioned to the Center for Justice Innovation (CJI) where she served as the Education Program Coordinator for youth programming across several New York City sites training youth providers to effectively advocate for services and protect the educational rights of the at-risk youth population.
Dr. Cela has more than two decades of experience in higher education administration, research, and instruction. She served as the Assistant Dean of the Audrey Cohen School of Human Services and Education at the Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY) where she managed a multi-million-dollar budget, ensured adherence to state and federal compliance requirements, and managed the College’s Office of Experiential Learning and CASAC program.
Dr. Cela’s career has been global, having worked in several countries in Latin America, the Caribbean region, and Africa. Since 2014, she has served as the Country Coordinator of the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development (INURED), a research institute based in Haiti, managing research and intervention projects funded by governments, multilateral institutions, and private foundations including but not limited to the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada, the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in France, USAID, among others. She is the former principal of the Villa Verde Ecological School in Gracias-Lempira, Honduras, a bilingual (English and Spanish) experientially-based school that emphasized environmental protection where she managed teaching and support staff from Honduras, the US, the UK, and Europe. She has conducted research on themes including, but not limited to, anthropology and education, transnational collaboration in education, migration and education, violence and education, youth identity formation, disaster health, and the anthropology of disaster and recovery, in the US, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Senegal, and Ghana.
Dr. Cela received her doctorate from Columbia University. She is a 1999-2000 Open Society Institute fellow, 2000-2001 Phelps Stokes Fund African Development fellow, 2013-2014 US Fulbright Scholar, and 2018-2022 National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse research fellow. She currently teaches courses in medical anthropology and global health at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She publishes extensively in peer-reviewed academic journals, mainstream news outlets, and blogs.