Peter Muennig and Celina Su co-founded the BRP in 2000 to help existing community-driven initiatives grow, and we remain committed to help those on-the-ground conduct their work in sustainable, participatory, and effective ways. All of our work at the BRP remains unpaid.

Peter Muennig

Peter heads the Banyan School initiative at the BRP. He is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He received his MD at the University of California-San Diego and his Master's in Public Health from Columbia University.

His research focuses on the health implications of non-medical social investments (especially education), primarily using cost-effectiveness and burden of disease analysis. His work has led to policy changes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health Canada, Immigration Canada, and in the states of Minnesota and California. It has been published in leading journals and has been discussed in the New York Times and on Slate, CNN, National Public Radio, BBC, and other outlets worldwide. For example, his work on the importance of small class sizes showed that interventions in grades kindergarten to 3rd grade led to health improvements over the students' entire lifetimes.

Celina Su

Celina is Executive Director of the BRP. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science and teaches at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She earned her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Her research focuses on civic engagement and education and health policy. She has published two books on education policy, Streetwise for Book Smarts:Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx (Cornell University Press, 2009) and Our Schools Suck: Young People Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failure of Urban Education (co-authored, New York University Press, 2009). Her non-academic pieces have appeared in n+1, Boston Review, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and other publications.

Peter is a Cherokee Native American, mixed race teacher-scholar, and Celina is a Brazilian-American teacher-scholar of Chinese descent. Both of us now have opportunities and privileges we could not have imagined as young people, in large part because of the education we were able to receive. This has inspired us to focus our careers on helping communities gain access to a good, inclusive education-- one committed to diversity and academic excellence-- in whatever ways we can.