Prof. Nadia Rubaii, our beloved friend and colleague and the founding co-director of I-GMAP, died on March 12th, 2022. She was 57 years old. Nadia’s death resulted from an episode of heart arrhythmia and cardiac arrest that she had suffered the previous week.
As well as the founder of I-GMAP, Nadia was a well-known and influential scholar and practitioner in the field of Public Administration. Her academic and practical background in public administration was exceptionally broad, with a particular expertise in the design, implementation and assessment of professional education initiatives, particularly in Latin America. Her ongoing research and leadership in the field especially emphasized the public service values of diversity and equity, locally and globally. She worked frequently as a consultant with local governments and non-profit organizations in addition to assessing and advising graduate public administration programs around the world.
A Binghamton University alumna three times over (with undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees in Political Science), Nadia returned to Binghamton University to join the College of Community and Public Affairs in 2004, after fifteen years at New Mexico State University. She quickly became a core member of CCPA, a prolific academic researcher, and an award-winning administrator, teacher and mentor.
When she was tapped in 2016 by Binghamton University’s administration to develop a new institute to promote atrocity prevention, Nadia drew on this extensive experience to design a prevention-focused institute, with a practical mission and global reach, dedicated to breaking down barriers between academic research and the global community of atrocity prevention practice.
Nadia’s skills and values - and her remarkable capacity for work – shaped and defined the Institute and its programs. She created and launched the world’s first and only professional Master of Science in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, including dedicated funding to support students in semester-long field placements in prevention-focused civil society, state, and international partners around the world. She designed and implemented a Faculty Fellows Program, offering instruction in the essentials of genocide and mass atrocity prevention to Binghamton University professors across five colleges and over a dozen distinct disciplines – equipping faculty in areas as distinct as computer science and comparative literature, nursing, geography history and management with an ‘atrocity prevention lens’ to incorporate into their teaching and research. One of Nadia’s last publications, co-authored with former students, explored how “
Expanding the Ranks of Atrocity Prevention Actors” could tap the potential of a range of professional graduate education programs to contribute their own disciplinary resources to a far broader community of practice.
While deeply pragmatic, Nadia was an idealist at heart. She believed that working to create a better, less violent, more gentle, more tolerant world was a duty and a calling, and would bring about real, sustainable change. Throughout her career, she always insisted that higher education could and should be a powerful force for good in a troubled world – as long as academics were willing to step out of the academy and reach in to the world with humility, curiosity, and compassion, to find ways to help. Nadia brought that vision of higher education as engaged and compassionate curiosity to I-GMAP as its core mission and highest calling.
Above all, Nadia’s lasting legacy is a global community of great friends, colleagues, and current and former students, an always-expanding network of relationships that she took such great delight in. Nadia’s joyful way of living drew people to her. She made friendships easily, cared for them well, and kept them long. She was passionately devoted to her work, but always seemed to have time for fun, a new adventure, new connections, and new friendships. Although Nadia was not given the gift of a long life, she lived it so very well.
We are heartbroken at the loss of our dear friend, and we know that we can’t hope to replace her. But we will keep her close to us by continuing the work of I-GMAP, and having her memory inspire us to do our best, and to do it with her spirit as our inspiration.
For all those of you who knew and loved Nadia, we offer our deepest condolences and wishes for solace and comfort in the global community of Fans of Nadia that she leaves behind. We invite Nadia’s many friends, colleagues and acquaintances to share their good memories, photos, and thoughts at this website. We’ll use what you post to make an album of memories and images that we can later compile to share and remember our friend. (Given Nadia’s love of international experiences and collaborations, please feel free to post in whatever language you choose, whether it be Spanish or English, Farsi or Dari, Arabic or Filipino, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, and more.)
