Associate Professor Patricia Antoniello, who teaches in both the Anthropology and Archaeology, and Health and Nutrition Sciences departments, is not only the first in her family to graduate from college; she’s the first to graduate from high school.
     Immediately after high school, Antoniello went to Bellevue Nursing School to become a registered nurse. After discovering her passion for anthropology in the seven years she was a practicing RN, Antoniello decided to change gears and registered at Columbia University, where she completed her Ph.D. in 1988. Later that same year she found herself teaching at Brooklyn College.
     A medical anthropologist whose dissertation was about the intersection of reproductive health issues and ethnicity and class, Antoniello was originally hired to teach public health in the College’s Health and Nutrition Sciences Department. Seven years later, however, she was asked to become the coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program and the acting director of the Women’s Center.
     “That position helped me to promote women on campus and to do research on women-related issues,” says Antoniello, who is also the director of the Shirley Chisholm Center for Research on Women.      Small wonder that her indefatigable drive to aid women was recently recognized by the Grand Lodge of the New York Order Sons of Italy, which bestowed upon Antoniello the Cornaro Award, established in honor of Lady Elena Cornaro, the first woman to ever receive a university doctorate in 1678.      Antoniello’s reach has extended far beyond Brooklyn. In 2004, she joined a team of husband-and-wife medical doctors who, thirty-five years ago, established the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkahed, a rural community two hundred miles east of Mumbai. (The project will soon be featured in National Geographic.)      “Their goal was to train women in villages of about 1,500 people to become health care workers who can help their community,” she explains. Although she originally went to collect ethnographic material about the women in these communities, she ended up focused more broadly on health issues, matters of development, and, recently, on ways the villagers seek to create ecological stability.      According to Antoniello, the project’s achievements are more than remarkable. “Many of these women had to marry at age twelve, had many children, and often lived through physical abuse. The project allowed them to gain a respectable status in their villages, so much so that some have been elected mayors,” she says, adding that such a development was previously unthinkable in the stratified society of rural India.      As part of her research, Antoniello has been taking BC students to Jamkahed during the summer and winter breaks for the last three years. “Macaulay Honors and medical students have been joining me to help with this research,” she says. “This winter I’ll be taking another group, but not to do research—just to observe closely how change, albeit in a small scale, is actually possible.”      Not to mention commendable.      No question this daughter of Italy has come a long way. And she’s been bringing other people along on this journey.