Dr. Shondel Nero is Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Multilingual Multicultural Studies in the Department of Teaching and Learning. She is an applied linguist whose research examines the politics, challenges, and strategies of educating students who speak and/or write in nonstandard varieties of English, World Englishes, and Creoles. She has extensively researched the linguistic and educational needs of speakers of Caribbean Creole English in the US and the Caribbean. Her work has appeared in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Language and Education, World Englishes, Applied Linguistics Review, Language Policy, and Language, Culture, and Curriculum. A native of Guyana, Dr. Nero is the author of Englishes in Contact: Anglophone Caribbean Students in an Urban College (Hampton Press, 2001), editor of Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education (Routledge, 2006), and co-author with Dohra Ahmad of Vernaculars in the Classroom: Paradoxes, Pedagogy, Possibilities (Routledge, 2014). She is the inaugural recipient of the James E. Alatis Prize (2016) for an outstanding article on research in language policy and planning in educational contexts based on her work as a Fulbright scholar in Jamaica, where she examined the implementation of the Jamaican Language Education Policy in schools.

Dr. Nero also directs a study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic as a means of developing teachers' linguistic and intercultural competence. She earned her doctorate in applied linguistics from Columbia University's Teachers College, and taught in the English Department at Long Island University, Brooklyn, and in the School of Education at St. John's University prior to joining the New York University faculty.