His words encapsulate the mission of the and the team approach to problem-solving that served as a guide for in her nearly 20 years at its helm.

“The Institute programs involve young people who are going to shape our world in the future,” says Hermann. “In today’s world, that means learning about governance with a mind to the other countries and governments around us. I always felt honored to be part of that mission.”

Margaret “Peg” Hermann first joined the Maxwell School as a professor of political science in 1998. Soon after, she was named a Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs, and in 2000 she took the helm of what was then known as the Global Affairs Institute—now the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

Hermann retired at the start of the spring semester and became professor emerita of political science.

She first joined the as a in 1998. A year later, she was named a Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs, and in 2000 she took the helm of what was then known as the Global Affairs Institute (GAI).

At the time, GAI was home to two regional centers: The South Asia Center and the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (PLACA). Hermann made it her mission to promote community and collaboration as well as to provide support to faculty doing international and comparative research.

Hermann and GAI got a boost when the Maxwell School received a $10-million endowment from Congress to rename the institute for the late senator. The ribbon-cutting ceremony in March 2005 was attended by dignitaries including senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, Congressman Charles Rangel and NBC newsman Tim Russert, a former member of Moynihan’s staff.

Today, the Moynihan Institute boasts seven multidisciplinary regional centers and six problem-focused research working groups. All collectively serve as a University focal point for internationalization and global engagement.

, professor of political science and Hermann’s successor at Moynihan, says he has long admired her work to increase global understanding and a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving.

“Peg has worked tirelessly to realize the institute’s mission: ‘to support scholarship, training and practice in global affairs and to carry on the public and intellectual traditions of Senator Moynihan,’” says Taylor. “More than any person on campus over the last two decades, she has fostered the development of multidisciplinary regional studies centers and programs.”

Indeed, the institute has administered grants worth millions of dollars during Hermann’s directorship, most recently securing $1.05 million for the South Asia Center.

“I’m really proud of these regional centers and programs and the important work on real-world problems they allow faculty and students from across the University to do,” says Hermann. “Without the support of the Moynihan Institute, they might not exist.”

Hermann also has helped the institute launch multidisciplinary research working groups that have resulted in books, special journal issues, and policy papers as well as speaker series.

At the same time, Hermann has earned an international reputation for her own scholarship. A pioneer in the field of political psychology, she developed the Leadership Trait Analysis assessment-at-a-distance tool that uses leaders’ speeches and interviews to understand their style and, in turn, what they are likely to do. She has compiled a dataset of over 500 leadership profiles of heads of state and insurgent/terrorist leaders, and she has trained leadership analysts in the intelligence and defense communities.

Hermann regularly shared her knowledge in Maxwell’s multidisciplinary master of arts in international relations program.

In addition to her leadership of the Moynihan Institute and her scholarship in the field of political psychology, Margaret Hermann served as a teacher, mentor and advisor to an untold number of Maxwell students studying foreign policy, crisis management and leadership.

“Peg Hermann is responsible for training hundreds of students in foreign policy, crisis management and leadership through her courses and serving as an important mentor, supporter and adviser to many throughout their time at Maxwell and throughout their careers,” says Colleen Heflin, associate dean, professor and chair of public administration and international relations.

One of these is Heidi Stallman, who was first exposed to Hermann’s work as a sophomore taking a political psychology course at Washington State University. Stallman wrote her undergraduate thesis using tools crafted by Hermann and is now a Maxwell political science doctoral student studying rebel governance and women leaders in rebel groups.

“Peg has been integral in helping me challenge dominant gender norms in the variety of disciplines that I engage with,” says Stallman. “Though a majority of her work does not focus on gender, her work is always inspired by her experiences in academia as a woman, and her commitment to gender-informed research.”

While Hermann has served as a mentor to all students, it is indisputable that she has served as a role model to decades of women pursuing careers in political psychology and international relations.

Hermann grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. Her father was a professor of sociology and her mother, a high school biology and chemistry teacher. She never had her father as a teacher, but she did have her mother for two semesters, and soaked up her love of her subject matter and teaching as well as her ability to carry her own in disciplines that were often taught by men.

Hermann attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where she has since received an honorary doctorate. Upon graduating from DePauw, she received a Ph.D. in psychology from Northwestern University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Personality Research Group at the Educational Testing Service.

Her first faculty position was as a visiting lecturer in psychology at Princeton University—she was one of only four women teaching at what was then an all-male institution. “The young men didn’t know what to make of a female professor,” she recalls.

Then, as a research associate at Ohio State’s Mershon Center, Hermann recalls, “My salary depended on bringing in grants.”

She became adept at it, securing $2 million from the National Science Foundation to build a nationwide research training group around leadership and group decision making that included launching a summer institute in political psychology. Maxwell political scientists Stuart Thorson and Matthew Bonham were part of the training group and recruited Hermann to become a colleague at ���ϲ�����.

The author or editor of 11 books and over 100 academic, technical and policy papers, Hermann was the first woman to serve as president of the International Society of Political Psychology, the fourth woman president of the International Studies Association, and founding editor of two journals, Political Psychology and International Studies Review.

At ���ϲ�����, she has received two Outstanding Teaching Awards from the master’s in international relations program and the William Wasserstrom Prize for Graduate Teaching. In 2004, she received a Chancellor’s Award for Exceptional Academic Achievement.

Though retired, Hermann is still visible at Maxwell as she completes grant projects and attends Moynihan Institute events.

“Peg Hermann has made an indelible impact in her time at Maxwell, influencing generations of students as a mentor and teacher and greatly expanding the work of the Moynihan Institute, and therefore our global impact,” says Dean David M. Van Slyke. “We celebrate her well-deserved retirement—and we’re pleased that she continues as a member of the Maxwell community.”

The year 1968 was one of tumult and change in the United States, marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, social unrest over civil rights and the Vietnam War and the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Charles Hicks as a student

It was also the year that Charles “Chuck” Hicks ’69, G’73 became ���ϲ�����’s first Black president of the Student Government Association (SGA)—a historic victory for the Bogalusa, Louisiana, native who came north for college to escape retaliation for his family’s civil rights activism.

Hicks’ father, Robert Hicks, was founder of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the first Black group in the civil rights movement to carry guns for protection, started after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. The group was instrumental in organizing a successful boycott of white businesses in Bogalusa as well as the longest march for civil rights, from Bogalusa to Baton Rouge, which took 10 days to walk the 106 miles.

Hicks, the oldest of five children, was a sophomore at Southern University and a student leader when he was asked to withdraw from school or face expulsion, because “the school didn’t want any trouble.”

Hicks and his family were devastated, but soon learned of a summer program at Brandeis University for talented Black students from the south that led to full scholarships at private colleges and universities in northern states. Hicks was accepted, and after the summer program, landed at ���ϲ�����, where he was required to enroll as a first-year student.

Hicks had grown up in a segregated environment in Bogalusa and never had white friends. But with only 50 or so Black students at ���ϲ�����, he chose not to segregate himself. Outgoing by nature, Hicks immediately got involved on campus, serving on his residence hall board, his class council and started a chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to partner with Black community groups on various activities.

“Most students were from Northeast states. Being Black and from the South, I was something of a novelty,” says Hicks, who was rushed by numerous white fraternities. “People would sometimes say to me, ‘You’re not like the other Blacks we see or hear about. I had to tell them, ‘Yes, I am. We face the same struggles and problems.’”

As a junior, Hicks became the first Black president of University Union. “After that, everybody started asking me if I was going to run for student body president,” he says.

Hicks with Ray Rafalik ’70 and Amy White ’69, both members of the student committee to select a new chancellor in 1968. Hicks was an ex-officio member of that committee as SGA president.

Hicks beat his opponent in that election, 1,585 to 998, and set out on an agenda that included loosening rules around student behavior. “Even though ���ϲ����� was a liberal school, it was very restrictive from our perspective,” he says. “Students had a curfew. At the time, you could only stand in the dorm lobby to chat with female friends. That rule changed to allow coed visits, which meant you could go to someone’s room, but the door had to stay open. Then SGA advocated for coed dorms.”

Along with his leadership of the general student body, Hicks began working with other Black students to establish the Black Student Union on campus and organize a takeover of the administration building to demand an increase in Black students, Black professors and Black history courses. “The administration turned the electricity off on us, but they never let the city police in to clear us out,” he says.

Despite Hicks’ popularity on campus, he says he was viewed as an “agitator” in the wider community. “If I drove off campus, I would get pulled over and arrested,” he says. “In my last two years, I must have been arrested 25-30 times. I would call Dr. Sawyer and he would call an attorney who would get the charges dismissed.”

Michael Sawyer was a Maxwell School professor who in 1972 also became the University’s interim vice chancellor for student programs.

Over time, things began to escalate. After graduating with a degree in political science, Hicks began graduate school in education administration and was living in an off-campus apartment with friends. “One day police rushed into the house and said they found marijuana that was mine,” says Hicks, who was jailed. David Ifshin ’70, who succeeded Hicks as SGA president, organized a protest, and 200 students marched on the jail demanding Hicks’ release. “That made me even more of a marked person. Dr. Sawyer suggested that ���ϲ����� might not be the best place for me to stay to get my doctorate,” he says.

An arrangement was made for Hicks to double up on summer courses and take an oral history exam so that he could earn a master’s degree and leave. He subsequently earned a second master’s in library science from the University of Maryland and moved to Washington, D.C., where he had a 35-year career with the DC Public Library, primarily in the Black History Section of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.

Civil rights activist Dorie Ladner with Hicks

Always a leader, Hicks served as president of the trade union for the DC Public Library, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and later as president of AFSCME District Council 20, the largest public sector union in the District of Columbia.

A well-known community organizer, Hicks is the founder and director of the D.C. Black History Celebration Committee, which celebrates Black history yearround, and was grand marshal of the 2021 Virtual D.C. MLK Parade. A speaker at the inaugural Million Man March, he is the founder of Bread for the Soul, the first and oldest Black AIDS organization in the city, and an active member of numerous organizations, including the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Martin Luther King Scholarship Committee, the D.C. Commission on Aging, the Waterside Tenants’ Council and Stand Up for Democracy in D.C. In 2019, he was elected to the Washington D.C. Hall of Fame and his name appears on the Hall of Fame Walkway. In 2021, he was selected to be in a permanent exhibit at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library as a D.C. History Maker.

Hicks recalls his ���ϲ����� experience as an incredible journey, but not a totally happy time.

“My experience as student government president was both the best and worst of times,” he says. “There were a number of white students that were not pleased with me being the SGA president. “There were a number of more progressive African American students that felt I should focus solely on efforts to benefit Black students. And there were people who didn’t think that SGA should have been involved protesting the war in Vietnam. There were always adverse views on what I should focus on, but I addressed the pushback by saying that I was elected to be the student body president for everyone on campus.”

Reprinted with permission from the Winter 2022 ���ϲ����� Manuscript magazine

Amy McKeever

While finishing her bachelor’s degree in history, Amy McKeever researched Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer Saul Bellow and the New York intellectual community for her capstone thesis.

The assignment “was my first real exposure to an intense research project and helped me understand how to dig for historical documents and other primary sources,” says McKeever ’06. It provided a taste of what would become her career: McKeever is a full-time senior writer and editor for National Geographic.

The job is based in Washington, D.C., and brought McKeever full circle. The daughter of D.C.-based foreign service officers, she attended high school in the nearby suburbs of northern Virginia. “I never really wanted to come back to this area,” she admits. Now, she can’t imagine being anywhere else.

Just before joining National Geographic full time in 2020, McKeever wrote a piece for ��DzԻ��́ Nast Traveler titled “14 Best Things to do in Washington, D.C.,” in which she directs readers to “Forget whatever it is you think you know about what there is to do in Washington, D.C.”

“Yes, America’s capital city is brimming with memorials, museums and watering holes for the high-powered,” she continues. “But there’s much more than politics driving the energy here. Residents will tell you it’s supremely livable, full of leafy, trail-filled parks, hip food markets and breweries, state-of-the-art rock venues, and tiny jazz clubs—to say nothing of the booming dining scene of recent years. There are stellar options on and off the beaten path when you’re in town, and really, something for everyone.”

At National Geographic, McKeever has worked across all content areas, including science, environment, animals, history and travel.

Amy McKeever poses in the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

“The first year I got a crash course in epidemiology covering COVID-19, but also wrote a lot about politics and the Supreme Court,” says McKeever, who started as an intern fact-checker for the former magazine, National Geographic Traveler.

McKeever’s byline has also appeared in publications such as Eater, Travel + Leisure and Thrillist. In addition to history, she majored in magazine journalism in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and French in the College of Arts and Sciences.

“There have been so many historic events in the last two years. It’s been useful to turn back to what I learned at Maxwell to help our readers put current events into context,” she says.

Will she look to relocate? Not likely.

“There’s so much opportunity and so many interesting people who are here to make the world a better place” she says. “People tend to think of Washington in terms of politics, but it’s very easy to carve out your own little D.C. that has nothing to do with Capitol Hill.”

Andy Paladino

Paladino ’18 focused his studies on geographic information systems (GIS), using his drone for several self-initiated projects, including a yearlong study mapping the depth and flow velocity of Onondaga Creek, under the mentorship of Peng Gao, professor and chair of geography and the environment.

An opportunity to work for a drone start-up company drew Paladino to Washington, D.C., after he earned his bachelor’s degree in geography in 2018. “I was able to take everything I had done in undergrad and apply it to industry, using drone imagery to analyze renewable assets for damage and develop data products for clients. It was basically my dream job,” he says.

When that company was acquired, he worked for a time with the Air Force Civil Engineer Center at Andrews Air Force Base, but he found he missed the fast pace of private industry.

This past June, Paladino returned to the start-up world, working as a customer success manager at Orbital Insight, a firm that uses geolocation information—like cell phone pings and GPS data—in combination with vision data and other software to provide location, behavior and usage analytics for commercial and government clients.

Drone photo from Andy Paladino

“We have geolocation data that can tell you the volume of people in any given area at any point in time—information that could be valuable to someone considering opening a business in the area or planning for a large event,” says Paladino. “We work with businesses interested in people’s behavior patterns before and after the onset of the pandemic. We can track supply chains. Basically, we can use our fusion of data sources to create a full snapshot of site intelligence or facility monitoring.”

When not working, Paladino can often be found flying his drone, a Phantom4QuadCopter. “Exploring new areas to capture images has been a great way to explore the greater D.C. area,” he says.

CFAC drummers, including Joshua Williams (left), at the College of Arts and Sciences’ department fair in 2021.

Habibatou Traore ’24 was in her first weeks at ���ϲ����� when she heard African drumming during an activities fair for new students last fall. She followed their sound to Joshua Williams, who teaches West African dance and drumming at the University’s  (CFAC). At Williams’ suggestion, the sociology major visited CFAC, and now works there as a work-study student. “The constant celebration of Black excellence, whether it be highlighting visual or performing arts, is inspiring,” she says.

CFAC, a unit of the Department of African American Studies (AAS) within the College of Arts and Sciences, is an arts and cultural organization dedicated to the promotion and development of artists of the African diaspora and other underrepresented groups.

Throughout 2022, CFAC has celebrated its 50-year anniversary, culminating with a luncheon and art auction held Oct. 22 and a  at the Landmark Theater on Oct. 26.

Tanisha M. Jackson, CFAC executive director and professor of African American studies.

“For 50 years, CFAC has helped share, preserve and continue the histories and stories of the African diaspora through the arts,” says , Ph.D., executive director and professor of African American studies. “We are proud of the community we serve, the setting we provide for dialogue and interaction and the incredible programs and artists we support.”

In 1972, ���ϲ����� was actively diversifying its faculty and programs when Herbert T. Williams, a sculptor and art historian, was hired with a dual appointment between the School of Fine Art in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the fledgling Afro-American studies program.

Williams was asked by Harry Morgan, program director, to create an institution or facility that would engage local Black community members in cultural events and visual arts. That fall, Williams launched a course called Art of the Black World. Students enrolled in that inaugural semester became involved with creating the entity, along with interested local community members.

The result was the Community Folk Art Gallery, which opened its doors in January 1973 in a former bakery on South Salina Street (shown below, courtesy CFAC) on ���ϲ�����’s predominantly Black South Side. The first exhibit featured the work of Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee and poet Quincy Troupe.

The development of the gallery was a grassroots effort. One of the first people Williams involved was ceramicist David MacDonald, who had joined the faculty of the College of Visual and Performing Arts in 1971. “As the only African American faculty member in the art school, he naturally gravitated to me,” recalls MacDonald, who spent 35 years as a CFAC board member, on and off, over the years. “Our mission was to provide the community some access to the resources of the campus and for the campus to gain some knowledge of the kinds of cultural things that were happening in the Black community.”

Jack White, one of the artists who helped start the CFAC gallery. (Image courtesy CFAC)

Others integral to the start of the gallery included nationally acclaimed local artist Jack White, who then taught as an adjunct at ���ϲ�����; undergraduate ceramics major Basheer Q. Alim ’74; and graduate students George Campbell PhD ’77, H’03, a physicist who went on to serve as president of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 2000 to 2011; and Mary Schmidt Campbell G’73, G’80, PhD’82, president of Spelman College from 2015 until June 2022.

Williams’ students received partial credit for working on gallery programs, acting as guest curators, helping arrange and hang shows, running a Friday night film series, and conducting arts workshops for local residents, who ranged from pre-schoolers to the elderly. One of its oldest community programs is an annual spring art competition for local high school students held in conjunction with The Links, a philanthropic organization for Black professional women.

“This is a shared effort,” said Williams in 1977. “Without SU’s participation, the gallery could not exist. But the community helps establish the programs and policies and benefits directly.”

The gallery moved three times as it outgrew space, expanding its programming each time.

Carol Charles, who became managing director of CFAC in 1999. (Image courtesy CFAC)

Williams died in 1999. Carol Charles ’84, who had served as associate director under Williams, became managing director. Kheli Willets ’92, G’94, Ph.D.’02, joined CFAC as academic director in 2002 and was named executive director after Charles’ departure in 2008. Both women had been involved with CFAC as SU undergraduates. Charles took Art in the Black World as an undergraduate and later used CFAC facilities as a dancer and with the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company. Willets was a metalsmithing major who became a work-study student at the gallery, an experience that exposed her to the possibility to teach college and work in a museum that focused on Black art. Working at CFAC inspired her master’s degree in museum studies, a doctorate in art education and a career grounded in African diasporan art and culture.

By then known as the Community Folk Art Center, it moved to its current location across from ���ϲ����� Stage in 2006, becoming part of the University’s Connective Corridor initiative and into the University’s Coalition of Museums and Art Centers (CMAC).

Renovated specifically to serve as an arts space, the new facility features two galleries, one named after Williams, a dance studio, theater (originally home to the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company), the David MacDonald ceramics studio, and classrooms that can accommodate up to 50 students for its after-school and summer arts academies.

Jackson succeeded Willets in 2019, continuing to expand the arts education center with robust public programming including exhibitions, film screenings, gallery talks, workshops and courses in studio and performing arts, and after-school and summer art programs offered at no charge to local students.

CFAC’s current home at 805 E. Genesee Street, ���ϲ�����.

She views CFAC’s role as greater than promoting the arts. “CFAC, in a very organic and genuine way, demonstrates the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives of ���ϲ�����,” she says. “We do it in practice and we do it in who we are and how we engage with those themes through exhibitions and programs.”

, associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion for the College of Arts and Sciences and associate professor of African American Studies, says CFAC provides students a unique vehicle to incorporate artistic expression into their scholarship. “One graduate student whose research focused on farmers in Tanzania ended up writing a one-woman show and performing it in the theater as part of her thesis,” says Ducre, who served as a CFAC board member during her tenure as chair of the Department of African American Studies.

It’s a perfect fit for Kailey Smith, who serves as a graduate assistant at CFAC as a master’s student in AAS’s Pan African Studies master’s program. While her thesis focuses on museums and the return of stolen African artifacts, her work at CFAC provides a practical perspective to that research. “CFAC has enhanced my studies by allowing me to see what goes on behind the scenes in a museum or gallery setting,” she says. “Those who curate these spaces have to make decisions on what gets displayed and when.”

MacDonald, who retired as professor of ceramics in 2008, attributes CFAC’s longevity in part to health of the Department of AAS. “When we started, the Afro- American Studies program was new and somewhat experimental,” he says. “At many colleges and universities, the courses in those early programs were ultimately absorbed into other academic disciplines, but at ���ϲ�����, the program became a full department. I think that’s played an important role in supporting CFAC, which has provided the instrument to have conversations and to hear voices that you would not normally hear at the average academic institution.”

To learn more about CFAC’s rich history, visit the historical exhibit on display until Dec. 10 that includes archival news articles and photos that highlight the organization’s early years and a retrospective of work from CFAC co-founders.

Professor Corrine Occhino’s project will address barriers Deaf women face in accessing health care.

As limits to women’s reproductive rights swirl in the national news, one researcher at ���ϲ����� is engaged in a groundbreaking nationwide study on the reproductive health experiences of Deaf and hard of hearing women. , assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), with a dual appointment in the , is working to determine the obstacles Deaf women encounter in receiving appropriate reproductive health care services and health information.

“We know from previous research that Deaf people have a lot of extra barriers to accessing health care that hearing people don’t,” says Occhino, who is director of the Multimodal Language Lab in A&S and program coordinator for the American Sign Language and Deaf Studies program in the School of Education. “Our goal is to identify problem areas so that we can improve health care communication for Deaf and hard of hearing people.”

Occhino joined ���ϲ����� in fall 2021. She previously ran the Multimodal Language Lab in the Center for Culture and Language at Rochester Institute of Technology, where she became engaged in research with colleague Tiffany Panko, director of the school’s Deaf Health Lab.

Occhino and Panko received funding from the Society of Family Planning to conduct a nationwide survey to gather insight on the pregnancy experiences and reproductive health care use of women who are deaf or hard of hearing. Through the survey and interviews, researchers will identify emergent themes and patterns of experience among Deaf and hard-of-hearing women, as well as their knowledge of, and opinions on, reproductive health.

Occhino says Deaf and hard of hearing individuals typically communicate with their health care providers through an interpreter using American Sign Language (ASL), through speech and hearing aids, or through writing. One pattern that has emerged early in the research is the disparity of Deaf and hard of hearing people not receiving their first choice of birth control from their health care provider.

“Among hearing individuals, the primary reason for not getting their preferred contraception was lack of insurance coverage or high cost,” says Occhino. “But within the Deaf and hard of hearing people, they frequently didn’t know why they weren’t given their primary choice. That’s a very small piece of the puzzle, but we think it points to how specific communication about particulars often falls through the cracks with Deaf and hard of hearing women, because they don’t always have the same kinds of access to having one-on-one conversations with their doctors or getting the kinds of explanations that you might get as a hearing person when you go into the OB/GYN.”

This has repercussions, she says. A 2020 study found that Deaf and hard-of-hearing women are 67 percent more at-risk of becoming pregnant unintentionally. While a portion of the survey deals with unplanned pregnancy and abortion, Occhino says respondents have been reluctant to share that information. “A lot of people are not comfortable talking about those experiences, especially in today’s climate where it’s become very politicized,” she says.

Occhino and Panko are currently analyzing their data with plans to write and present findings this fall at the American Public Health Association annual meeting. “We hope our findings lead to the development of culturally and linguistically appropriate educational interventions for health care providers and promote access to information and effective use of the reproductive health care system,” says Occhino.

Occhino is also engaged in a separate project to develop resources for Deaf refugees in the ���ϲ����� area to learn ASL and English. With a mini-grant from the , Occhino is working with a local non-profit organization, Deaf New Americans Advocacy Inc., to identify and provide services to the Deaf New American community both for teaching ASL and English. “We’re working to create a bilingual literacy program,” she says.

Stefan Ballmer

At the same time, members of the Advanced LIGO team are continuously working on refinements for future observation periods years ahead. , professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was a member of the team that helped design and build the LIGO detectors.

To continue that work, Ballmer was recently awarded a $555,000 to develop technology for sensing optical cavity mismatches and actuators for suspensions for the next generation detector, a renewal of funding for detector technology for gravitational-wave astrophysics.

The award also provides support for Ballmer’s doctoral students, including Elenna Capote, who is currently on site in Hanford, helping tune the detector alignment and control systems to make sure the detector performs as designed.

“These detectors are complicated machines with thousands of control loops keeping four main mirrors and an additional 30 suspended mirrors aligned and controlled in length to keep the light resonant,” Ballmer says. “Every time you make a change, it really becomes a new detector that has to be re-tuned.”

How LIGO Works

LIGO uses a pair of giant laser detectors called interferometers, located 1,900 miles apart in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Each detector contains two 2.5-mile-long vacuum arms—tubes that run perpendicular to one another. A powerful laser beam is split into two and sent down the arms. Mirrors at the end reflect the light back to where the laser beam was split. Since the arms are the same length, the light should take exactly the same time to travel to the mirror at the end of each tunnel and back. But if a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it changes the distance between the mirrors, causing the light beams to return at different times.

By comparing both beams, LIGO is able to measure the stretching of spacetime caused by gravitational waves, a seminal observation first made in 2015 with the first physical confirmation of a gravitational wave generated by two colliding black holes, nearly 1.3 billion light years away.

According to Ballmer, the higher the laser power in the 2.5-mile-long arms, the more accurately scientists can determine the motion of the arm. But the amount of laser power that can be used is currently limited by imperfections in the detectors’ optical system. “The optical phase front of the laser coming back from the detector can get distorted by thermal effects in the mirrors,” he says.

Innovating LIGO

Physics graduate students Elenna Capote (front) and Varun Srivastava (back) working on site at LIGO Hanford in Washington state.

Ballmer is working on a diagnostic camera that records thermal distortions in the detector, allowing scientists to determine their cause and effect. While a prototype camera was developed under a previous award, “this continued support is for deploying that camera and miniaturizing it, making it easier to use on the site,” he says.

The award also supports collaborative research with scientists at MIT to redesign the test mass suspensions for the current detectors to use heavier masses. “Random arrival photons push the test masses around, so the heavier the test masses are, the less they move when they get randomly hit by a photon,” Ballmer explains. “Going to heavier test masses is a way to increase low frequency sensitivity.”

Previous research has focused on new coatings for the mirrors. Under the current grant, Ballmer is also exploring research and development to integrate these coatings on the detector. “The new coatings have much lower thermal noise, but do not work with some auxiliary laser frequencies in the detector. Changing the mirror coatings thus requires other changes in the detector, and so the R&D that’s going under this award is to prototype the new detector systems compatible with the new types of coatings,” he says.

In addition to being used to upgrade the LIGO detectors in its fifth or sixth observation cycle, Ballmer says these developments can be used as a baseline for the next generation of detectors.

Ballmer was a principal investigator on the Cosmic Horizon Explorer Study, a project planning for the third generation of detectors, which will have 10 times the sensitivity of Advanced LIGO. The Cosmic Explorer will push the detection range of black hole and neutron star mergers out into cosmic distances. “We will actually see mergers happening from the very first stars that formed in the universe,” he says.

The 100-page study will inform next steps in NSF funding decisions on the project, which Ballmer says will likely focus on the site proposal and development of the conceptual design for the detector. “We’ve all just seen these beautiful images from the James Webb telescope showing the furthest and earliest galaxies of lights. So, with the Cosmic Explorer, if there are black hole mergers in those early galaxies, we would see them,” he says.

About Stefan W. Ballmer

Ballmer joined ���ϲ����� in 2010. Leading up to his contributions to LIGO’s Nobel Prize-winning work, he received an NSF CAREER Award in 2013 to support detector technology in the era of gravitational wave astrophysics, providing $860,000 of research funding over five years.

In October 2021, Ballmer was named a (APS), for his critical role in the design and commissioning of the Advanced LIGO detectors and the scientific interpretation of their observations, leadership in the development of third-generation gravitational-wave detectors and mentoring of the next generation of gravitational-wave experimenters.

A native of Switzerland, Ballmer has held a visiting associate professor position at the University of Tokyo; a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; and a Robert A. Millikan Fellowship at Caltech. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT and a master’s degree from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. An aviation enthusiast, Ballmer enjoys flying in his spare time, is an instrument flight instructor and holds a commercial pilot license.

Christopher Scholz

HABs occur when colonies of cyanobacteria grow out of control. “They can be very toxic,” says Christopher Scholz, professor of Earth and environmental sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. “If there’s a HAB in a freshwater lake, you certainly don’t want to be drinking that water and you don’t want to be bathing in it or have your dog swimming in it.”

Scholz’s research focuses on paleolimnology—reconstructing the past environments of inland waters through their geologic record—and he has studied climate change using sedimentary analysis of lake basins ranging from Lakes Malawi and Taganyika in the East African Rift Valley to Lake Baikal in Siberia to freshwater lakes in Upstate New York. He’s now using similar techniques to study environmental changes in Skaneateles Lake and nearby Oneida Lake over the last 350 years, a starting point for research that may eventually provide a historical record of environmental conditions leading to HABs on the lakes.

Scholz has received $34,000 from the , a program based out of Cornell University, to collect sediment cores from the two lakes to determine spatial patterns of sedimentation and take measurements of nutrients including phosphorus, carbon and nitrogen to see how those have varied over time.

Researchers from the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering collect sediment cores from Skaneateles Lake in October 2021.

“The layers of sediment at the bottom of a lake basin are essentially a tape recorder of environmental change over time,” Scholz says. “Within this relatively small project, we’re trying to get a sense of how the loading of nutrients into the lakes have changed just over the last 300-350 years, from precolonial times to the present.”

Skaneateles Lake is an oligotrophic lake, meaning it contains low nutrient content leading to clear water due to limited algae growth. Scholz says the recent HABs are unusual. “We know essentially nothing about past, ancient occurrences of HABs in the lake,” he says.

Oneida Lake, by contrast, is a eutrophic lake. “Parts of it turn green every summer on account of high biological productivity, and there’s a longer history of HABs occurring,” he says.

Comparing sediment cores from the two lakes may provide answers to environmental conditions that lead to HABs.

Scholz is collaborating on the project with ���ϲ����� colleagues Charles T. Driscoll, University Professor of Environmental Systems and Distinguished Professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, and Melissa Chipman, assistant professor of arctic paleoecology and paleoclimate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Staff technician Jacqueline Corbett and graduate student Laura Streib examine a sediment core from Oneida Lake.

In partnership with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the Skaneateles Lake Association and the Oneida Lake Association, the team is collecting core samples from both lakes to quantitatively measure how the sediment in each lake changed in accumulation and composition over time, as well as to establish patterns of sediment accumulation in different locations in the lakes.

“Sediment doesn’t accumulate evenly all around the bottom of a lake,” Scholz says. “So, identifying the key sites to evaluate these kinds of changes is very important and will inform future studies.”

Ultimately, understanding past history of environmental change leading to HABs may help scientists protect water quality in the future. “We can’t take these remarkable natural resources for granted,” Scholz says. “We live in a changing world and water conditions are definitely evolving.”

Through a National Science Foundation (PAARE) grant of more than $1 million, ���ϲ����� will help create a new research and education program intended to diversify the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics, specifically to increase the number of Hispanic/Latinx students to the field.

A&S physicists Stefan W. Ballmer and Georgia Mansell are part of an NSF-funded project to help diversify the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics.

The program builds on an existing collaboration between California State University Fullerton (CSUF), a primarily undergraduate Hispanic-serving institution, and ���ϲ�����. The existing PAARE program has supported eight graduate students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to graduate with a Ph.D. in physics from ���ϲ�����. The new award expands the existing CSUF-���ϲ����� program to two additional Ph.D.-granting partners: Northwestern University and Washington State University.

This program will provide a clear pathway for CSUF students to enter doctoral programs at these three partner universities, including financial and academic support as they transition. The program intends to provide students with a long-term road map for their STEM careers and ensure that admitted students complete the Ph.D. degree and facilitate their becoming leaders in gravitational-wave astrophysics by providing sustained mentoring and actively fostering partnership opportunities.

CSUF is the lead institution on the grant. Principal investigators at ���ϲ����� are , professor of physics, and , assistant research professor of physics, both integrally involved with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which provided the first direct observation of gravitational waves in 2015.

“Diversifying the astrophysics community is critically important, enabling a new crop of gravitational wave physicists and enriching the field,” says Mansell. “I’m proud to be involved in the PAARE grant, grateful to be part of a team that puts in the work when it comes to DEI, and happy that the NSF is investing in this initiative.”

Ballmer expects the first graduate students to begin graduate study at ���ϲ����� through the partnership in 2023. “The program will provide a pathway and dedicated support for students all the way to their doctoral degree,” he says.

Ballmer was a member of the team that helped design and build the Advanced LIGO and has NSF funding to continue to develop upgrades. He is also principal investigator on the Cosmic Horizon Explorer Study, planning for the next generation of detectors.

Mansell joined ���ϲ����� in January 2021 and is currently working at the LIGO site in Hanford, Washington, preparing the detector for its upcoming observational run next year. She will be on campus to establish her own lab in spring 2023.

“I am excited to be involved because I’ve worked with some of the current PAARE students who have come to the site through the LIGO collaboration’s fellows program,” says Mansell. “I am hoping future PAARE students will come and work in my lab at SU, once it’s set up.”

has spent nearly the entirety of her career studying hearing loss in infants. While previous research used clicks and tone bursts to measure infant hearing, her latest project explores hearing response to natural speech.

An NIH grant awarded to CSD Professor Beth Prieve is funding a study on infant auditory response.

The two-year study, funded by a , will make use of a new auditory tool developed by co-investigator Ross Maddox, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience at University of Rochester Medical Center, that uses spoken words from an “Alice in Wonderland” audiobook to measure infant auditory response to the brainstem and cortex. “I’m very interested in looking at the entire auditory system to understand how humans process sound,” says Prieve, professor of communication sciences and disorders and founder of the Pediatric Auditory Laboratory in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Now we will use actual speech, which is fantastic because we have to the potential to find some differences in babies who might have a language processing problem.”

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, more than 12,000 babies are born each year with some degree of hearing loss. Prieve, who is both an audiologist and neuroscientist, says the ability to efficiently process spoken speech through the hearing system is critical for learning spoken language. Problems with speech processing ultimately affect academic performance and social interactions. Pre-term infants, specifically, have a higher chance of having language delay, learning disability, autism and hearing loss than infants born at full term, and often one type of problem gets confused with another.

Professor Beth Prieve

Prieve anticipates the data gathered through the study will help untangle deficits in the auditory system from other neurological problems. The project will measure the infant response to both traditional testing methods using short clicks, as well as the new tool using running human speech, testing both pre-term and term infants 5 months old or younger. “We’re laying the groundwork by testing babies without a hearing loss to see what their responses look like,” she says. “From there, we’re hoping to answer some more intriguing and deeper questions in children with known hearing loss and other language-based disorders.”

In 2019, Khadija Mohamed was among the first cohort of , participating in a program designed to help resettled refugee teens in ���ϲ����� share their stories through writing and art.

Two years later, Mohamed became an artist-in-residence with the program, and now, the rising ���ϲ����� junior is a research assistant and co-designer of the curriculum for , a creative writing program for students across the city.

Former Narratio Fellow Khadija Mohamed (center) now serves as one of the program’s mentors. (Photo by Wendy Wang)

While Mohamed’s peer mentorship is largely the result of her own initiative, , director of the College of Arts and Sciences’ (A&S’) (EHN), hopes to turn that participation into the norm.

With an $18,350 grant from the , EHN wants to interconnect elements of three programs run in collaboration with the North Side Learning Center, both to increase participation and bolster mentorship and support for resettled refugee youth to pursue higher education.

EHN was founded by Nordquist in 2020, an outgrowth of his own community engagement since moving to ���ϲ����� in 2013. It serves as an umbrella organization that seeds, supports and connects teams of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff working on community-based arts and humanities projects with historically marginalized communities in ���ϲ����� and Central New York.

The CNY Community Foundation grant will support the Narratio Fellowship, a yearlong program for resettled high school and early college students; Write Out, an afterschool writing program for elementary and middle schoolers; and North Side Speech and Debate, an afterschool public speaking program for high school students.

Brice Nordquist (left), director of the Engaged Humanities Network, working with former Narratio Fellow Abshir Habseme. (Photo by Edward Grattan)

“Each of these projects works with different age groups. The grant funding will help us build a structure to interconnect the projects in terms of the curriculum, collection of the student work and the assessment of the programs,” says Nordquist, associate professor of writing and rhetoric and the Dean’s Professor of Community Engagement in A&S. “Our goal is to be able to move students through these enrichment programs from middle school all the way through early college so that they have sustained, coherent humanities and arts projects and experiences.”

The grant supports a strategic planning retreat, which will inform the hiring of an educational consultant for assistance with curricular design to meet defined objectives. There are also funds earmarked for the creation of a digital portfolio to store and showcase student work. Nordquist says many older students have used creative work produced in these programs as the basis for college or scholarship applications. The proposed e-portfolio will store all of a student’s projects from their EHN programs for the duration of their participation—potentially from age 11 until their early 20s.

“The e-portfolio is a way of collecting their work, specifically intended so the student can use it for educational and professional opportunities beyond their time at North Side,” says Nordquist.

There are also funds to support peer mentorship. “That’s a big key to this,” he says. “This structure will create a process for program participants to cycle back as paid leaders, so that over time, these programs are sustained by the community itself, rather than being driven by ���ϲ����� representatives.”

Since opening its doors in 2008, the ���ϲ����� Humanities Center has supported faculty and graduate student research that highlights the humanities’ relevance within and beyond the academy. Graduate students may apply for competitive Dissertation Fellowships and Humanities New York Public Humanities Graduate Project awards.

Dissertation Fellowships

Dissertation Fellowships allow recipients to focus on finishing their writing without the demands of teaching. Fellows benefit from a support system within the Humanities Center, camaraderie with one another and presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience. “Our support helps doctoral students complete their dissertations and succeed in the job market, whether in academia or applied settings,” says Vivian May, Humanities Center director.

This year’s Dissertation Fellows are Deyasini Dasgupta and Stephanie Jones.

Deyasini Dasgupta (left) and Stephanie Jones

Dasgupta is earning a Ph.D. in English. Her dissertation, “(Re)-Negotiating Monstrous Bodies: Reading Embodiment through Race, Affect and Disability in Early Modern England,” bridges disability studies, premodern critical race theory, gender studies and historical phenomenology. In examining various “monstrous” bodies in Shakespeare, Spenser and others, Dasgupta asks: What does it mean to be human in the premodern world? What does it mean to be excluded from the domain of the human? What does it feel like?

“I am truly grateful for the sense of community, financial security and professional support provided by this Fellowship,” says Dasgupta. “Because of this generous program, I have been able to present at multiple conferences, purchase research materials and focus all my time and attention on my research and writing. I have also benefited from Humanities Center Director Vivian May’s kind guidance and from conversations with the brilliant Stephanie Jones, my fellow dissertation fellow.”

Jones, the first Black woman awarded a Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship, is a Ph.D. candidate in writing studies, rhetoric and composition. Her dissertation, “Afrofuturist Feminism as Theory and Praxis: Rhetorical Root Working in the Black Speculative Arts Movement,” examines the history of Afrofuturism, exploring intersections between African diaspora culture, science and technology, and Black women’s contributions to the Black speculative arts movement. As Jones explains, “Black artists create methods of world-building and time travel and engage strategies that allow them to cultivate unique perspectives, such as rhetorical root working and activism, to enact an Afrofuturism that recognizes and disrupts normalized genres of futurity in ways that are anti-racist.”

Jones credits her fellowship for allowing her to successfully complete her writing. “I was also able to publish several articles and attend conferences to present my dissertation research,” she says. In 2021, Jones’s research was recognized with two awards: the Geneva Smitherman Award for Research in Black Language, Literacies, Cultures and Rhetorics (from the National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication Black Caucus) and an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for writing, rhetoric and composition studies from ���ϲ�����. She will defend her dissertation in May and has accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor of rhetoric and writing studies and associate director of first-year composition at Oklahoma State University.

�����Ի��� shared their dissertation research on the  followed by a  in February to discuss their work. “The video presentations and coffee hour provide an opportunity for the wider University community to learn about students’ cutting-edge work in an accessible way,” says May. “The Fellows also gain experience speaking to non-specialists about their research and its significance.”

Humanities New York Public Humanities Graduate Projects

Public Humanities Graduate Projects, a joint initiative between the Humanities Center and Humanities New York, open to master’s and doctoral students, support emerging public humanities scholars to engage beyond the ivory tower. “These collaborative projects explore an issue in the public domain with community partners,” says May. “Projects bridge expertise across our communities and bring people together to address community issues.”

This year’s Public Humanities Graduate Project awardees are Jacob Gedetsis G’21 and Ionah Scully.

Jacob Gedetsis (left) and Ionah Scully

Gedetsis, who earned a creative writing M.F.A. in August 2021, received an award for “First Taste: A Community Narrative Around Food,” a youth-focused writing project designed to generate intergenerational community narratives centered on New Americans and food. Last summer, Gedetsis engaged local refugee students at the North Side Learning Center through site visits to local farms, museums, grocers and restaurants—including the CNY Regional Market, Habiba’s Ethiopian Kitchen and restaurants at the Salt City Market—to explore how various New American communities in ���ϲ����� access and make food. Classroom-based workshops helped students reflect on their experiences through creative expression; the project concluded with a public reading and display of student work at the Salt City Market in downtown ���ϲ�����.

Ionah Scully, an award-winning dancer, is a Ph.D. candidate in the cultural foundations of education program and a member of the Michel First Nation, whose traditional lands are in Canada. Their dissertation research focuses on Two Spirit storytelling in education. Via this grant, Scully hosted land-based journaling sessions with Black, Indigenous and other people of color to consider their relationships to land, the land-back movement toward Indigenous sovereignty and relationships to one another as colonized peoples with different experiences of oppression.

Scully’s dissertation research and Humanities New York project take up shared questions but are also distinct. “I am passionate about furthering decolonial action and education and taking full advantage of academia to support many different project directions,” Scully says. “It has been fruitful, and I look forward to seeking additional opportunities to continue this important community work.”

Meet Some Alumni

May notes that the positive influence of both funding sources is evident in past recipients’ successes. Here’s where a few former dissertation fellows and Humanities New York public humanities awardees are today:

• Haejoo Kim G’21 earned a Ph.D. in English with support from a Dissertation Fellowship and defended her dissertation on “Medical Liberty and Alternative Health Practices in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” This spring, she started a position as an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University, in Seoul, Korea.
• Donovan Schaefer G’17, who earned his Ph.D. in religion with support from a Dissertation Fellowship, is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His forthcoming book, “” (Duke 2022), explores the intersections between affect theory, science and critical approaches to the secular.
• Kishauna Soljour ’13, G’19, earned a Ph.D. in history with support from a Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellowship, the precursor to its current grant program. As an Andrew W. Mellow Public Humanities Fellow and visiting assistant professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College, she is developing public programming at Yonkers Public Library. Soljour’s research highlights the importance of oral history, migration narratives and popular cultural as well as artistic expressions of identity.
• Matthew D. Stewart G’19, who earned a Ph.D. in history, is a humanities teacher at The Ambrose School in Meridian, Idaho, where he uses the discussion methods honed through his Public Humanities Fellowship in the classroom every day. His dissertation research forms the basis of his first book, “” (University of Utah Press, 2022), which will be featured in the  on May 2.

Romita Ray

The seminar provides an immersive experience with objects in the SUArt Galleries, Light Work, and the Special Collections Research Center—examining them and learning to conduct archival research about them, says Ray, associate professor of art history and chair of the Department of Art and Music Histories.

“I introduced my students to some of the outstanding figures in art and architectural history who are represented in our collections, and then they got to choose which artists, architects, and objects they wanted to continue working with,” she says. “This was not a superficial look. This was a deep dive into artistic oeuvres, methods, and critical ideas.”

For example, Adam Hsu ’19 focused on the famous Margaret Bourke White photograph, Mahatma Gandhi and the Spinning Wheel, while Max Greenblatt ’18 studied Salvador Dali illustrations for “Alice in Wonderland.” Angela Tillapaugh ’18 chose the Anna Hyatt Huntington sculpture “Diana of the Chase,” while Christina Rosace ’18 studied an image of the goddess Durga from the collection of Indian calendar art amassed by former SU religion professor H. Daniel Smith.

Tammy Hong

In addition to a research paper, the students shared their findings with each other and with the campus community through Eight + One, a scholarly magazine they produced featuring op-ed-length essays about their research subjects. The magazine, the first of its kind produced at SU, was meant to be “a lasting record of the hard work the students put in,” says Ray.

The magazine was designed by class member Benjamin Farr ’18, a double major in art history and magazine journalism, who studied John James Audubon’s bird prints for the course. “Creating Eight + One with Professor Ray was one of the most rewarding experiences of my time at SU,” says Farr, who is currently working at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York, while applying to graduate school. “The art history program is very writing intensive, but few people save professors ever read our papers. After reading through the magazine, some members of my family even asked to read my older papers.”

Tammy Hong ’18, who studied Hyacinthe Rigaud’s paintings of Louis XIV, says that while she was delighted to immerse herself in the SU collections and share some of the gems contained with the SU community, the magazine project was particularly valuable for honing her writing. “The rigorous editing process made me realize how polished my writing had to be in order to produce a thought-provoking and concise piece,” says Hong, currently the Andrew W. Mellon Research Assistant in Modern Materials in the Conservation Division at the National Gallery of Art.

Ray couldn’t be more pleased with the results of the course. “It showcases the research potential that our art collections at SU hold for our undergraduate students,” she says. “This kind of hands-on learning experience followed by a publication makes students realize that they are an integral part of research in the humanities at SU.”

David Tate

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Forensic Science, two adjunct faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute, demonstrate the differences in latent print distortion on absorbent surfaces—such as paper—and non-absorbent surfaces—such as ceramic tile.

“In the process of analyzing a print for identification, you have to take into account various factors of distortion. Some can be very complex, so it helps to have a good grasp of different distortion factors,” says co-author David Tate, a certified latent print examiner.

Distortion mechanics delve into the minutiae of latent print analysis and are aimed at having a greater impact on the examiner’s accuracy when marking features within the latent print, and ultimately, in determining its value and correspondence (or lack thereof) to a known subject’s impression.

Jesse Eller

Tate and co-authors Jesse Eller and Elizabeth Anderson G’15, conducted a study comparing lateral movement of fingerprints—essentially swiping a finger along a surface—on copy paper and on ceramic tile. Their results showed that indeed, the porosity of a surface impacts print distortion. “The distortion of a print will have a different appearance based on the surface,” says Tate.

In particular, the clarity of the impression at the beginning and end of the print provides visual clues to the direction of movement. “Clear differences in appearance were observed in the starting and ending impressions deposited on absorbent and nonabsorbent surfaces,” says Tate. “Starting impressions on absorbent surfaces were more well defined than ending impressions. In contrast, on nonabsorbent surfaces, the ending impressions were more well defined than respective starting impressions.”

Elizabeth Anderson

Previous research of latent print distortion has not specifically examined distortion of prints on porous surfaces. “Our paper contributes to the body of knowledge on latent print distortion, and on a practical level, hopefully helps latent print examiners who deal with this on a daily basis understand what’s going on with the casework in front of them,” says Tate.

The paper’s authors are all latent print examiners with the Onondaga County Center for Forensic Sciences in ���ϲ�����. In addition, Tate and Eller offer consulting services through their own firm, Eureka Forensic Services, and teach courses in latent print analysis in SU’s FNSSI program. “Our students enjoy being taught by working professionals who bring our practical experience and our research into the classroom,” says Tate.

Ingeborg Zechner

Waxman’s filmography includes scores for more than 40 films, including classics such as “The Invisible Man,” “Flash Gordon,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Peyton Place” and “A Place in the Sun.”

The composer has turned into a major research project for Zechner, who received her doctorate in historical musicology from the University of Graz in 2014 with a dissertation about London’s Italian opera business in the 19th century. She’s spending fall semester as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Art and Music Histories, studying a collection of Waxman’s papers housed in the SU Special Collections.

The papers—some 200 boxes—span from film scores written in France and Germany during the 1930s before Waxman immigrated to the United States through his Hollywood career and tenure as artistic director of the Los Angeles Music Festival, to his death in 1967 at age 60. “Normally, on a research trip you only have a week or two at an archive,” says Zechner. “The Fulbright grant allows me the luxurious situation of being able to browse and explore and see what the material can offer me.”

Zechner says SU’s ownership of the Waxman papers is a story in itself.  Under a directive from Chancellor William P. Tolley in the early 1960s to build ���ϲ�����’s Special Collections, Martin H. Bush, deputy administrator of manuscripts, wrote letters to prominent artists, architects, writers and musicians of the day asking for their papers. Waxman complied, giving perpetuity and academic purpose to his lifetime work. Zechner says the collection is providing an excellent foundation for her research, which will continue in California, Germany, Italy, and France, pending grant funding.

The multi-year project is, in essence, Zechner’s “second dissertation,” required in the Austrian-German academic system to be hired for a professorship. “After you earn your Ph.D., you have to establish an entirely new research area for yourself and write a second monograph in this new field,” she explains.

Zechner says her research on Waxman is not entirely divorced from her background as an opera scholar. “Both opera and film have inter-textual layers with different media involved with the musical score providing a relation between the music and the narrative. In opera, it’s the staging, and in movies, it’s the picture track,” she says.

In November, Zechner made a presentation on her Waxman research to faculty in the Department of Art and Music Histories. “I was able to show some of the material from the collection to faculty members from department and share my findings,” she says. “They’ve been welcoming colleagues who offer a great deal of interaction, so I’m not spending all my time alone in the archive.”

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the basics of applying fission-track thermochronology within a geologic framework, including the development of the method and the fundamentals of how the technique is applied—from fieldwork to statistics to interpretation to implications—all illustrated with clear examples and citations to relevant studies.

Fitzgerald says the book could be used as a text in a graduate-level course, as well as a resource for scientists who regularly apply thermochronology. “It provides a really nice place to start for both graduate students and scientists,” he says.

Thermochronology is the study of the time-temperature history of rocks. Fission track thermochronology was developed in the 1970s as a method to constrain the time-temperature by looking at fission tracks in different minerals that form by spontaneous fission of Uranium 238. “It’s like a little nuclear explosion that leaves linear damage zones in the crystal,” Fitzgerald explains. “The number of tracks is proportional to the age and uranium content. Determine the uranium content and bingo, you constrain the time since the tracks formed.”

The method can be applied to multiple minerals, with tracks in each mineral retentive below different temperatures. Fission-track thermochronology applied to the mineral apatite yields information between about 120 and 60 degrees Celsius. “You can use it to constrain geologic events and processes that occur in the upper four to five kilometers of the crust,” says Fitzgerald. “For example, it’s really good for constraining when mountains formed and, hence, why they formed. It’s also a widely used technique in sedimentary basins because it overlaps the temperature window where hydrocarbons form.”

Paul Fitzgerald in Alaska.

Fitzgerald says that apatite fission-track thermochronology is so powerful because it is one of the very few techniques that have a kinetic parameter, the length of the fission tracks. “So you can constrain not only the timing of geologic events, but also how fast geologic terrains cooled or even if they were reheated. That allows you to eliminate certain competing hypotheses because you have a much greater control on the time-temperature path,” he says.

Fitzgerald has used the method extensively in his own research, which focuses on understanding the tectonic evolution of the crust and the geologic processes that form mountain belts and shape landscapes. He has worked extensively in the mountains of Antarctica and Alaska, the Basin and Range Province of the southwestern United States, Papua New Guinea and the Pyrenees.

Fitzgerald’s co-editor on the book is Marco G. Malusà, a geologist from the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy. Malusà has worked extensively in the European Alps, seeking to better understand the tectonic evolution of these mountains and making notable advances in the application of the fission-track method to detrital grains that were eroded off the mountains and are being transported down rivers. Malusà and Fitzgerald drew from their own research for eight of the 21 chapters in the book, while colleague Suzanne Baldwin, the Michael G. and Susan T. Thonis Professor of Earth Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, was also lead author on a chapter. “Her expertise is on geologic processes that operate deeper in the Earth, and thus, she offers an important perspective, linking deep earth processes with those occurring in the shallow crust,” Fitzgerald explains.

“Fission-Track Thermochronology and its Application to Geology” was released in July and was widely referenced during the biennial international thermochronology conference, held in September in Quedlinburg, Germany, where it was also used as prizes for the best student presentations.

Fitzgerald says that while he budgeted about a year and a half to devote to the book, in the end the project exceeded two-and-a-half years. During this time, he also served as associate dean of science, mathematics and research in the College of Arts and Sciences. Widely published for his research, he considers the book a milestone publication. “A scientist probably does only one of these books in his or her career,” he says. “Now is the time to get back to working on existing research projects in many parts of the world.”

Glenn Peers

The College of Arts and Sciences welcomes Glenn Peers as professor of art history in the Department of Art and Music Histories. Peers joined ���ϲ����� in July after 20 years at the University of Texas-Austin, where he developed an international reputation for his scholarship on Byzantine art and culture.

“Glenn brings valuable expertise to the department in ancient and late antique art,” says Department Chair Romita Ray. “We now have a bridge between the ancient and the medieval.”

Much of Byzantine art centers on devotional objects. “There wasn’t a separation of church and state like we, in modern states, sought to be ruled under,” Peers explains. “In fact, they thought the opposite, that church and state needed to be closely intertwined, because if God wasn’t in favor of the state, then the state couldn’t survive.”

In addition, the church was a strong factor in post-medieval life, whereas the state was supplanted by other rulers, who tended to erase traces of their predecessors. “So it’s the religious art that survives more fully than the secular art,” he says.

Peers is author or co-author of six books, including “Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium” (University of California Press, 2001), “Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium” (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004) and “Orthodox Magic in Trebizond and Beyond” (La Pomme d’or, Seyssel, 2018). He was editor of “Byzantine Things in the World” (Yale University Press, 2013), a companion to an exhibition of the same name at Houston’s Menil Collection that he curated in 2013.

In the exhibition, Peers juxtaposed Byzantine icons, crosses, pilgrim tokens and reliquaries with “like-minded objects” from other cultures and periods, including modern works from artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko. “They allowed me to maneuver modern and medieval works into a kind of conversation that hasn’t happened anywhere else, to my knowledge,” says Peers, who calls the project “one of the most stimulating and satisfying professional experiences I’ve ever had.”

It’s inspired a second book, “Byzantine Things Into the World,” currently in progress, which Peers says is a set of reflections that have accumulated about the experience of working with the objects and of working with people who were also experiencing the objects as well. “The security guards at the Menil, for instance, gave me a lot of insight into the exhibition that I couldn’t have gotten myself,” he says.

A Native of Nova Scotia, Peers became interested in ancient art during a six-week summer abroad trip to Greece after his first year of college. “I didn’t really travel or have exposure to other cultures growing up, and that experience absolutely changed my life,” he says.

He went on to major in classics and spent his junior year in Athens, putting him on a path to his vocation. “Being able to experience these historical works of art in their proper context has always been deeply stimulating and exciting for me,” he says.

Peers earned his Ph.D. in the history of art at The Johns Hopkins University and a Licentiate in Medieval Studies at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. During the 2007-08 academic year, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. During the 2011-12 academic year, he was Whitehead Professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. In summer 2014, he was a senior fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Germany.

While at UT-Austin, Peers led three study abroad trips to ���ϲ�����, Sicily, and is quite excited about the prospect of creating a “���ϲ����� at ���ϲ�����” program. “���ϲ�����, Sicily, is a very important classical city, but also kind of a crossroads where different fates and cultures met in the Middle Ages. Islam, Christianity and Judaism were all very important components in that culture and society,” he says. “Study abroad deeply informed my own development and life path, and it would be deeply satisfying to give that experience to undergraduates here.”

Romita Ray

, associate professor of art history and chair of the Department of Art and Music Histories in the College of Arts and Sciences, spent two and a half months in London this summer conducting research at the National Maritime Museum (NMM) as the recipient of a competitive Caird Short-Term Research Fellowship.

Ray used the archives and museum collections of the NMM as a resource to better understand how the East India Company focused on Chinese tea as a valuable plant commodity that could be transplanted in India—the subject of the first chapter of her forthcoming book on the visual histories of Indian tea.

“The museum is located near the edge of the Thames, which encouraged me to think about all of the rivers that connect to the seas that brought tea to different shores,” she says.

Ray’s book, tentatively titled “From Two Leaves and a Bud: The Visual History of Indian Tea,” intends to analyze the visual cultures of Indian tea consumption from the colonial era to the modern day. She begins with the rise of the British-owned East India Company, which monopolized the 18th-century tea trade in Asia and India; continuing with the Victoria Raj period of British rule from 1858 to 1947; and concluding with post-independent India, where tea drinking has made the transition from an imperial tradition to a national pastime.

She has conducted extensive research—in tea plantations, botanical gardens and herbaria, and in archival holdings of tea companies and tea brokers—supported in part by two prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities grants that funded her research in the UK, India. and Sri Lanka.

Ray says her NMM residency was particularly valuable in helping unpack tea in the context of transnational trade. She used the museum’s archives to examine handwritten ships logs, records, diaries and other documents, and to study objects in the museum collections, including porcelain and silver, coastal maps and paintings of sea life.

“That’s the beauty of being in contact with objects and archives—it’s a deeply immersive process. You have to hide and investigate, and for that you need time away from your other duties,” she says. “The whole point was to write from London, which was the center of imperial power and headquarters of the East India Company.”

Ray says the NMM curators and research librarians were a fantastic resource, both at pointing her to objects and areas within the collection as well as to other scholars. In addition to conducting valuable book research, Ray connected with two historians during her stay—Jordan Goodman, an honorary research associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, who has published widely on science and medicine, and Richard Coulton, a lecturer on 18th-century literature and culture at Queen Mary, University of London, and co-author of “Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World” (Reaktion Books, 2015). The three scholars are now planning a conference on tea and natural history in 2020. “We plan to bring in speakers from Britain, Europe and North America,” she says.

Ray will return to the NMM next summer to complete the final month of her Caird Research Fellowship. She says her writing will guide her detective work. “Depending on which direction the chapter is taking, I will follow that thread to the collection that is most related to what I am writing about. It’s thrilling to play tea detective!”

Faculty members Michael Marciano and Jonathan Adelman have been awarded a two-year $431,917 grant from the National Institute of Justice.

Forensics and National Security Sciences Institute (FNSSI) faculty members Michael Marciano and Jonathan Adelman have been awarded a two-year $431,917 grant from the National Institute of Justice to develop a fully continuous machine learning approach to predict the number of contributors in sequence-based DNA profiles. The project builds upon intellectual property the two developed that is owned and licensed by SU.

Previously, Marciano and Adelman developed a method to predict the number of people contributing to mixed DNA samples, dubbed Probabilistic Assessment for Contributor Estimate (PACE), which uses computer technology to determine the number of individuals’ DNA in a given sample. The patented method is licensed to NicheVision Forensics, which is participating as a grant subcontractor on the new project.

Modern forensic DNA analysis uses the differences in the size of DNA markers to differentiate individuals. “At one location, I might have a fragment or marker that is 15 units long, and you might have one that’s 14 units long. The difference between the 15 and the 14 is what helps identify me from you,” explains Marciano, an FNSSI research assistant professor and molecular biologist. That technique becomes limited, however, when multiple individuals have markers of the same length.

Forensic DNA analysis will soon make the transition to using DNA sequencing as a means of identification. DNA sequence data is typically much more complex than fragment (size data). Marciano and Adelman’s new method focuses on using artificial intelligence—specifically, machine deep learning—to tease out complex patterns undetectable to a human analyst.

“The sequence data we’re talking about are very complex and hierarchical in nature,” explains Adelman, FNSSI research assistant professor and computer scientist. “There are layers to the data. Some of the layers have connections and patterns specific to that layer, while other connections and patterns transcend layers within the data. One of the things that machine learning is great at is precisely quantifying those patterns which we can in turn leverage to get stronger assessments of the DNA profile.”

Machine learning uses existing data to train computers how to solve problems on their own with new data.  Marciano and Adelman are going a step further to use deep learning, in which the computer figures out not only all the patterns and structure in the data, but the ideal portions of the data to mine for information content. “It’s been used very successfully in a variety of disciplines in the past decade, but has a drawback in that it requires a massive amount of data to teach the computer,” says Adelman.

Marciano and Adelman will be amassing large data sets from collaborators, including Verogen (formerly Illumina), Promega and the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, to simulate additional data with all of the different nuances that occur in sequence data.

“The purpose of our simulator is to provide enough data in concert with the real DNA mixtures to adequately train the artificial intelligence,” adds Marciano, who says their work would not be possible without the support of the College of Arts and Sciences Information Technology Group and ���ϲ�����’s Research Computing Group.

This is not basic science research. The goal is to produce a tool that can be used immediately for DNA sequence analysis. “Forensic DNA analysis is undergoing a paradigm shift and we are creating this tool in preparation for that transition,” says Marciano.

Amanda Eubanks Winkler

The performance, sold out during its three-week run, was a collaboration between the Folger, ���ϲ����� musicologist Amanda Eubanks Eubanks Winkler, and Richard Schoch, professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast, co-investigators of the Performing Restoration Shakespeare Project.

For nearly two decades in the mid 1600s, English theaters were closed and no new plays were written or produced. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, theaters reopened but there were few new plays available. Theater companies filled the creative void with new adaptations of classic works, many by William Shakespeare. These productions of the Restoration era—the first to do Shakespeare after Shakespeare’s generation—were exceedingly popular, marked by song and dance, lavish scenic effects, and often, with reimagined and added characters.

But over time, these productions were largely forgotten. “By the late 18th century, Shakespeare had attained this God-like status in English literary circles and these Restoration adaptations came to be viewed as bastardizations,” says Eubanks Eubanks Winkler, associate professor of music and history and cultures in the College of Arts and Sciences and an expert on English theater music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries.

“Macbeth” at the Folger Theater. (Photo by Brittany Diliberto)

Through a multi-year £607,312 grant from the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, Eubanks Winkler and Schoch are focusing on the performance dimensions of Restoration Shakespeare, forming a community of scholars and artists who undertake archival study, run studio-based workshops and create public performances.

The first was in summer 2017, when they workshopped excerpts of the Restoration-era “Tempest” at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

The second was the full professional production of Davenant’s “Macbeth” at the Folger that began rehearsal in August and ran for three weeks in September.

“I moved to Washington at the beginning of August and then commuted back and forth at the start of the academic year to fulfill my teaching,” says Eubanks Winkler.  “We had three scholars from the U.K. and three scholars from the U.S. who participated in the rehearsal process with us. They developed a set of research questions for the actors, and musicians, and the creative team that could only be answered through them being involved in the production process.”

Eubanks Winkler served as a consultant and the production used a score of witches music by John Eccles from a manuscript in the British Library that she edited in 2004.

“MacBeth” at the Folger Theater. (Photo by Brittany Diliberto)

The singing witches were referred to by Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette as “the most striking single feature, musically.” Another reviewer described the production as “luminous in every detail.”

Eubanks Winkler and Schoch will take what they’ve learned from the “Tempest” and “Macbeth” performances to plan another performance under the Performing Restoration Shakespeare umbrella: an event for theater companies and producers in July 2019 in London.

“The idea is to have actors and musicians perform some of this material for producers and creative teams looking for creative programming,” says Eubanks Winkler. “We’ll also have some of our collaborators from the Folger there to talk about the pleasures and challenges of staging this material. Our long-term goal is to influence artistic programming and creative practice in theater companies and music ensembles.”

Eubanks Winkler is a general editor for “The Collected Works of John Eccles” (A-R Editions) and has published two critical editions: “John Eccles, Incidental Music, Part 1” (2015) and “Music for Macbeth” (2004). She is the author of “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage” (2006) and the co-edited volume “Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England” (2017). She is currently completing another book, “Singing at School: Performance and Pedagogy in Early Modern England.”

Roland Van Deusen ’67, G’75 outside the ���ϲ����� VA Medical Center.

Veteran suicide rates have increased 25 percent over the last decade, with veterans more than twice as likely as non-vets to take their own lives.

Roland Van Deusen ’67, G’75, a former U.S. Navy petty officer and retired psychiatric social worker and drug counselor, self produced a video PSA message aimed at struggling veterans, urging them to forgive themselves for human emotions resulting from inhumane experiences. It’s also a tool for their families, friends and counselors.

Filmed on the ���ϲ����� campus and nearby ���ϲ����� Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center, the video has been widely circulated online, including on the Psychiatric Times website, and is used by used by staff at the VA National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the VA’s nationwide suicide prevention program, among others. As a result, Van Deusen was recently invited to join the Veterans Administration COVER (Creating Options for Veterans Expedited Recovery) Commission, an 18-month legislated commission focused on veteran mental health.

The video caps a decade of Van Deusen’s advocacy efforts for veterans. The College of Arts and Sciences caught up with Van Deusen to ask about his history and motivation.

Tell us about your own military service.

I enlisted in the Naval Reserve my junior year of high school to get out of a public housing project, Maywood Terrace, in Watertown, New York. I won a scholarship that would pay 80 percent of the tuition at ���ϲ�����, but had to extend my enlistment in the reserves for four years in order to get my degree.

I majored in sociology with a minor in psychology. Once a week, I worked at the Liverpool Naval Reserve Center and had to do two weeks a year either at boot camp or on a ship.

When I graduated, I had a two-year active duty obligation. I was trained as a navigator and volunteered twice for river patrol boats in Vietnam, but got turned down twice due to poor vision. I spent a year in Iceland in charge of a barracks of 300 guys who ran the radar site and a year on a food supply ship in the Mediterranean. I got to go to Italy five times, to Spain three times. And I got to help navigate across the Atlantic Ocean and all through the Mediterranean.

What was your feeling about the Vietnam War at that time?

While I was serving in the military, I felt that whatever happened to me would be worth it if my beloved country could be at peace again. But I could see that things were going the wrong way and personally felt that Lyndon Johnson sold out the guys that were over there. By 1969, I was back and had started demonstrating against the war.

The subsequent wars—which have proven themselves to be endless and winless—have only increased my sense of betrayal. We’ve had more than 300 local GIs killed who were stationed at Fort Drum or who came from the North Country. How many more were wounded? How many more were traumatized?

Your professional career gave you a lot of insight into the emotional issues facing veterans. How did your career evolve?

When I first came out of the service, I returned to Watertown and got a job with Jefferson County as a case worker in the children’s division working with foster care, and later set up and ran a drug counseling agency. After five years, I decided to use my GI Bill benefits to get a master’s in social work, so went back to ���ϲ�����. I worked in local psychiatric hospitals while I was in graduate school and spent the next eight years as a psychiatric social worker. In 1984, I went to work in the state prison system, where I discovered I loved doing drug counseling. I supervised treatment at Hale Creek Correctional Facility, the first prison accredited for substance abuse, and ran treatment at Cape Vincent Prison, at the time the largest inpatient program for substance abuse. My wife, Nancy, set up the substance abuse program for incarcerated veterans at Cape Vincent, and I later took it over.

When did the advocacy work start?

In 2000, I retired from Cape Vincent Correctional Facility. Because I was never able to get to Vietnam, I always felt like I didn’t do all that I could have. Now that I was free, I felt like I needed to do for my fellow veterans what they would do for me. My focus with the volunteer work was to prove that peace is also patriotic by honoring the warriors not the wars.

I’m involved with several organizations, including Veterans for Peace. It started out with lobbying. I was reading a lot about guys who served in Desert Storm getting sick from depleted uranium contamination so I became involved in the lobbying effort that got Governor George Pataki to sign the bill providing coverage for depleted uranium for New York State Reserves and National Guard. There was a federal bill, too, but that did not pass.

I heard about local military spouses losing their education benefits so started a protest that spurred Congressman Owens to lead a successful effort in the House to restore benefits for 90,000 such students nationwide. I also got property taxes lowered for county veterans.

A lot of your efforts have focused on PTSD.

I understand that because of my work as a psychiatric social worker and counselor. I ran a 12-step program at my church and through the years discovered that approach was also helpful for folks with PTSD. I’ve helped start five anonymous PTSD support groups in the Fort Drum area and another in Clayton, and have helped train all of the police agencies in the Fort Drum area about PTSD. I was also part of a successful effort to keep a civilian-run PTSD clinic at the local hospital open for Fort Drum soldiers. After a Fort Drum soldier told me he’d lost 12 men in his unit to suicide, I started working on efforts to implement universal military discharge mental health screening. I’m hoping the COVER Commission will help with that.

Van Deusen’s video message to veterans with invisible wounds can be seen on .

Zunli Lu

Scientists have long known that atmospheric carbon dioxide is closely linked to climate change. Studying ice age cycles, carbon dioxide increased during warmer times and reduced during glacial periods. When carbon was stored in oceans during these glacial periods, oxygen levels in the ocean were supposed to decrease. However, there weren’t sensitive and reliable methods to measure such changes. Until now.

In research published in the Oct. 18 issue of , ���ϲ����� Earth sciences Associate Professor and , a research fellow at Heriot-Wyatt University, Edinburgh, UK, and other colleagues reconstruct oxygen levels in the Pacific Ocean during the last ice age 20,000 years ago. Their paper, “Glacial expansion of oxygen-depleted seawater in the eastern tropical Pacific,” demonstrates that the respired carbon reservoir of the glacial Pacific was increased, confirming this mechanism as a contributor to lower levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during these periods.

Lu and Hoogakker focused on what’s known as the oxygen minimum zone, or marine dead zone, which hangs below the sea surface. Lu describes it as shaped like a tongue sticking out on the continental shelf. As more and more carbon dioxide was transferred from the atmosphere into the ocean by marine planktons, oxygen in the water is reduced. “The marine dead zones may expand as climate change continues to happen so there is a growing interest in understanding their evolution in the past,” says Lu.

Scientists use what is known as proxy data to reconstruct past ocean conditions. These proxy data are preserved physical characteristics of the environment that can stand in for direct measurements. “At the bottom of the ocean there are layers and layers of mud that have collected over time, with all sorts of fossils buried in those layers,” says Lu. Using samples from international ocean drilling programs, they go through them layer-by-layer, “and just like flipping through a book, we read through what happened to the ocean environment over time.”

Photo credit: Gregory Wissink G’16, Ph.D.

Gregory Hoke, associate professor and associate chair of Earth sciences, and recent SU doctoral student Gregory Ruetenik, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, co-authored the article with colleagues from China, France, Sweden, Australia, and the United States. Hoke’s initial collaboration with first author Jungsheng Nie was co-editing a special volume on the growth of the Tibetan Plateau during the Cenozoic.

The Mekong River is the longest in Southeast Asia and the tenth largest worldwide in terms of water volume. Originating in the Tibetan Plateau, the Mekong runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The Chinese portion of the river (Lancang Jiang) occupies a spectacular canyon that is between 1-2 kilometers deep relative to the surrounding landscape.

“When the upper half of that river was established and at what point it incised the canyon it occupies today, as well as whether it was influenced by climate or by tectonics, has been debated by geologists for the last quarter century,” says Hoke. “Our work establishes when major canyon incision began and identifies the most likely mechanism responsible for that incision: an intensification of the Asian monsoon during the warmest period over the last 23 million years, the Middle Miocene climate optimum.”

River incision is the natural process by which a river cuts downward into its bed, deepening the active channel. “In most cases, you can attribute incision to some sort of some change in the overall relief of a landscape, which is typically interpreted to be in response to a tectonic influence,” says Hoke.

The standard interpretation for river incision of the Mekong and adjacent Yangtze basins had been a response to topographic growth of the Tibetan Plateau. However, a recent string of studies have determined that the southeastern margin of Tibet was already at or near modern elevations by 40 million years ago, throwing a monkey wrench into that hypothesis.

Using thermochronology of apatite minerals extracted from bedrock samples collected along the walls of the river canyon, the scientists were able to numerically model the cooling history of the rock as the river incised, which revealed synchronous downcutting at 15-17 million years along the entire river. Synchronous downcutting points towards a non-tectonic cause for incision. Ruetenik modeled whether or not a stronger monsoon was capable of achieving the magnitude of downcutting over the relatively short duration of the middle Miocene climate optimum using landscape models he developed during his SU doctoral study. According to Hoke, “This solves how river incision occurred in the absence of any clear pulse of plateau growth along the southeast margin of Tibet. In essence, an enhanced monsoon did a tremendous amount of work sawing through the landscape during the middle Miocene climate optimum.”

Previously, Hoke studied buried river sands in cave deposits to reconstruct the incision history of the Yangtze river, the next river to the east of the Mekong. “We found a sequence of ages that look similar to those from the thermochrometers in the Mekong,” he says of his findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2016. He next hopes subsequent studies will be able to extend the results from this new Nature Geoscience paper to the three other big rivers that drain the southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau.

Leonard Lopoo

Recognizing his outstanding scholarship and service to the Maxwell School, Leonard Lopoo has been appointed Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of Public Policy.

Lopoo, who joined the Maxwell School in 2003, is a professor of public administration and international affairs, director of the Center for Policy Research, and director and co-founder of the Maxwell X Lab. He is a leading interdisciplinary scholar on social policy, using demography and economics to study low-income families.

“As director of Maxwell’s Center for Policy Research and as co-founder and director of X Lab, Len Lopoo has continuously invested in our students, faculty and staff to ensure that Maxwell is at the leading edge of thoughtful innovation, teaching and research,” says Maxwell Dean David Van Slyke. “Len’s practical application of scholarship has been recognized by the Maxwell Advisory Board and is equally appreciated by his colleagues and our students.”

Lopoo is a prolific scholar who has been published in numerous academic journals, including Demography, the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Marriage and the Family and the Journal of Public Economics. He is currently the social policy co-editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, a post he has held since 2008.

Lopoo has received funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Aging, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research.

In addition to his scholarship, Lopoo is considered one of Maxwell’s finest teachers and has been recognized with numerous accolades for his excellence in the classroom. He is a two-time recipient of Maxwell’s Birkhead-Burkhead Teaching Excellence Award (2005, 2017), along with the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research (2009), ���ϲ�����’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award (2005) and the Excellence in Graduate Education Faculty Recognition Award (2013).

In 2017, Lopoo helped launch the Maxwell X Lab within the Center for Policy Research. The lab’s primary goal is to partner with public institutions and nonprofit organizations to test and build evidence for policies and programs that actually work. The team leverages behavioral science and randomized controlled trials to design and evaluate different techniques for influencing human behavior and improving outcomes.

Lopoo received a Ph.D. from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago in 2001 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 2001-03.

A collegiate tennis player at Louisiana State University, Lopoo is in his seventh year as a volunteer assistant coach for the SU women’s tennis team.

Shannon Monnat

Shannon Monnat, a rural demographer and sociologist whose work focuses on public health, joins the faculty of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs as the Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion. Monnat studies health disparities, stratification and inequality, and spatial differences in drug, alcohol and suicide mortality. Her research aims to better understand the current opioid epidemic and other diseases and deaths of despair.

The Lerner Chair is a component of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, established in 2011 with a generous founding gift from Sid Lerner (a 1953 ���ϲ����� alumnus) and his wife, Helaine. The center’s mission is to improve the health of the community through service, research, education, advocacy and policy. It works together with citizens, students and public health professionals to identify needs, develop programming, and deploy collaborative initiatives. Sid Lerner is a former advertising executive who developed a strong interest in how lifestyle habits contribute to chronic disease.

Monnat says the Lerner Chair is an ideal platform to pursue her interests while impacting local community health issues. “Increasing problems such as disability, obesity, and poor mental health are all issues that affect our long term economic sustainability and well-being as a society,” she says. “The underlying causes of many of these issues are deeply connected. Social scientists are in a prime position to identify those underlying social, economic, and policy-related mechanisms and hopefully identify strategies to mitigate them.”

Monnat, a native of Lowville, New York, adds, “As an Upstate New Yorker, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with local communities on population health issues and drug use. The Lerner Center is really poised to do that kind of work in the community.”

Monnat is author or co-author of more than two-dozen publications, is frequently invited to present at academic conferences, and is regularly sought for commentary by the media. At Maxwell, she will hold an appointment in the Department of Sociology and serve as senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research.

“Shannon Monnat is committed to disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship that informs, benefits, and influences public policy and the public good,” says David M. Van Slyke, dean of the Maxwell School. “She brings timely and important research, a public orientation and unbounded energy to the intellectual leadership of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. As a sociologist with a national reputation, she will be an immediate asset to the Maxwell School and ���ϲ�����.”

Monnat joins the Maxwell School from Pennsylvania State University, where she was assistant professor of rural sociology and demography and research associate at the Population Research Institute. She previously served as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her Ph.D. in sociology is from the University at Albany (SUNY), where she received the Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award.

“We know that to achieve good health we need to go beyond the traditional model of health care and public health and reach upstream to identify and address the community issues that play into people’s ability to lead a healthy and productive life,” says Thomas Dennison, faculty director of the Lerner Center. “Shannon’s work looking at the fundamentals of how community conditions influence health will contribute enormously to the Lerner Center’s mission.”

Evin Robinson and Jessica Santana

Since 2014, the organization has provided opportunities to 60 students from nine high schools. Students enroll as juniors and receive weekly classes from computer science/technology professionals, as well as mentorship and other professional opportunities. New York On Tech will accept a new cohort of 60-80 high school juniors for the 2016-17 school year, representing more than 50 high schools in the city.

Although Santana and Robinson had met casually at SU, it wasn’t until they both attended a summer Ernst & Young Leadership Conference that they realized how much they had in common. “I went to take the A train back home to Brooklyn and she was taking the A train as well,” recalls Robinson. “We started talking on the train about school, life, ambitions, wanting to give back. Turns out we were getting off at the same stop. We had grown up in the same neighborhood, but never knew each other until college.”

A connection was forged. A couple years later, Santana had graduated and come back to campus after starting her career at Deloitte. She met up for coffee with Evin, who was finishing his graduate degree in information management and technology, and a couple of hours later, they had the concept for what would become New York On Tech sketched out on a pile of Starbucks napkins.

“When you go back to your neighborhood you realize you can really be a catalyst for change in marginalized spaces where companies are not recruiting from, where mentors are not living in,” says Santana. “That was our call to action.”

Although young, both were already accomplished professionals. Santana, who earned her undergraduate degree in accounting from the and her master’s in information management and technology from the , had secured prestigious internships while an undergrad, and went on to work as a technology consultant at Deloitte and Accenture. Robinson was a seasoned student entrepreneur who’d garnered numerous accolades including the Goldman Sachs Entrepreneur of the Year and the Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurship Engagement Fellowship. He earned his undergraduate degree from the and his graduate degree from the .

For a time, both worked as technology consultants at Accenture in Manhattan, growing their nonprofit on the side. Then in 2015, Santana was accepted into the Camelback Ventures Social Innovation Fellowship program, which provided seed funding and other support to grow the enterprise. She left Accenture to focus on the non-profit full time; Robinson remains at Accenture, but is also integrally involved in the overall operation.

New York On Tech is supported by corporate partnerships that provide funding, and professionals who teach classes at the corporate sites, as well as a board of 16 seasoned directors and advisors and approximately 40 mentors representing about 27 different companies.

The organization was born from Robinson and Santana’s strong desire to give back. Only two years in, the duo can already see the impact they are making. “The transformation of the students is amazing,” says Robinson. “They’re learning how to do front-end and back-end web development. They’re producing websites and mobile applications and video games.”

And they’re planning for their futures. “We’re all about getting our students to continue on to college, and the majority of them do,” he says. One student from their first year garnered a full, four-year computer science scholarship. Another student was selected to participate in the prestigious Google Computer Science Summer Institute this summer and a few will be doing internships at companies like BNY Mellon and Warby Parker.

“I never would have guessed that I’d be the founder of a nonprofit organization,” says Santana, “but I feel like I’m on this earth to live a life of service. People need to think about the impact they want to have and whether what they’re doing now is going to lead to that legacy. If you follow your heart, success is always going to find you.”

Anthony Otero

But Otero was always an active reader and writer. “I’ve always been somebody who has written things down, whether it was a journal in high school or short stories or random thoughts,” he says. “The idea was always in the back of my head that maybe one day I’d write a book, but it wasn’t necessarily something I thought would actually happen.”

Otero kicked things up in 2009. His marriage was falling apart and he needed a creative outlet. “I just started writing, and I found that the more I wrote, the better I felt.”

Otero started a blog (latinegro.wordpress.com), where he shared his perspective on male insecurities and divorce. He developed a following, and the feedback was positive.

On the verge of turning 40, Otero decided it was time to get serious about what his passions were and challenged himself to write a book. “There came a point where I wanted to stop talking about it and just do it,” he says.

The result was “Hanging Upside Down,” which he self-published in 2014. Inspired by events in his own life, the novel tackles issues surrounding divorce from a male point of view.

“I’d noticed that a lot of the narratives on divorce are female-driven. ‘The man did this; the man did that.’ And he probably did, but you don’t hear the why, or the other side of it,” he says.

Otero, who is president of the ���ϲ����� Latino Network, has challenged himself to write four books before he’s 50. He turned 42 in June, the same month he published his second novel, “The Book of Isabel,” which he describes as both a sequel and a prequel to his first book.

“It continues with the main character but also provides insight to things that happened earlier in his life,” says Otero, who continues to write short stories, a blog and occasional posts for The Huffington Post.

“I’m an emotional writer. When I’m in the mood, I need to write. When I’m in that moment, everything sort of pours out. I might write 10 short stories within two weeks. Then I have weeks without anything. It’s either flowing or it’s not, although I try to blog at least once a week,” he says.

Despite his passion for writing, Otero says he still loves working in higher education, particularly any opportunity to mentor and advise students. The only reason he would leave student affairs would be to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing.

“I’m not getting any younger. If I don’t follow some sort of passion or dream, as I advise students to do, what’s the point?” says Otero. “My advice to others is that it’s never too late to pursue something that brings you meaning.”

José Vilson

“We need to get to know our kids for real, and we need to train our teachers to get to know them as people and not just as numbers,” says Vilson, who has taught for 11 years in Inwood/Washington Heights, N.Y.

Vilson grew up in a drug- and crime-riddled neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Coming from Dominican and Haitian heritage, he figured his students would relate to him because he came from a similar background. They do, but he says that’s not enough.

“Our current education policies don’t always align with what my students actually need,” he says. “Poverty plays a big part.”

Vilson graduated from ���ϲ����� with a degree from the . He got a job out of school with the New York City Teaching Fellows program, teaching at-risk students, who were predominantly African American and Latino. He knew he’d found his calling and went on to earn a master’s in math education from the City University of New York.

Vilson began teaching in 2005, four years after the No Child Left Behind Act passed Congress. From the beginning, he could see that the system was not serving his disadvantaged students. In 2007, he began blogging (thejosevilson.com), at first reflecting on his experiences and ultimately using the Internet to call for change in education policy.

He says he tries to address issues that need to be talked about but aren’t, a mission that prompted his book “This is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education.”

“There’s a storm of books from writers who have left education for various reasons, but I didn’t see that book from the teacher who stayed,” says Vilson, who decided to fill that void. “People need to know why it is we stay despite all the nonsense.”

The book, published in spring 2014 by Haymarket Books, has received wide attention, putting Vilson in the spotlight as an education activist. He’s appeared in media—including PBS, NPR, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post— and has been listed as a top education blogger and a top teacher. He’s also been approached by publishers and has two book deals in the works.

“As a teacher, I decided to talk about education policy because there are very few teachers who are able to influence policy makers the way I have,” says Vilson. “If you’re in a field where you feel there is a missing hole, a missing part of the narrative, I think it’s important to get out there and fill that space.”

But his primary passion remains in the classroom. “My greatest challenge is just trying to get every one of my students to excel academically,” he says. “Trying to figure out how best to meet every child’s needs sometimes seems insurmountable.”

Larry Martin

Martin has served at the helm of ���ϲ�����’s Office of Program Development since 1995, engaging the University’s African American and Latino alumni at unprecedented levels.

During his 20-year tenure, the Office of Program Development hosted nine alumni reunion weekends and eight off-campus trips, including a journey to South Africa for 140 alumni in 2007; raised and awarded more than $3.1 million in scholarship aid to talented African American and Latino Students through the Our Time Has Come Scholarship Fund; published a semi-annual magazine, The ���ϲ����� Manuscript; produced art exhibits (in partnership with the Community Folk Art Center) featuring some of America’s pre-eminent artists, including Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Pérez Celis and Gordon Parks; and led efforts to retire the jersey of one of ���ϲ�����’s greatest sport stars, pioneering airman Wilmeth Sidat-Singh ‘39.

“Larry Martin has been a fixture at ���ϲ����� for more than four decades and made enormous contributions to University life,” says Chancellor Kent Syverud. “He has worked hard to engage and connect alumni, especially African American and Latino alumni, with one another and with the University. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who has done more to build meaningful relationships between them and our students and faculty. Larry is a steward of the University, and I know his impact will be felt across campus and among alumni for years to come.”

In addition, Martin was instrumental in organizing efforts to recognize the ���ϲ����� 8—nine members of the ���ϲ����� football team who boycotted the team in 1970 to protest inequities within the athletic program. In 2006, the former players were awarded the Chancellor’s Medal for Outstanding Achievement and cited for their extraordinary courage. Last year, their story gained a wider audience through the book “Leveling the Playing Field: The Story of the ���ϲ����� 8,” published by ���ϲ����� Press.

“For years, we thought that our sacrifice had been forgotten and Larry revived it in the eyes of the University,” says Greg Allen ’72, a member of the ���ϲ����� 8 and a retired insurance executive. “His efforts brought us back into the ���ϲ����� family and washed away years of bitterness.”

“Larry has not only been a University administrator, but probably one of the most prolific fundraisers, counselors and community organizers at the institution,” adds ���ϲ����� Trustee Deryck Palmer ’78, a partner in the New York City law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLC. “He has been highly effective in achieving successes that are in the best interest of a diverse community while building relationships across the country and serving as a role model and inspiration to students on campus.”

Martin joined ���ϲ����� as director of development in 1977 and was part of the task force that built the Carrier Dome, the first facility of its kind on a college campus. Following the successful campaign to complete the Dome on time and within budget, he subsequently became part of the $35-million Capital Campaign team and represented the university in the Midwest, cultivating and soliciting alumni for major gifts to the University.

“Larry has lived and breathed ���ϲ����� for much of his professional life, and to say he will be missed would be a tremendous understatement,” says Matt Ter Molen, chief advancement officer and senior vice president. “His passion for the University, his commitment to making it a better place to work and study, and his endless quest to engage our alumni have been nothing short of extraordinary.”

In 1983, Martin was part of the group that planned and managed the inaugural $1 million School of Education Scholarship Fund, which later became the Burton Blatt Scholarship Fund. In 1986, he spearheaded ���ϲ�����’s efforts to establish a presence on the West Coast. Along with trustees Joe Lampe ’53, G’55, Marshall Gelfand ’50, Jim Miller ’63 and in collaboration with the , he created the “Hollywood Program.” This program gave Newhouse students a behind-the-scenes look at the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, providing them with the unique opportunity to meet with prominent writers, producers, agents and entertainment executives such as Dick Clark ’51, Peter Guber ’64, Rob Light ’78, Ron Meyer, PhD ’10, Mark Tinker ’73 and others. The innovative program later became the “Semester in LA.”

“Through the years, Larry has interfaced with some of the University’s most influential alumni and engendered their loyalty to the University,” says ���ϲ����� football legend Floyd Little ’67. “I know of no better ambassador for ���ϲ����� than Larry Martin.”

“It’s been a great journey that has exceeded all of my professional and personal expectations,” says Martin. “Along the way I have met many talented alumni and friends who have helped propel ���ϲ����� forward in many ways.”