Molloy University, originally founded to educate women, continues to highlight the influence of women in leadership and education.
During Women’s History Month, three faculty members in the university’s School of Business are helping prepare students for careers in marketing, finance and management, bringing decades of professional experience into the classroom.
Dawn DiStefano, assistant professor
DiStefano, a tenured assistant professor in Molloy’s School of Business, began her career in banking and finance, working at Charles Schwab & Co. and Fidelity Investments after earning degrees from Hofstra University, Dowling College and Pace University.
“My family was very good with banking, numbers, math,” DiStefano, 49, said. “So I just thought that would be my natural progression.”
Her career path shifted after she volunteered as a guest speaker at her alma maters, which sparked an interest in teaching. DiStefano began teaching at Nassau Community College in 2006, and later worked as a senior gift officer for the American Red Cross on Long Island, where she led fundraising initiatives, doubled the organization’s annual gala revenue and helped secure a $250,000 donation in her first six months on the job.
Today she teaches full-time at Molloy and part-time at NCC, and encourages women in her classes to be confident in their abilities.
“In the beginning, it wasn’t very welcoming at all,” she said of her early years in brokerage. “You were looked upon as like, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I quickly said in my mind and in my heart, ‘I can win them over.’”
Donna M. Iucolano, Ph.D., assistant professor
Iucolano, an assistant professor of marketing at Molloy, brings more than two decades of experience in direct and digital marketing, e-commerce and business strategy to her teaching. A first-generation college graduate, she earned a doctorate in management from Case Western Reserve University and holds additional degrees from Hofstra University and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Before entering academia, Iucolano, 62, held senior leadership roles at companies including 1-800-Flowers.com, Scholastic Corporation and New York & Company.
“I have deep experience in building and growing businesses,” she said. “I worked at companies of all different sizes, and I was always responsible for starting or building new divisions and growing sales and revenue.”
Her projects included launching and scaling business divisions that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. She began teaching as an adjunct in 2014 at Hofstra University while still working in business, before working full time at Molloy in 2021.
“I was getting to the point where I really thought that I wanted to give back in some way,” Iucolano said. She joined Molloy in a tenure-track position in 2021, after transitioning to academia full time during the pandemic.
“I find my students to be very creative,” she said. “I try to really stress that marketing today is really a hybrid, or a combination of the creative and the analytical, and that they really need to focus on both in order to do well as a marketing professional.”
Rose Lavelle, professor of practice
Lavelle brings more than 25 years of experience in the capital markets to her work in business education.
During her career on Wall Street, she held senior management roles in credit, risk management and fixed-income trading at several financial firms. Working in a male-dominated industry — and as the only woman in her training program — presented challenges, though Lavelle, who is 62, said that growing up with five brothers helped prepare her.
Exposure to instructors from the business world also sparked her interest in teaching. “People from industry were teaching the actual content, which I found so interesting,” she said. “I remember at that point thinking, ‘I would like to do this.’”
Lavelle later earned New York state certification to teach business and marketing, and joined Molloy in 2021.
“We have some amazing people on our faculty, and I think we all really try to infuse our experience from our careers into the classroom and try to make the curriculum really come to life,” she said. “There’s nothing quite like sharing personal anecdotes, which helps make these concepts relatable to the students.”
Lavelle is also active in nonprofit leadership, serving on the executive board of Tuesday’s Children.
“Don’t tolerate being treated as a second-class citizen,” she said when asked what advice she might offer younger women who wish to go into the field. “If you accept it, you’re just allowing it to occur. Make your presence known.”
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