Xiaoxia “Silvie” Huang

With “Engaging Refugee and Immigrant Youth in STEM Through Culturally Relevant and Place-Based Digital Storytelling,” — an associate professor in the program—aims to engage culturally and linguistically diverse refugee and immigrant middle school students in co-designing culturally relevant and place-based STEM learning experiences through immersive, virtual reality (VR) storytelling. The goal? To support their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and career aspirations.

During this two-year project, Huang, a project investigator, will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team, including co-PIs Professor (School of Education) and Professor (). Also joining the research team are professors and () and professors and ().

“During the VR storytelling co-design process, local middle schoolers will expand their STEM disciplinary knowledge and skills in agriculture, environmental science, and entry-level computer coding,” says Huang. “This learning will be deeply rooted in their lived experience, with immersive stories that interweave their identities, cultures, and interaction with local environments. The goal of this project is to increase participants’ STEM learning, identity and self-efficacy, and to broaden their interests in STEM career pathways.”

The project team will collaborate with various community partners and organizations during its implementation, including , the , ��and interconnected projects and programs organized through the (including Natural Science Explorers and Write Out). Huang’s project also will engage 10 ���ϲ����� undergraduate and three graduate students as mentors for the middle school participants.

“This exciting and interdisciplinary research project brings together collaborators from four different schools and colleges and a host of community partners to advance culturally sustaining STEM opportunities for refugee and immigrant students in the local ���ϲ����� community,” says Professor Beth Ferri, Associate Dean for Research, School of Education. “Drawing on cultural and community assets and engaged interdisciplinary learning, the project is as ambitious as it is innovative.”

Huang expects the project will produce not only the young participants’ digitally immersive stories but also curriculum modules for facilitators and participants, supporting the co-design process, as well as a practical guide for using community-based research to involve refugee and immigrant youth in STEM.

Selected from submissions made at the foundation’s annual application deadline in February 2024, these projects—exhibitions, publications and other public presentations—expand understanding, methods and platforms of contemporary architecture discourse and feature work by architects, archivists, artists, curators, designers, educators and other professionals working with organizations worldwide in cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Nashville, Athens, New York and Chicago, where the Graham Foundation is based.

‘Ethical Narratives: Essays by Richard Ingersoll (1949–2021)’

Richard Ingersoll

School of Architecture faculty , associate professor (lead editor), and , architecture field studies coordinator at ���ϲ����� Abroad Florence; along with , and have been awarded funding to support their publication, “Ethical Narratives: Essays by Richard Ingersoll (1949–2021).”

The book, under contract with Actar Publishers, assembles key texts, drawings and images by and of Richard Ingersoll, the prominent architectural historian, critic and educator who wrote prolifically for the world’s leading architectural publications from the 1980s until his passing in 2021.

Ingersoll was a rare voice in the field, admired for his global and ethical perspective that relentlessly challenged architects and students to consider the environmental and social impacts of their work. He rigorously contextualized his topics within larger historical and cultural frameworks, tying them to today’s pressing ecological and political imperatives.

“Ingersoll’s writing was characterized by its gentle persistence and foresight, setting him apart in his field. This book seeks not only to capture his nimble intellect but also aims to underscore the creative, playful and generous aspects of his life and personality,” says Davis.

This compilation of more than 30 of Ingersoll’s most impactful texts (selected from over 350 essays and lectures) are organized thematically, centered on Ingersoll’s primary polemics, including social justice and climate change. Observations and recollections offered by his colleagues, friends and students, including Margaret Crawford, Luis Fernandez-Galiano, Liane Lefaivre, Pippo Ciorra and others, offer additional insight into the extraordinary man behind the words.

Richard Ingersoll, “Istanbul,” ca. 1982. Watercolor on paper, 18 x 12 inches (Photo courtesy of the Ingersoll Estate)

“Professor Ingersoll, a long-time faculty member of our Florence program, was an impressive intellectual figure and this collection of essays—which also includes reflections by some of the most important architects and critics in contemporary architecture—will be of great interest to anyone interested in architecture’s ethical and political impact on late 20th and early 21st century culture,” says Michael Speaks, dean of the School of Architecture.

“Congratulations to Associate Professor Lawrence Davis and the entire team of architects and editors on receiving a prestigious Graham Foundation organizational grant to support the publication of this important collection of essays by Richard Ingersoll,” says Speaks.

“Our international editorial team is extremely grateful for this vital funding from the Graham Foundation,” says Davis. “The book editors would also like to thank Caroline Bowling, graduate research and design intern, for her ongoing work and Dean Speaks for his support.

The new grantees join a worldwide network of organizations and individuals that the has supported over the past 68 years. In that time, the Foundation has awarded more than 44 million dollars in direct support to over 5,100 projects by individuals and organizations around the world.

Saba Siddiki

The funding is provided by the NSF’s Smart and Connected Community program and aims to foster a Community-Responsive Electrified and Adaptive Transit Ecosystem to tackle challenges that arise in the planning, operations and management of public bus fleet electrification.

According to Siddiki and fellow project researchers, public bus fleets—including transit and school buses—represent a prime opportunity for transportation electrification and associated improvements in environmental quality and health benefits in impacted communities.

The widespread adoption of electric buses has been hindered by an array of complex and interrelated planning, operational and managerial challenges, they say. Among them are range limits, long charging time, expenses, low bus utilization ratios, equipment downtime, an underdeveloped workforce, and diverse stakeholder interests and priorities.

The research team seeks to overcome these hurdles with a holistic approach that includes the integration of intelligent technology development with community needs. Sustainability and transportation access will be focal points in their research and solution design.

The project will involve the development of intelligent tools for effective and data-driven decision-making regarding bus electrification. The project will also assess collaborative governance in public bus fleet electrification planning and policymaking. In addition, in collaboration with industry and community partners, the project will contribute to the development of a workforce to facilitate a sustainable future for electrified public bus transportation.

“Through these various activities, the project aims to support a scalable, transferable and sustainable path for bus electrification,” says Siddiki.

Siddiki co-authored a paper published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition in August 2023 that presented findings on research related to the topic of transportation electrification. She and fellow writers examined pathways in American cities with varying degrees of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) adoption and policy activity took to encourage PEV adoption in the late 2010s. They found that transportation electrification in cities was streamlined through the work of PEV advocates that collaborated across sectors.

This recent work builds on previous projects Siddiki has conducted examining public sector policies to encourage electric vehicle adoption as well as factors informing individual vehicle uptake.

Siddiki is the Chapple Family Professor of Citizenship and Democracy and director of the master of public administration program and the Center for Policy Design and Governance. Her research focuses on policy design, collaborative policymaking, institutional theory and analysis, and regulatory implementation and compliance.

“Professor Siddiki’s leadership of the Center for Policy Design and Governance and her broader interdisciplinary work, collaborations and scholarship elevates the visibility and relevance of the research being done as well as the diverse audiences that are impacted by the outcomes and the external funding being prioritized to support evidence-based policy and implementation,” says Dean David M. Van Slyke.

The project research team is led by principal investigator Jie Xu of George Mason University. In addition to Siddiki, it also includes Wenying Ji, Ran Ji, Vivian Motti, David Wong and Fengxiu Zhang, all of George Mason University, and Jundong Li of the University of Virginia.

The program, NRT-URoL: Emergent Intelligence Research for Graduate Excellence in Biological and Bio-Inspired Systems (EmIRGE-Bio), will support the integration of research and education on emergent intelligence in both biological and bio-inspired systems and allow doctoral students to work and experience team-building across disciplinary and departmental boundaries.

Lisa Manning speaks at a previous BioInspired Symposium. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

“Many of society’s most pressing challenges—including food security, sustainability and supporting aging populations—will require breakthroughs in biotechnology and bio-inspired science,” says , William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), who is principal investigator (PI). “This program will train a new generation of scientists and engineers who can evaluate and harness complex systems, such as biological tissues or next-generation materials, to drive intelligent responses such as sensing, actuating and learning, leading to breakthrough technologies.”

Co-PIs are , associate professor of biology and chemistry in A&S; , associate director of BioInspired and Renée Crown Professor in the Sciences and Mathematics and associate professor of biology in A&S; , Samuel and Carol Nappi Research Scholar and associate professor of biomedical and chemical engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS); and , associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in ECS.

BioInspired director , professor of biomedical and chemical engineering in ECS, says, “the Research Traineeship Program is currently one of—if not the most—competitive funding programs at the National Science Foundation. Receipt of the award speaks to the existing strength of graduate education in BioInspired fields at ���ϲ����� and to the exciting new opportunities and programming that Lisa and the team designed and proposed and now stand poised to deliver.”

The EmIRGE-Bio program will feature advanced core disciplinary courses in areas foundational to biotechnology and bio-inspired design; the development of two new courses utilizing team-based learning paradigms; and a longitudinal professional development program. It will also include a STEM entrepreneurship course offered by the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, an internship program and a co-curricular workshop series on project management and technology transfer.

Some 115 Ph.D. students from fields that span the life and physical sciences and engineering are expected to take part in the training, which the research team says will address a STEM workforce gap identified by local and national partners in industry and academe.

“Emergence in biology and bio-inspired design is one of the University’s signature areas of strength, and we have seen that borne out by the success of BioInspired since its founding in 2019,” says Interim Vice Chancellor, Provost and Chief Academic Officer . “This initiative draws on that strength and supports our long-term strategic goal to transform STEM at ���ϲ����� and enhance graduates’ potential for success in a swiftly evolving marketplace.”

Adds , vice president for research: “The NRT award will advance BioInspired in ways that are core to ���ϲ�����’s identity: recruiting and retaining a diverse student population, advancing cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and education and providing our students with the entrepreneurial skills needed in the 21st century workforce.”

Angela Oliverio

Each fermented food—kombucha, sauerkraut or sourdough bread—is the result of an active, unique microbiome, which is the microbial community in a particular environment. A sourdough starter, for instance, is a distinctive community of yeasts and bacteria that ferments carbohydrates in flour and produces carbon dioxide gas, making bread dough rise before baking.

Microbiomes often bump into each other, such as when two people shake hands. They can trade microbes while keeping their original integrity intact. However, microbiomes can be accidentally or purposely mixed, creating new microbial systems and functions. Agricultural soils and their microbiomes are often blended and reassembled to improve crop productivity.

Scientists term these mixing events as community coalescence, but little is known about this process or its outcomes.

“We have a poor understanding of community coalescence,” says��, an assistant professor of biology. “We lack a theoretical framework to help predict what happens during coalescence, and we lack model systems to test its effects.”

Oliverio has been awarded a����to study the mechanisms of community coalescence in synthetic microbiomes constructed in the lab. Her team uses microbial model systems that are easy to culture and replicate.

“We aim to learn how microbiomes reassemble when they mix,” Oliverio says. “We want to see how mixing events impact the function of microbiomes and how often new communities with novel functions form.”

The Olivero lab houses a library of 500 global sourdough starter samples previously collected from community scientists globally. Her co-investigator at Tufts University has developed a library of kombucha samples.

The researchers are addressing fundamental questions about how complex systems work.

“We are culturing different isolates from these wild samples that we can then put together in synthetic communities and coalesce them with each other,” Oliverio says. “We will use genomics tools to see if there are attributes at the genome level that we can use to predict how coalescence will occur.”

Oliverio’s team plans to use RNA tools to understand how the transcription of communities shifts when they encounter another community or microbiome.

Samples of microbial cultures from Oliverio’s lab.

“These genomic tools could offer us hypotheses about how this process occurs at a metabolic level, so we can predict which community components will be successful,” says Oliverio. “But we also think we can develop useful tools for microbiome engineering with a potential to improve manipulation of microbiomes that are relevant to medicine and industry.”

Oliverio plans to take advantage of the appeal of fermented food systems to increase public interest in microbiology.

“People have questions about food, especially sourdough starters, and that’s a good way to connect with people and perhaps get them excited about microbiology,” she says. “Everyone wants to tell me about their sourdough starter, and that’s a starting point for a conversation.”

She is developing an undergraduate course in computational biology and genomics, using sourdough starters as a “charismatic tool” to learn those topics.

“The idea is that students will start their own sourdough culture, isolate microbes from it, sequence those microbes, and then learn how to assemble and analyze genomes from their own sample.”

Story by John H. Tibbetts

The three-year grant supports the creation of a unique oral history archive and course development focused on the history and ethics of public health pandemic response and faculty and doctoral student training that centers humanities knowledge and methods.

From left: Marian Moser Jones, Amy Fairchild and Cheryl Healton

The educational and research resource will create “new, urgently needed, accessible opportunities for the humanities to speak to public health and broaden access to humanities higher learning opportunities,” says , professor at the Maxwell School, who is principal investigator (PI). Co-PIs are , associate professor of health services management and policy at The Ohio State University, and , founding dean and professor of public health policy and management at the School of Global Public Health at New York University (NYU).

The research team has already conducted nearly 100 interviews with state and local health officials, delving into their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. A planned third phase of the oral history initiative will result in approximately 150 interviews from 40 states and two territories that will become part of a digital archive, “Stewards in the Storm,” housed at ���ϲ�����’s .

Widespread public and political backlash against protective health measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and against those who were trying to implement those measures—has had a lasting impact on public health, including ongoing staff shortages and attempts to sharply curtail public health authorities needed to preserve life. In their initial rounds of interviews, the research team found that 36 percent of health officials reported receiving death threats, and 24 percent reported serious threats to their families—with women and people of color more likely to receive such threats.

The third round of interviews is important, Healton says, “because it ensures a resource with a broad, nationally inclusive sample that both researchers and instructors can use to conduct reliable, valid research and to develop strong humanities content in courses that reach both public health and humanities students.”

In addition to expanding the interviews, the researchers also plan to establish a hands-on “Backlash Lab” that will introduce students to the history and ethics of public health, oral history interviewing techniques, qualitative coding strategies and techniques, and quantitative analysis. The lab, anchored at ���ϲ�����, Ohio State and NYU, will also create partnerships with colleges that have historically served Black, Hispanic or first-generation students. Students will code interviews and write case studies to be used in undergraduate and graduate courses as well as professional settings.

Additionally, a survey course, Pandemics: History, Ethics, Politics and Policy, will be developed collaboratively and offered at ���ϲ�����, Ohio State, NYU and Cornell University, with the aim of extending it to other collaborating institutions and other schools and programs in public health. The course aims to cut across public health, public policy and the humanities with a focus on history, medical sociology and communications.

In years two and three of the project, the team will run two workshops for scholars teaching public health and humanities at community and four-year colleges and universities across the country, with a focus on institutions that have public health schools or programs. The workshops will introduce teachers to the techniques of oral history, suggest ways to work with the archive and extend the reach of the new course.

The project capitalizes on synergies between public health and the humanities and addresses common gaps in knowledge about public health history. “As important as easy access to primary documents related to pandemic responses are, we can further illuminate broader historical themes that enrich both the humanities and the field of public health by providing insight into peoples’ lived experiences of pandemics and pandemic response,” Moser Jones says.

“This rich body of narrative history does more than create qualitative data through oral history methods,” Fairchild adds. “Rather, it uses the experience of the pandemic as a lens that can clarify and contextualize the continuing climate of pandemic-associated backlash that has ongoing repercussions for pragmatic efforts to confront population health challenges, from reproductive rights to climate change. It is primarily the foundation for humanistic investigation into the ways in which governmental responses to crises are social products and reflect the societies in which people live and die.”

Selected from nearly 600 submissions, 84 individuals—including established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians and writers—were given the prestigious annual grants for their publications, research, exhibitions, films, site-specific installations and digital initiatives that expand contemporary ideas of architecture through innovative rigorous interdisciplinary work on design and the built environment.

“Congratulations to both Professor Brown and Assistant Professor Myers,” says Michael Speaks, dean of the School of Architecture. “These awards are among the most prestigious in architecture and the fine arts and will help these professors and, indeed, our school to advance scholarship and research in our discipline.”

‘Women Architects and Global Solidarity Across the Cold War Divide: The International Union of Women Architects, 1963–1993’

Lori Brown

Lori A. Brown, along with , senior lecturer in architectural design at the University of Melbourne, have been awarded funding to support their research project, “Women Architects and Global Solidarity Across the Cold War Divide: The International Union of Women Architects, 1963–1993.”

Feminist architectural history has frequently been organized around individual figures or national historiographies, but rarely around the transnational networks that connect women architects into a global feminist movement. This project uncovers a key transnational women’s organization: the International Union of Women Architects (UIFA), founded in 1963, to narrate a new global history of women’s organizing in architecture. Spanning a diversity of sites from Berlin, Bucharest, Cape Town, Iran, Paris and Seattle, during the years 1963–93, UIFA’s membership crossed 90 countries, and the organization attracted powerful women patrons—from the Empress of Iran to Princess Grace of Monaco. This geographic reach offers a sharp lens for investigating how women architects organized across the Cold War divide and how nation states mobilized the UIFA global conferences to promote their own political aspirations, including state feminism.

International Union of Women Architects, Ramsar, Iran (Photo courtesy of Noushin Ehsan)

“We are honored that our research project is receiving support from the Graham Foundation,” says Brown. “This grant recognizes the innovative quality of the project which locates women architects in a transnational organization that was advocating for women’s professional equity. This research will redraw the map of women’s architectural history to understand the diversity of places and people shaping architecture in the second half of the 20th century.”

Here There Be Dragons, Season Four: Odes[s]a

Jess Myers

Urbanist Jess Myers has been awarded funding to support Odes[s]a, season four of her narrative documentary podcast, “,” which explores the gaps between residents’ security concerns and the responses their governance structures make visible in policy and design decisions.

After seasons on New York, Paris, and Stockholm, season four of “Here There Be Dragons” turns to the Black Sea to focus on the diasporic and residential communities of Odesa, Ukraine, and how they navigate the question of safety. The podcast’s title is inspired by medieval cartographer’s depiction of sea monsters and demons hovering over unexplored land or dangerous territories, accompanied by the phrase hic sunt dracones, “here be dragons.” The dragons are symbolic of the systems of uncertainty and fear that define the borders of a known territory. Each season explores contemporary urban territories and engages with residents on the concept of security narratives and the “dragons” that perpetuate them. Resident experiences reveal the impact that urban policy, design decisions and social histories have over time, recognizing the shift in the landscape of post-9/11 security politics in which the growth of cities is inextricably linked to the proliferation of securitized development. The podcast navigates the hidden post-occupancy studies that lurk in mundane encounters with city life.

“Studio Collage” by Jess Myers

“The Graham Foundation’s support allows me to refine and elevate research on Odesa, Ukraine in a period where this work is particularly difficult,” says Myers. “I am immensely grateful for funding that will allow me to pursue the rigor that residents’ stories deserve.”

The 2024 grantees join a worldwide network of individuals and organizations that the has supported over the past 68 years. In that time, the Foundation has awarded more than 44 million dollars in direct support to over 5,100 projects by individuals and organizations around the world.

Heflin is principal investigator on the project Did Physical Presence Waivers Impact WIC Participation During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A doctoral student in public administration and international affairs, Clay Fannin, is also a researcher on the project.

Colleen Heflin

Using the $30,000 grant, they are examining whether remote service waivers—which allowed users to apply for the program from home during COVID—impacted children’s participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children program (WIC). WIC is a federal assistance program for health care and nutrition of low-income pregnant, breastfeeding and postpartum birthing people, as well as children under five who are found to be at nutritional risk. During COVID, the number of children participating in WIC increased, but with wide variance among states. The project will try to determine if there is a causal relationship between WIC caseload size and the issuance of physical presence waivers using variation both within and across agencies in different local conditions.

Funding is provided through the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) which supports research on issues and trends in agriculture, the environment and rural economies to inform public and private decision making.

Past research by Heflin on federal nutrition assistance programs has been supported by organizations including the ERS. For instance, Heflin was principal investigator for an ERS-funded project titled “SNAP Uptake and School Readiness in Virginia,” and a project funded by the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research that explored the relationship between SNAP eligibility and medical expenses.

Heflin is a research affiliate at the Center for Aging and Policy Studies and a senior research associate at the Center for Policy Research and Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health. Her area of expertise is in food insecurity, nutrition and welfare policy and the well-being of vulnerable and low-income populations. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2002.

Story by Michael Kelly

Alexander Charters

Alexander N. Charters (1916-2018) was an internationally recognized American expert in the field of adult and continuing education. ���ϲ����� Libraries has assembled historical documents and University records, including manuscript, print, visual and media materials related to adult education since 1949.

This material is known collectively as the Alexander N. Charters Library for Educators of Adults, in recognition of Charters’ efforts to promote and expand SCRC’s adult education holdings. Through the generosity of Charters, SCRC offers annual grants to one or more scholars or practitioners wishing to do research using SCRC’s adult education collections with the amount of the award dependent on the scope of the research outlined in the applicant’s proposal.

Details on the application process are available on the��.

NYSCA also awarded a $40,000 Organizational Support grant to an interdisciplinary art and storytelling collaboration by faculty from the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) and the School of Education and a separate, $20,000 award to Punto de Contacto/Point of Contact Inc.

This is a record-setting achievement for the University, since it marks the second year in a row that five faculty have received the highly competitive NYSCA awards, says Sarah Workman, associate director of research development (humanities) in the Office of Research and College of Arts and Sciences.

Duncan Brown, vice president for research, says the grants represent “an investment in the vibrant and diverse artistic voices of our faculty.”

“The breadth of this year’s awardees reflects our continued excellence in engaged scholarship in the arts, both by scholars working independently and by those working in unique collaborations— from the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Architecture, the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the School of Education,” Brown says.

Individual Artist Grants

Individual Artist grant awardees are:

Clockwise from top left: VPA faculty members Ann Clarke, Natalie Draper, Anne Laver, Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris

, associate professor of studio arts and dean emerita of VPA, for an outdoor textile installation, “Interior Landscapes.” She is using the concept of landscape writ large as a metaphor for states of mind to create sanctuary settings for reflection on the environment and the self. The installation will be developed at Stone Quarry Art Park in Cazenovia, New York.

VPA faculty members , associate professor of applied music and performance (organ), and , assistant professor of music composition/theory and history, for their project, “Reimagining the Organ—A Composer Portrait Project by Anne Laver and Natalie Draper.” Draper will write three new musical works that expand and diversify the classical organ repertoire. The pieces will be part of a new commercial recording and a contemporary music festival.

Canary Lab co-directors and VPA faculty members , associate professor of art photography, and��received a grant for their project, “Watershed.” The work reflects on the historical, spiritual and ecological significance of the Mahikannituk (Hudson) River through photography, video, writing and a program of public engagement.

, assistant professor of architecture at the School of Architecture, for the narrative documentary podcast “Here There Be Dragons: Odes(s)a, Film, Media and New Technology.” The podcast explores contemporary urban territories and engages listeners in the concept of security narratives. Season four is about Odesa, Ukraine.

Jess Myers (School of Architecture), left, and Dana Spiotta (College of Arts and Sciences)

, professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, for��“Mutual,”��a novel about multiple generations of a family in New York. The book engages with historical and personal forms of amnesia, notions of belonging, solitude and community.

Organizational Support Grants

The $40,000 Organizational Support grant was awarded to��, assistant professor of art therapy at VPA (as principal investigator), and��, ��assistant professor of educational leadership in the��School of Education (as co-principal investigator). The grant is for their research work and curriculum development project, “This Woman’s Work: Elevating Black Women Voices in CNY Through Visual Storytelling, Freedom Makerspaces and Community Arts.”

From left: Courtney Mauldin (School of Education), Rochele Royster (VPA) and Tere Paniagua (Point of Contact)

They plan to unearth historical and present-day stories regarding abolition, health disparities and anti-Black violence and connect a cohort of oral historians with local artists to create an interactive arts exhibition. They will also co-create open art studio/makerspaces, host intergenerational storytelling workshops and create curricula for public schools and libraries to chronicle the narratives, history and artwork to create a more complete picture of local history through the lived experiences of Black women.

At Point of Contact, the award will support the organization’s annual programs in literacy and visual arts and its work as a forum for community collaboration and open dialogue, says , executive director, cultural engagement for the Hispanic community.

Hydronic Shell Technologies will implement a patented building technology that uses prefabricated, modular panels to retrofit multifamily buildings. This high-efficiency system is designed to improve indoor air quality and lower residents’ energy bills.

Photo courtesy of Hydronic Shell Technologies

Based in New York City, Hydronic Shell Technologies is a member of ���ϲ�����CoE’s Partner Program, a network of startups and established companies working on indoor environmental quality, renewable energy and other green technologies. Hydronic Shell Technologies is also an active industry collaborator in ���ϲ�����CoE’s , which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and executed in partnership with CenterState CEO.

“���ϲ����� was the birthplace of the modern HVAC industry in the early 20th century, and the culture of innovation still thrives here,” says David Goldstein, founder and CEO of Hydronic Shell Technologies. “���ϲ�����CoE and ���ϲ����� have been essential partners in helping us reach this point, and we’re thrilled to work with them and other local partners to showcase a transformative new approach to retrofitting buildings, achieving deep emissions reductions while addressing the urgent quality of life issues prevalent in affordable housing communities throughout the country.”

Hydronic Shell Technologies will work in collaboration with ���ϲ�����CoE and the University, as well as other project partners that include two ���ϲ�����CoE Partner Program members: and . The project will be implemented at a seven-story ���ϲ����� Housing Authority residential building located at 418 Fabius St. on the city’s Near West Side.

As New York State’s Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems, ���ϲ�����CoE is a hub for cutting-edge research and serves as a test bed for products that deliver clean energy solutions. Over the past twenty years, ���ϲ�����CoE has engaged more than 200 firms and organizations in collaborative projects, as well as over 75 faculty members across ���ϲ����� and partner institutions.

“We are very excited to support the efforts of Hydronic Shell Technologies,” says ���ϲ����� COE Executive Director , professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. “David and his team have designed a unique product that will make our community’s public housing stock more energy-efficient and livable.”

SOE’s (CDI) will assist Creative’s implementation of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded, $25 million, five-year All Children Succeeding initiative, which supports Uzbekistan’s mandate to improve teacher and paraprofessional inclusive education training. The consortium will help to revise education materials, update the national curriculum and enhance educational access for all students, including those with disabilities.

Sara Jo Soldovieri with local school students in Uzbekistan

Principal investigators Professor G’01, G’07, G’08 and Professor , executive director of the , will work on the initiative’s inclusive educator preparation. One project will address pre-service training for teachers and paraprofessionals in support of improved inclusive education for all children. Doctoral candidate Sara Jo Soldovieri ’18, G’19 supported the SOE team in the co-creation phase of the grant, meeting with USAID and local partners in Uzbekistan in June 2023.

To this end, CDI will audit disability-related programs, courses and certification requirements; develop inclusive curricula, syllabi and courses; create inclusive practicums and student teacher placements; prepare inclusive higher education faculty who can educate future teachers; and develop toolkits for use in inclusive schools that encompass Universal Design for Learning and assistive technologies.

Additionally, CDI will help develop a structure and process for individualized support plans for students with disabilities, prepare teachers and staff to manage these plans and strategize inclusive teaching and learning materials, including high tech (such as speech recognition and text-to-speech software) and low tech (such as adaptive writing tools and noise canceling headphones) options.

“We are excited to collaborate with Creative and the other partners to improve educational access and outcomes for students with disabilities in Uzbekistan,” says Ashby. “We will focus our efforts on in-service and pre-service teacher preparation to ensure that educators have the knowledge, skills and dispositions to educate ALL children, including students with disabilities who have been historically marginalized. We are grateful to USAID for recognizing the importance of this work.”

, Uzbekistan’s education system has historically followed a teacher-centered, textbook-driven model where all students are expected to learn the same material at the same pace, leaving little room for diverse engagement strategies.

“We are hearing from the people of Uzbekistan that they want more inclusive schools,” says Myers. “We are excited that their government has set a goal that 51% of their schools will be inclusive by 2025, and they are asking for support and collaboration on these efforts. ���ϲ����� has a long history of working on deinstitutionalization and school inclusion, and we’re thrilled to expand that work into new spaces and with new partners.”

Joining Creative and CDI to help Uzbekistan reach its inclusive and equitable education goals are , an Uzbekistani advocacy organization for people with disabilities; , an Uzbekistani civil society and development group; and the , which will provide expertise in learning assessments and English language learning.

Claudia Miller

Professor project is titled “.”

Scholars have long used algebra to study unsolved questions from geometry, such as how investigators can find measures of singularity. A singularity is a place on a curve, surface or higher dimensional space where it is not smooth—that is, it has a sharp point or crosses itself. Highly complex abstract structures are easier to understand and visualize in the smooth setting, and singularities present challenges and complexities.

The structural backbone given by algebraic geometry and commutative algebra can help investigators understand how to measure how extreme a singularity is or how far it is from being smooth. Miller will use homological methods to gain insight into these problems, helping investigators understand how to measure the extremity of a singularity, extracting information and presenting it as a visible mathematical object.

She will deploy differential forms and operators to characterize smoothness and create new algebraic structures that yield not only invariants but also tools to discover new invariants. This work on singularities can lead to applications in computer vision and medical imaging, and has connections to string theory in physics.

For the Spring 2024 semester, Miller was selected for a prestigious at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. She will be on site at the institute for a semester of talks and research activities. The intense program is reserved for distinguished mathematicians to collaborate on cutting-edge topics. She will participate in seminars and workshops, exchange ideas with other researchers in residence and mentor postdoctoral fellows. The NSF grant will enable her to travel the semester beforehand and the summer after the program to work with colleagues at other universities, both in preparation for the intense program and to continue work begun there. It will also enable her to invite visitors to ���ϲ����� to speak on their work, exchange new ideas and provide exposure for the large group of Ph.D. students in algebra in the department.

Josh Pollitz

Professor project is titled, “.”

Algebraic geometry is a central branch of modern mathematics, focusing on the study of systems of polynomial equations, which are objects that are fundamental throughout mathematics. But when polynomial equations reach higher dimensions with increased numbers of variables, the shapes of algebraic geometry become harder to visualize. Commutative algebra provides a framework or language for seeing and understanding the properties of shapes in higher dimensional algebraic geometry.

Pollitz will investigate singularities in commutative algebra through the lens of various homological constructions. Homological algebra is the study of certain structures in math and how they correspond.

A highly complex equation is easier to visualize when it is smooth. But a singularity, a sharp point or crossing in an otherwise smooth surface of a higher-dimensional mathematical object, makes visualizing the equation’s shape more difficult. Homological tools can help investigators understand how to measure the extremity of a singularity, extracting information and presenting it in the form of a visible mathematical object. This research could have potential applications in a variety of mathematical areas, as well as real-world applications through fields such as cryptography.

He plans to use the NSF grant to travel and speak about his research at universities and increase the visibility and strength of ���ϲ�����’s , which meets weekly and brings in outside speakers with new ideas and encourages graduate students to travel and speak at conferences. This grant, which can be difficult for early-career investigators to secure, will support postdocs, graduate and undergraduate student research. A long-term goal of the grant is establishing ���ϲ����� as a hub for commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.

Story by John H. Tibbetts

Kristy Buzard

, associate professor of economics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, is part of a research team that recently received funding from the Women in Economics and Mathematics Research Consortium to investigate the mechanisms that contribute to gender disparities in economics professions.

The research team for the project, “What Attracts and Deters Women from Economics,” includes Laura Gee of Tufts University as principal investigator and Olga Stoddard of Brigham Young University and Buzard as co-principal investigators. Using the $157,065 grant, they will investigate the causes of women’s underrepresentation in economics and design interventions to increase the low rates of participation by women in the field. The project involves a field experiment across multiple sites and stages of professional development, including high school and entering college.

Previous work by the team has shown that gender-biased stereotypes and beliefs, institutional and covert forms of sexism, and expectations about career paths or caregiver responsibilities differentially affect women and men in educational and professional settings.

The Women in Economics and Mathematics Research Consortium was created by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in partnership with the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession (CSWEP) and with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. The CSWEP-SSRC funds research and interventions to promote the presence and success of women in the economics and mathematics disciplines.

In March 2023, the same research team received a $64,300 grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for another field experiment on gender-based inequality. The experiment found that mothers are 1.4 times more likely to be contacted by school than fathers. The study has received media attention, such as on National Public Radio’s “,” which discusses recent papers in economics.

Buzard is a Melvin A. Eggers Economics Faculty Scholar and senior research associate for the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration. In addition to issues of gender inequality, her work explores international trade agreements and how international institutions, domestic politics and economic and legal arrangements impact cooperation on trade and related issues.

Story by Michael Kelly

The two centers, both based in the , were invited to join the project earlier this year, after the local sheriff’s office received a $1.2 million grant from the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant and Substance Use Program. The funding is provided by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to support state and local governments in their response to opioid and other illicit substance abuse.

Hannah Patnaik (left) and Alexandra Punch and their teams in Maxwell are collaborating with the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office on a project to reduce the impact of opioids and other illicit drugs in the county.

“The Lerner Center and X Lab will aid them in evaluating their processes and outcomes associated with their grant-funded programs to build strong coordination between custody and community-based treatment and establish peer recovery support services for individuals leaving jail and returning to the community,” says , director of the Lerner Center and the project’s principal investigator. “The ultimate goal of the Onondaga County project is to reduce the impact of illicit opioids, stimulants and other substances on individuals and communities.”

Punch is joined in the project by , managing director of the Maxwell X Lab. The X Lab uses data, behavioral science and real-life testing to find better ways for governments and nonprofits to operate. In 2018, for instance, it gained national recognition for its work with the City of ���ϲ����� to recoup nearly $1.5 million in delinquent property taxes with handwritten notes from the mayor and other city officials.

For this project, the X Lab will evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment and recovery support services designed to specifically aid individuals navigating the criminal justice system, Patnaik says. “We will use our extensive experience with randomized control trials and quasi-experimental methodological techniques to evaluate their key goals, objectives and outcomes of interest and accurately estimate the impact of the program,” she says.

The project complements another project by the Lerner Center and X Lab to evaluate substance abuse treatment and recovery support service systems treating people with opioid use disorders. Both centers have partnered with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to evaluate systems in 10 geographically diverse opioid courts in New York state.

“While there is some overlap in the goals of these two projects, the programs being evaluated are different. The opioid courts project focuses on the pre-trial population, while the collaboration with the sheriff’s office focuses on individuals either awaiting trial or transfer to another facility,” Punch says. “Both programs aim to medically stabilize individuals identified as having a substance use disorder navigating the criminal justice system.”

For the Onondaga County project, the X Lab and Lerner Center are monitoring treatment outcomes and analyzing how the medication-assisted treatment program “tracks and complies with state-mandated reporting requirements, inmate linkage to recovery peer services, treatment services and discharge planning,” says Punch.

The X Lab and Lerner Center were recommended for the project by administrators at ���ϲ�����-based health care provider Crouse Health. Crouse has served as a substance use treatment partner for the sheriff’s office and has collaborated on prior projects with the Lerner Center, including Plans of Safe Care, a community-wellness project aimed to support soon-to-be mothers with substance use disorders.

For Punch, working with community organizations and helping vulnerable members of the population is an ideal combination.

“The opportunity to evaluate programming and recommend solutions to complex issues of illicit drug use is my passion,” she says. “I also really love working with the Maxwell X Lab. They are a fantastic group of researchers who look at every project from a unique perspective and provide such care to their evaluations. I always learn so much from them, which typically fuels more opportunities to collaborate on future projects.”

Story by Sophia Moore

The program supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. The grants are considered the NSF’s most competitive awards in support of early-career faculty.

The 2023 recipients are:

• , Thonis Family Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and assistant professor, College of Arts and Sciences (A&S)
• , assistant professor of chemistry, A&S
• , assistant professor of physics, A&S
• , assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science
• , assistant professor of chemistry, A&S

Bhattacharya is a climate scientist who uses evidence from the geological past, including former instances of climate change, to understand how rainfall will change in the future as a result of global warming. Her lab uses organic molecules, as well as climate models, to reconstruct ancient patterns of temperatures and rainfall. She is currently working on using the geological past to understand the processes that will drive extremes in droughts and flooding in the 21st century.

Makhlynets works at the intersection of chemistry and biology to produce “smart” biomaterials such as stimuli-responsive hydrogels that promote wound healing and antimicrobial hydrogels. She also studies how the human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae controls manganese levels inside cells and how the redesign of small and stable non-enzymatic proteins catalyzes chemical reactions.��

Patteson researches the mechanical properties of living materials and how cells navigate the physical features of their environment. She is presently investigating the role of the structural protein vimentin in cell motility. She is testing the mechanisms by which vimentin protects the cell nucleus against damage caused by cellular stress and inflammation.

Shan researches the mechanics of tunable dry adhesion for the design of soft grippers that can manipulate delicate and small objects. Shan’s team previously explored ways to adjust the adhesion abilities of soft composite structures containing smart materials with tunable stiffness triggered by heat. He was granted a patent in spring 2022 for that discovery and has now filed a provisional patent for a new method that uses low pressure to achieve tunable adhesion.

Steinhardt designs and synthesizes molecular probes that bind native dopamine and serotonin receptors. The Steinhardt lab is interested in creating chemical tools to understand how these critical receptors (especially DRD2, 5HT2A, and 5HT2C) contribute to learning, mental illness and addiction and neurodegenerative disease.

Alexander Charters

Alexander N. Charters (1916-2018) was an internationally recognized American expert in the field of adult and continuing education. ���ϲ����� Libraries has assembled historical documents and University records, including manuscript, print, visual and media materials related to adult education since 1949.

This material is known collectively as the Alexander N. Charters Library for Educators of Adults, in recognition of Charters’ efforts to promote and expand SCRC’s adult education holdings. Through the generosity of Charters, SCRC offers annual grants to one or more scholars or practitioners wishing to do research using SCRC’s adult education collections with the amount of the award dependent on the scope of the research outlined in the applicant’s proposal.

Details on the application process are available on the��.

“These awards demonstrate the high esteem in which our faculty are held and will help preserve and expand the rich cultural resources of New York state,” says Duncan Brown, the University’s vice president for research. “The broad range of projects showcase ���ϲ�����’s engaged scholarship in the arts and humanities from the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the School of Information Studies.” The five awards total $80,000 and are a major achievement for arts and humanities scholarship at ���ϲ�����, he says.

“One of the aspects that I believe made these projects successful is their emphasis on underrepresented narratives, whether those were expressed in film, music, quilting or literature, along with their focus on community connection and interface,” says , assistant director, research development for humanities, in the University’s Office of Research/College of Art and Sciences. “These projects all have inclusivity at their core; they emphasize access and representation in their own way as well as including the aspects of strong community ties and community-representative themes,” Workman says.

Brice Nordquist

Faculty winning awards and securing funding for their scholarship were the following:

, associate professor of writing and rhetoric and Dean’s Professor of Community Engagement in the College of Arts and Sciences, was awarded $40,000.

The funds will be used for a project connected to����called��“The Collective Work of Repair: Connecting Youth Arts Programming and Performance through Environmental Storytelling.”��The project presents��public events, community dialogues, and youth arts programs and performances featuring diverse environmental storytellers.

Previous and upcoming events include the following:

• “Indigenous Filmmaking as Environmental Justice,” a film screening and storytelling workshop highlighting indigenous environmental justice work, featuring Seneca Nation member Jason Corwin
• “Writing Out of our Inner Landscapes,” a reading and interactive community writing workshop with poet and scholar Vievee Francis, which explores and redefines eco-poetry
• “Environmental Justice is Racial Justice is Reproductive Justice,” a public dialogue and healing circle with community educator, health activist and poet SeQuoia Kemp. The event traces relationships between environmental racism, reproductive justice and the production of maternal toxic zones.
• “Nonviolent Action from Civil Rights to Climate Justice,” a public talk and nonviolent direct-action training with activist and author George Lakey on ecojustice at the intersections of race, class, queerness and the climate crisis

��is presented by the University’s�� with SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s writing, rhetoric and communications program. It brings together scholars, teachers, students, artists and community leaders to deepen understandings of and strengthen responses to the impacts of the climate crisis on Central New York and interconnected ecosystems around the world.

Programs draw ���ϲ����� and Central New York students from kindergarten through graduate school and local residents into the collective project through interconnected courses and arts, humanities, community inquiry and STEM enrichment programs.

Individual Artist Awards

In addition, four faculty members each received $10,000 awards in the category of Support for Artists. They are the following:

Chanelle Benz

, assistant professor of English, , for her literature project, “The Labyrinth.”

The book is set on a former sugar plantation in Louisiana, centering on��Black liberation, West African-derived religions and environmental millenarianism. It explores the legacies of transatlantic slavery as they intersect with modern environmental racism and capitalistic nihilism, and the powerful nature-based connections African descendants forged for protection and survival and to link arms with their dead.

Rachel Ivy Clarke

, associate professor, , for “Material Interactions: Data-Driven Community Quilting.”

Clarke’s project takes the traditional skill of quilting and data and information science knowledge to visually and tangibly illustrate information. One of her quilted pieces, in the form of an American flag, uses colors and textures to illustrate the lack of gender and racial diversity in the U.S. Senate during the 116th Congress.

Another showcases differences between typically masculine professions that are lauded in American culture, compared to “invisible work.” Clarke plans new data-driven pieces by having attendees at community events in New York state select fabrics, colors and shapes to interactively create a collaborative quilt on the spot.

Kara Herold

, associate professor of film, , for her film project, “The Callback.”

�ճ����project is an original comedy about an artist struggling to succeed within a backwards Hollywood dream machine. The storyline features an aspiring actor whose pursuit of a role through auditions calls out an industry that offers limited and/or stereotypical roles for women, and one where women are still underrepresented onscreen and off.

The original film is co-written by Herold and her collaborator, Lisa McElroy, and directed, produced and edited by Herold. The crew consisted of five professionals and 24 students, including those in the On-Set Production class co-taught by Herold and Film and Media Arts Instructor Joe Gabriel with assistance from Associate Professor Alex Méndez Giner. Filming was done on campus and at various City of ���ϲ����� locations.

William Knuth

, assistant professor of applied music and performance (violin and viola), .

Funding is providing Knuth and classical guitarist Adam Levin, as the group Duo Sonidos, to expand chamber music for violin and guitar and develop and premiere a new musical work. Their new album targets Brazilian composers.

Legendary Brazilian guitarist and composer Sergio Assad is working with Knuth and Levin to compose a new piece based on the paintings of Brazilian female artist Tarsila do Amaral, a leading global modern artist.

The projects supported by the awarded funds are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Xin Liu

As co-founder and president of The Enlight Foundation, Liu has focused her philanthropy on projects and people who share a desire to create equal educational opportunities around the globe and nurture social entrepreneurs and change-makers.

That same desire drives the parents of Alexia Tsairis, for whom The Alexia is named. Alexia was 20 years old—a photography major in the Newhouse School—in 1988 when she was killed in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, as she was returning home from a semester abroad in London.

“All through our almost 34 years since that fateful night in 1988, we have had hopes and dreams,” says Alexia’s mother Aphrodite Tsairis. “We have been dedicated to visual journalism by supporting the important socially relevant work of professionals and by providing a platform for educating emerging photojournalists.”

Aphrodite and her husband, Peter, founded the in partnership with Newhouse in 1991 and, since then, it has awarded $1.7 million in grants to 170 students like Liu and professional photographers through annual competitions, encouraging them to heighten the impact of their work. In 2021, the program transitioned to the Newhouse School and became The Alexia.

“Our overriding interest is in the stories they produce,” says Aphrodite Tsairis. “We care about current issues that plague our crisis-ridden planet and, most importantly, how to solve them. We elevate the visual journalist to the role of change-maker, not just reporter.”

That philosophy resonates deeply with Liu. “Visual storytelling can connect people in powerful ways,” she says. “Those connections can inspire social change around the globe. Journalists, photojournalists and videographers play a vital role as change agents in our world and when we support the profession, we help amplify its impact.”

Through the , ���ϲ����� is providing an additional $1 million to enhance the impact of the Enlight Foundation’s $2 million gift. The funding creates The Alexia Endowed Chair and provides continuous support for the grants, and for teaching, research, fellowships, programmatic and educational opportunities to inspire more impactful storytelling.

“I am so thankful to Xin for having the vision to expand The Alexia,” says Bruce Strong, associate professor in visual communications and The Alexia Endowed Chair in the Newhouse School. “In addition to offering the grants, our plan is to provide fellowship opportunities for top-tier professionals so they can pull away from their hectic careers and take time to reflect, develop additional skill sets and research relevant topics before going back into the industry. This will also provide an additional opportunity for our Newhouse faculty and students to engage with accomplished visual communicators.”

Liu believes the Alexia grant helped her rise to the “top of her game.” Born and raised in China, she attended Renmin University of China with the intention of becoming a journalist. The university had just launched a new major in photojournalism, and she was immediately attracted to the idea: “I had never even touched a camera before,” she says. “But I figured that if I could do both writing and photography, I could go on assignment and do all parts of the story.”

She worked at the China Youth Daily for almost three years. While there, she was contacted by a former professor and advisor, as she had been selected as a graduate student upon graduation, and informed about The Alexia grant opportunity for students. She seized the opportunity. After a three-month internship at The Baltimore Sun, Liu arrived in Central New York in the winter of 1994 (just before a season of nonstop snow that she says destroyed two pair of her military-style boots!).

“Everything I learned in ���ϲ����� was so very different from what I had learned in China,” she says. She developed storytelling skills in photo essays and still remembers the story she crafted about a ���ϲ����� high school student who was struggling as a single mother (in fact, Liu includes these photos in an upcoming book collection that will capture pivotal moments in her life). When Liu interned at The Baltimore Sun, she “met all these amazing photojournalists, including many women, which truly encouraged me. In China, most of them were men.”

Ultimately, she was offered a full scholarship to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where she earned a master’s degree in visual communications. She worked for the Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Palm Beach Post.

Liu founded Enlight Foundation in 2004 to provide opportunities for Chinese students to study abroad. She describes how Enlight evolved to focus its philanthropy on rural education, youth leadership training and programs that would foster the growth of social entrepreneurs and changemakers. Funding for journalists became a priority more recently as the profession became more vulnerable to political attacks.

“Journalism is the fourth pillar of our society and a critical pillar of democracy,” says Liu. “International bureaus are closing. Local newspapers are dying.” Her support of The Alexia is based on her belief that journalists are witnesses to history and can influence its course. She notes that photojournalists often capture “a decisive moment” in history—an iconic image that “captures the soul of a historical era.”

Newhouse School Dean Mark Lodato says the power of great journalism and communications can be wielded to strengthen society. “The gift from Enlight, along with Xin’s vision for the future, will enable Newhouse to further broaden its reach around the globe and heighten the impact of deep thinkers and trailblazers who understand the power of storytelling to transform lives.”

Strong stresses that The Alexia grants go beyond simply recognizing great work. “The grants are essentially incubators for important projects,” he says. “We find people who desire to make a difference in the world and heighten their influence. The Alexia was created to help people understand different cultures, something we need now more than ever. Visual communication is a language that cuts across all cultures, all backgrounds, all languages. You don’t have to speak the language of the photographer to understand what they are saying in their story.”

Peter and Aphrodite Tsairis still think about what stories their daughter might have told through her photojournalism had she had a chance. “With the support of the Newhouse School, which gave us a home, we were able to channel our loss in a way that made us whole again,” says Aphrodite. “We felt closer to her as we met students and professionals who showed us what her life would or could have been had she lived. It was healing.”

Now, the promise of a young life cut short lives on in a legacy gift made by the woman who still treasures the grant that carries Alexia’s name. “This is about capacity building,” says Liu. “The capacity of storytellers around the globe to bridge cultural divides, to foster understanding, address social issues, and bring about lasting change.”

About ���ϲ�����

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Orange isn’t just our color. It’s our promise to leave the world better than we found it. Forever Orange: The Campaign for ���ϲ����� is poised to do just that. Fueled by more than 150 years of fearless firsts, together we can enhance academic excellence, transform the student experience and expand unique opportunities for learning and growth. Forever Orange endeavors to raise $1.5 billion in philanthropic support, inspire 125,000 individual donors to participate in the campaign, and actively engage one in five alumni in the life of the University. Now is the time to show the world what Orange can do. Visit to learn more.

In total, the awards combine for more than $460,000 in support for academic year 2022-23 (based on the annual value of each multiyear grant). This represents an increase of about 20% over last year.

“These grants from NSF reflect the high esteem that our faculty are held in by the mathematical community, and the impact of their research on the field,” says Graham Leuschke, professor and chair of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “We’re proud of the recognition that their scholarship has brought them. These grants are important accomplishments, and the support will allow our faculty to go on to even greater heights.”

Highlights of the grants include (in chronological order by award date):

Onninen

��received a three-year NSF grant, beginning June 2022, for his work on��. The project will explore energy-minimizing deformations and their applications to the study of non-linear elasticity—which examines how physical materials warp, bend or are otherwise altered in response to stress—and will further develop analytic and geometric tools to address the mathematical challenges the resulting constraints present.

“In a very simplistic illustration, suppose a blacksmith is hammering a hot piece of iron or steel to create a new shape,” says Onninen. “When to stop hammering? Every stroke creates an element of the energy-minimizing sequence of homeomorphisms. If the weak limit fails to be invertible, then it tells us when to stop hammering prior to the conditions favorable to the formation of cracks.”

The project will include research opportunities for graduate students over its three-year duration.

Coman

��was awarded a three-year NSF grant, beginning this July, for his project,��. The project aims to advance knowledge and understanding in the areas of complex analysis (which studies functions depending on variables that are complex numbers), complex geometry and potential theory. These critical areas of study provide powerful tools for solving important problems in fields of pure and applied mathematics (such as image and signal processing) and physics.

“I will study spaces of sections of holomorphic line bundles and the asymptotics of the related Bergman kernel functions, for example, which in physics terms are related to the quantum mechanics of particles in a magnetic field,” says Coman.

Coman will work together with colleagues at the University of Cologne, Germany, and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, for part of the research. And two current mathematics Ph.D. students, Melody Wolff and Jesse Hulse, will receive summer support under the grant.

Shen

��was another recipient of a three-year NSF grant, for his��. There is a growing problem of overly large data sets in such fields as information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, civil infrastructure and environmental science, and an increasing demand for competent data processing models. Shen is leading an effort to develop a more computationally efficient approach to optimizing data.

“The success of the proposed research will provide the opportunity for many useful and interesting applications in mathematics, computer science and medical communities,” says Shen. “Our medical collaborator at MSKCC [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center] has shown great enthusiasm in developing our methods for medical image reconstruction when low radiation doses are used in emission computed tomography.”

The projects will heavily involve graduate students, helping prepare them for the significant challenges that will continue to be posed by the big-data era. “Since the work has a strong relevance with industry, medical sciences and defense, the educational component of the proposed research will pave the way for job opportunities for students who take part,” Shen says.

Miller (left) and Wehrli

Mathematics Professor�� and Associate Professor received an NSF grant to host the on Oct. 22 at ���ϲ�����. The one-day, in-person conference brought together researchers from New York state and nearby regions, working in various areas of topology—primarily algebraic and low-dimensional—with the hopes of building a cohesive topology community in the region. Three distinguished young researchers, ��(Columbia University),�� (Swarthmore) and����(University of Massachusetts—Amherst) served as plenary speakers, and there were an additional 14 talks within parallel afternoon sessions.

The conference was the third installment of the UNYTS series, founded in 2017 by Miller and Wehrli, together with professors Inna Zakharevich of Cornell University and Adam Sikora of the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Story by Laura Wallis

Cattle grazing on grasses in California

When migratory herds graze on grasses and shrubs and move on to new territory, plants respond by growing fresh shoots. This stimulated growth absorbs atmospheric carbon in plant leaves and roots, which eventually gets trapped in grassland soils, removing it—and its heat-trapping properties—from the atmosphere. For example, when vast bison herds migrated on the Great Plains, their grazing behaviors and grassland’s subsequent carbon storage helped maintain stable ecosystems and global climate.

, professor of biology in the��, hopes more family- and tribal-run ranchers could capture additional carbon in their soils by learning from wild ecosystems. By doing so, ranchers could qualify for market certifications for climate-friendly or carbon-neutral beef that are similar to certifications for organic or antibiotic-free foods.

Large-scale beef production has come under criticism for high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. But improving specialized beef supply chains and markets for carbon-neutral beef—and innovative ranching practices—could start turning that around.

Biology Professor Mark Ritchie is part of a USDA-funded project to develop, implement and measure how beef producers can sequester greenhouse gases in grassland soils.

“Ranches could become more climate-friendly or carbon-neutral by adopting management practices that mimic some characteristics of wild grasslands,” says Ritchie.

For instance, ranchers could rotate high numbers of animals through multiple pastures and paddocks for just a few days each and then fatten them during the last feeding stage with a diet of hay and other grasses instead of corn.

Ritchie is collaborating with Sustainable Northwest, an organization based in Portland, Oregon, which recently announced receiving a $10 million grant award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The organization’s Regenerative Ranching program partners with Country Natural Beef, a cooperative of more than 100 family ranches that manage several million acres in the West.

The grant would support the nation’s largest climate-focused beef production program across nine western states. It would be among the first programs in the nation to develop, implement and measure how beef producers can sequester greenhouse gases in grassland soils.

Ritchie and his team plan to develop a computer model for ranchers based on a minimum of inputs that will use regional baseline data of soil type, soil carbon and plant life characteristics. Ranchers could plug in their location and other data about their property and determine their best course without requiring a soil test. The user-friendly model could encourage more underserved and marginal ranchers to participate in the program.

“Ranchers could see how their soil carbon would change depending on their region’s characteristics and their management choices,” says Ritchie. “The model would allow them to make predictions under different climates and soil types for how much carbon storage in soils should change based on their management choices. They could compare their current management practices to desired practices and decide what is the best fit for their situation.”

Story by John H. Tibbetts

With a $20,000 grant, the theater will be able to substantially increase the number of pay-what-you-will performances for each show remaining in its 2022/2023 season and will also bring back the Stage for All program. The two programs help ensure all community members have access to high quality live theater while removing cost as a barrier.

“There’s nothing like the joy that live entertainment brings. It’s a chance to join with family and friends, to unplug from our screens and to celebrate our vibrant arts community. We are proud to help bring that shared experience to as many members of our community as possible,” says Steve Gorczynski, Central New York regional president, M&T Bank.

According to Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing arts and arts education, improving access to the arts not only provides benefits to the individual, such as decreased stress levels and social isolation, but research shows that the arts have benefits for communities as a whole.

Art consumption provides a common bridge that increases friendship, empathy and mutual trust by bringing generations together, encouraging partnerships and intercultural understanding. A five-year study of low-income Chicago neighborhoods by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation showed that access to the arts brought 5-10% increases in housing, population and school test scores, along with decreases in crime.

The M&T Bank Pay-What-You-Will Performance Program allows 76 tickets over the course of five days for each production to be available for whatever price patrons wish to pay. The pay-what-you-will performances are available on the following dates:

• “Disney’s The Little Mermaid”: Nov. 30-Dec. 4
• “Espejos: Clean”: Feb. 15-19
• “Our Town”: March 29-April 2
• “Tender Rain”: May 3-7
• “Clue”: June 7-11

Since the pay-what-you-will program’s inception in the 2017/2018 season, more than 1,100 tickets have been purchased at a price point that community members are able to pay. The grant from M&T Bank subsidizes the gap between the actual ticket price and the amount paid for a pay-what-you-will ticket, which averages between $7 and $8.

“At ���ϲ����� Stage, we believe theater should be accessible to all,” says Bob Hupp, artistic director, ���ϲ����� Stage. “Regardless of the barrier to attendance, each of us should be able to enjoy the communal and transformational experience of sharing the intimacy of live theatre. This grant goes a long way in breaking down the barrier of price to our neighbors, and we’re grateful to M&T Bank for its generosity.”

Pay-what-you-will tickets must be claimed in person at the Box Office, 820 E. Genesee St., ���ϲ�����, or by phone, 315.443.3275, on the day of the desired performance. The box office opens at 10 a.m. and remains open through the start of the show. There is a limit of two tickets per person, and they are subject to availability.

In addition to the pay-what-you-will performances, the M&T Bank Stage for All program connects ���ϲ����� Stage to local community organizations. Deeply reduced ticket vouchers are provided to other local nonprofits to distribute to community members they serve. Tickets cost $10 for adults and $5 for children.

Two professors at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications have been awarded nearly $600,000 in funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s .

Kelly Leahy

, assistant professor of television, radio and film, and��, David J. Levidow Endowed Professor and director of the Newhouse School’s��, will study how media literacy can offer a method for mediating cognitive and emotional responses in an extended (virtual, augmented and mixed) reality environment.

Leahy, Chock and a team of student researchers will create and test media literacy interventions focused on harmful information in virtual spaces in order to inform the prevention of extremism and violent content in the metaverse.

T . Makana Chock

“Immersive virtual spaces such as virtual reality and the metaverse create more visceral emotions than traditional online spaces such as the internet,” Chock says. “This makes the virtual world a potentially high-risk environment for manipulation.”

Adds Leahy, “Terrorist recruiters and violent extremists are active in online social spaces and will most certainly target new forms of technology for their efforts to spread conspiracy theories, air grievances and craft misinformation, disinformation and ‘malinformation’ (reality-based information used to inflict harm).”

The study will identify key concepts and techniques specifically related to persuasion in extended reality contexts and apply these findings to create gamified interventions based on existing research from media literacy. These experiences will be piloted for young adults who are members of the extended reality community.

Emerging evidence suggests that people tend to feel increased empathy in virtual spaces, which could lead to increased manipulation, according to Leahy. Past research has shown that young adults are more likely to be targeted for terrorist recruitment, she adds.

“Extended reality impacts us in ways we are only just beginning to understand,” says Newhouse dean��. “The work of Professors Leahy and Chock will play an important role in increasing that understanding and shaping the way we use and moderate these spaces, especially when it comes to young people.”

TVTP seeks to help prevent incidents of domestic violent extremism and bolster efforts to counter online radicalization and mobilization to violence. The Newhouse award was one of 43 grants totaling $20 million awarded this year by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“Working in partnership with one another is how we best prevent acts of terrorism and targeted violence,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas in a press release when the grants were announced. “We are equipping local communities and organizations—including those historically underserved—with needed resources so they can become more effective partners, strengthen our security and help the American people feel safe and secure in our daily lives.”

Artist rendering of a neutron star merger. (Courtesy: NSF LIGO; Sonoma State University; A. Simonnet)

In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) observed the first detection of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime created by the cataclysmic collision of two black holes. The ��played a leading role in this monumental discovery that confirmed a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Since this first discovery, LIGO has detected dozens more black hole collisions and observed the collision of two neutron stars,��. Today, physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) are working to design Cosmic Explorer: a next-generation gravitational-wave observatory capable of seeing much further into the Universe and observing with higher precision than ever before.

Duncan Brown

Among those physicists is��, Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics and ���ϲ�����’s vice president for research. Brown was recently awarded a (NSF) to develop advanced algorithms and computational techniques to explore how astrophysical information can be extracted from the signal-rich data of future detectors.

Gravitational waves are produced by the universe’s most violent and energetic processes. When two black holes collide or massive stars explode at the end of their lifetimes, they create waves in spacetime that can be observed using gravitational-wave detectors. Cosmic Explorer will be sensitive enough to study the collisions of the remnants from the first stars that formed in the universe. But to meet the target build date in the mid-2030s, investment in technology development is needed now.

Brown will use the NSF funding to develop new algorithms to detect signals with Cosmic Explorer and understand the astrophysics encoded in the observed waves. This research will also help estimate the computational resources required to fully exploit the science potential of next-generation detectors, as well as educate a community of researchers that is ready to explore the universe within this new observational window.

“Gravitational-wave astronomy is an amazing field,” says Brown. “With Cosmic Explorer, humanity will go from its first glimpse of the gravitational-wave sky to detecting every black hole merger in the universe within a single human lifetime. We need to start preparing now for the exciting data deluge that Cosmic Explorer will bring.”

Through the educational component of this grant, undergraduate and graduate students in A&S’ physics department will learn computational skills that advance the competitiveness of the U.S. STEM workforce. This award will also support an effort to bring high-performance computing to school districts in rural Pennsylvania and promote STEM education in K-12 schools.

Jason Webb

Jason Webb G ’18, ��an instructional analyst with ITS Online Learning Services, adjunct professor in the Newhouse School and instructor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, recently received a “Create with VR” grant from Unity and Meta Immersive Learning. As part of the grant, Webb will receive 15 virtual reality (VR) headsets. The grant is awarded by three-dimensional (3D) content platform Unity and Meta, the parent company of virtual reality brand Oculus, as well as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other apps and services.

Webb plans to use the VR headsets to “help introduce students in the 3D animation and visual effects class to new ways to tell stories using 3D models along with trainings for faculty to help introduce VR to the classroom,” he says. “For my research, it will help dive into how educators can use VR to immerse students in the content.”

The grant comes at a time when extended reality is becoming more common in higher education, both in physical and virtual classrooms and in research and creative settings.

“Over the last few years, we have seen a huge swing in the use of XR (extended reality) in the classrooms, whether it be for medical, industrial, storytelling or STEM classes,” Webb says. “With increases in technology power and design, it is getting easier to access the technology for consumption and development.”

In addition to receiving the grant, Webb is now certified as a VR Educator in Unity. This semester, he will be a keynote panelist at the Inclusive Campus of the Future Conference and give a presentation on the topic of “Extended Reality in Research” at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.

Webb also is an active participant in the Extended Reality (XR) group at ���ϲ�����.

“Students and faculty can join our XR at ���ϲ����� group that meets virtually online twice a semester, and they can reach out to me (jmwebb02@syr.edu) to join the group,” says Webb. “We also have the ��website that updates information on XR projects on campus.”

Jay Golden

A climate-smart commodity is an agricultural commodity that is produced using farming, ranching or forestry practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon. As project partner, ���ϲ����� will lead one of the four primary focus areas. Over the next five years, ���ϲ����� researchers will develop and expand existing markets and develop new markets for climate-smart commodities produced in New York State—benefiting the environment, farmers and manufacturing sectors alike.

“Both governments and industry around the world are rapidly committing to a net-zero carbon economy, and in order to meet these grand challenges, the industries of today will need to find low carbon and green-tech alternatives for which biobased feedstocks and products will play a critical role,” says Jay Golden, Pontarelli Professor of Environmental Sustainability and Finance in ���ϲ�����’s Maxwell School and director of the Dynamic Sustainability Lab, who is the project’s principal investigator from ���ϲ�����.

The interdisciplinary team from ���ϲ�����, working in collaboration with Cornell University, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, New York State agencies and additional public and private partners, includes faculty and student researchers from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, School of Information Studies, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and�� Whitman School of Management. In addition, the team will work in partnership with ���ϲ����� Libraries’ Blackstone LaunchPad to develop a pipeline of new green tech and climate-smart innovators with a focus on developing new climate-smart businesses in underserved communities.

Faculty from ���ϲ����� include:

• Principal Investigator: Jay Golden, Pontarelli Professor of Environmental Sustainability and Finance in ���ϲ�����’s Maxwell School and director of the Dynamic Sustainability Lab
• Investigators:
  • Carmen Carrión-Flores, research assistant professor,��; senior research associate, Center for Policy Research
  • Peter Wilcoxen, Ajello Professor in Energy and Environmental Policy; professor of public administration and international affairs; director, Center for Environmental Policy and Administration
  • Lee McKnight, associate professor, School of Information Studies
  • Todd Moss, chair, Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises and
    associate professor of entrepreneurship, Whitman School
  • Jason Davis, research professor, Newhouse School; co-director, Real Chemistry Emerging Insights Lab
  • Regina Luttrell, associate dean for research and creative activity; co-director, Real Chemistry Emerging Insights Lab; associate professor of public relations, Newhouse School
  • Erika Schneider, assistant professor of public relations, Newhouse School

“Our ���ϲ����� team will be at the global forefront of this effort by providing public and private decision makers the ability to track and verify low and zero carbon feedstocks through the value chain; to develop important incentives and polices to support market demand; and to model the environmental, climate and economic/jobs benefit to New York and America,” Golden says. “The anticipated climate-smart commodities will serve as a platform for a new generation of low-carbon chemicals, fuels and energy sources, as well as building and construction materials and a vast array of consumer products to support the transition to a net-zero carbon economy.”

Laverne Gray

Gray will explore how culture(s), class designation, gender and community location are fashioned in a Black informational perspective. The course considers Black library and learning traditions, formal and informal information networks, information embodiment and informational resistance activities, while surveying the role social justice plays in the organizing and development of community consciousness to uncover hidden aspects of information organization and their longstanding implications of in/exclusion.

Julia White

White will explore disability as a cultural construction, which has resulted in pervasive and systemic discrimination that disabled people encounter in their everyday lives. By engaging collections rich in the history of inclusive education and disability rights, as well as the documented rise (and fall) of institutions and asylums for individuals with intellectual disabilities, the course will investigate the impact of these histories on current conceptualizations and practices in the field of special and inclusive education.

“We’re so fortunate to have the opportunity to work with both Dr. Gray and Dr. White and couldn’t be more excited by the serendipity of their pairing as a faculty cohort,” says Jana Rosinski, SCRC’s instruction and education librarian and coordinator of the SCRC Faculty Fellows Program. “To be able to support the exploration of these critical matters with materials of the places, times, happenings and people within the context of a course is such an impactful experience for students. Beyond the courses themselves, Dr. Gray and Dr. White are educators of future educators and information caretakers. These ways of thinking and creating, modes of inquiry, uncovering and critique, the very embodiment of knowledge and meaning making extends through the potential in each of their students, radiating out.”

���ϲ����� Libraries’ SCRC Faculty Fellows Program aims to support innovative curriculum development and foster new ideas about how to transform the role of special collections in University instruction. Each fellow receives a $5,000 stipend along with guidance on how to provide students with a unique opportunity to research, analyze and interpret SCRC’s primary source materials in their class and ongoing course support.

Original funding for the SCRC Faculty Fellows Program was made possible through the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which promotes the advancement and perpetuation of humanistic inquiry and artistic creativity by encouraging excellence in scholarship and in the performing arts, and by supporting research libraries and other institutions that transmit our cultural heritage.

To learn more about the SCRC Faculty Fellows Program or teaching with SCRC, contact Jana Rosinski, SCRC’s Instruction and Education Librarian at jrosinsk@syr.edu. For more information about how to financially support a faculty fellow for the 2024-25 academic year and beyond, contact Ron Thiele at rlthiele@syr.edu or 315.560.9419.

When Brice Nordquist founded the (EHN) in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) in 2020, one the main ideas guiding its mission was to build and foster relationships between members of ���ϲ����� and the surrounding communities. To help facilitate that objective, EHN offers to support faculty and students at ���ϲ����� on their publicly engaged scholarship and creative work.

Through initiatives tackling pressing issues like mass incarceration and climate change, grant awardees demonstrate how humanities knowledges and methods are used to answer urgent questions facing society.

EHN’s Engaged Communities Mini-Grants support projects like the Natural Sciences Explorer Program, where A&S faculty and students work with Central New York youth to spark their interest in science.

This year six different teams received $5,000 in seed funding to develop and implement University projects designed in collaboration with community partners. Mini-grant awardees for the 2022-23 academic year will be eligible, along with awardees from 2021-22, to apply for a $10,000 Sustaining Engagement Grant in Spring 2023 for continued work on their project.

From engaging elementary school students in scientific exploration to curating an art exhibition to illuminate Indigenous culture, this year’s winners exemplify the extensive range of scholarship across A&S. While each project is arts and humanities based, Nordquist says an important component of this initiative is promoting collaborations that take up a variety of subjects, topics and themes.

“Programs such as this year’s Natural Sciences Explorer Program and last year’s have core humanist elements even though they aren’t situated exclusively in a humanities field,” says Nordquist. “A key to this effort is supporting projects that span disciplines, are codesigned with community-based partners and have teams that are diverse in their stages of education and expertise. We hope each grant helps these partnerships grow and extend reciprocal relationships between ���ϲ����� and our community-based collaborators.”

To maximize impact, project teams will also meet with each other and members of the throughout the year to problem solve, share resources, align efforts and collectively advocate.

The NSEP works with elementary school children at the North Side Learning Center (NSLC) in ���ϲ����� to explore biology and earth and environmental sciences through inquiry-based learning and culturally responsive teaching. The program aims to instill an interest in biology and geoscience for students in groups that are traditionally underrepresented in STEM. Using tangible projects that demonstrate how science plays a role in students’ everyday lives, the NSEP hopes to inspire a curiosity that stays with them well beyond their participation in the program.

Earth and environmental sciences graduate student Eliza Hurst presents a hydrology demonstration to ���ϲ�����-area youth at the North Side Learning Center (NSLC).

They recently held a seven-week summer program focused on the Earth system as a whole. Through hands-on research, students learned about Earth’s four subsystems: the “lithosphere” (land), the “hydrosphere” (water), the “biosphere” (living things) and the “atmosphere” (air). Alongside project leaders, the young scholars explored how the different subsystems interact with one another. Students dissected owl pellets to construct a food web, which is a collection of food chains within a single ecosystem; learned about biomes, which are areas classified by species living in a particular location; and explored how temperature and moisture variations within their yards form microbiomes.

While this round of EHN funding supports their work only at NSLC now, project leaders hope to soon offer additional after-school programs at other community centers around ���ϲ�����.

Philosophy Lab

Project Lead: Michael Rieppel, associate professor of philosophy

Michael Rieppel (right) leads a philosophy discussion at Southside Academy in ���ϲ�����.

One of the most common questions children often ask is, why? That sense of wonder and feeling of puzzlement about the world, which often wanes as people reach adulthood, is what makes children perfect philosophers, says philosophy professor Michael Rieppel. But unfortunately, most elementary and middle school students rarely get to engage with philosophy, at least in the United States.

The Philosophy Lab, coordinated by Rieppel and philosophy graduate students, offers after-school programming for students in the city of ���ϲ����� that emphasizes critical philosophical tools to help students understand the importance of reasoning. The program’s primary goal is to help participants build principled answers to existential questions they may be struggling to find answers to.

Questions students explore in the Philosophy Lab include: What makes you who you are, and what kind of changes can you undergo and still be you? Are there facts about what’s right and wrong, and where do these ethical standards come from? What is consciousness, and could a computer ever be conscious?

“Our goal in exposing them to philosophy is to show them that the questions they ask are worth taking seriously, and that they themselves have the skills necessary to dig more deeply into those questions and begin to formulate their own answers to them,” says Rieppel.

The program, currently being offered at Ed Smith K-8 School in ���ϲ�����, is helping students gain a sense of empowerment and confidence in their ability to engage with philosophical questions analytically and to arrive at reasoned answers to them. Rieppel says he hopes to build on the success at Ed Smith and expand to other ���ϲ����� city schools and after school programs in the future.

Deaf New Americans – Developing Language and Sharing Stories

Project Leads: Corrine Occhino, assistant professor of languages, literatures and linguistics with a dual appointment in the School of Education, and Monu Chhetri and Tamla Htoo (co-founders of )

Corrine Occhino

Occhino, Chhetri and Htoo’s project will support Deaf resettled refugees in Central New York who are learning American Sign Language (ASL), an important step in creating self-sufficiency among the community of Deaf New Americans.

Their work aims to better understand and support the literacies of deaf refugees through the creation of English language and ASL instructional materials. In collaboration with Deaf New Americans Advocacy Inc., a Central New York-based non-profit that advocates for and provides services to the local Deaf community, Occhino will develop bilingual ASL materials for Deaf resettled refugees in ���ϲ�����. The project will include a video storytelling component to document the challenges and lived experiences of Deaf New Americans across contexts to bring awareness of their existence and needs.

Through a separate collaboration with Nordquist, Occhino will also set up a remote tutoring program for the hearing children of Deaf refugees who are second language learners of English.

Peter Jones Exhibition and Programming

Project Leads: Sascha Scott, associate professor of art history, and Scott Manning Stevens, Citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and associate professor of English and director of Native American and Indigenous Studies

Student Curatorial Team: Eiza Capton (Member of the Cayuga Nation; B.F.A. in Illustration), Charlotte Dupree (Citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation; B.A. in Art History), Anthony V. Ornelaz (M.F.A. in Creative Writing), Jaden N. Dagenais (M.A. in Art History; M.S. in Library and Information Studies) and AJ Borja Armas (Ph.D. in Cultural Foundations of Education)

Renowned artist Peter Jones with one of his ceramic sculptures

In collaboration with the, Scott and Stevens are working with a student curatorial team to organize an exhibit highlighting the work of nationally and internationally recognized artist Peter Jones. A member of the Beaver Clan of the Onondaga Nation, Jones’ works are held by prestigious museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of the American Indian. In addition to reviving traditional Haudenosaunee pottery making, Jones has innovated a form of figurative ceramic sculpture through which he highlights traditional Haudenosaunee culture and the challenges their communities face.

The exhibition, which will open at ���ϲ����� in August 2023, is being curated by undergraduate and graduate students under the direction of Stevens and Scott. The student research team has selected works of art for the exhibition, created the thematic design, and interviewed the artist. They are currently conducting research for the exhibition and are writing wall text and catalog essays.

Patrick W. Berry

With over 2 million people in prisons and jails, the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Even after being released from prison, formerly incarcerated people face numerous hurdles when reacclimating into society, which can often lead to a relapse into criminal behavior, says Patrick W. Berry, author of “Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Mass Incarceration.”

“Formerly incarcerated people are frequently told what they cannot do, where they can’t live, where they can’t work, and where they can’t go to school,” he says. “This makes finding a way so incredibly difficult.”

In collaboration with the Center for Community Alternatives, an organization promoting reintegrative justice and a reduced reliance on incarceration, Writing Beyond Release will initiate the launch of “Mend.” The national online and print publication will discuss the crisis of mass incarceration from the personal narratives of people who have been directly impacted. “Mend” will work to educate the nation about the shortcomings of the current incarceration system and help incarcerated people and their families develop new facets of their identities.

“The ‘Mend’ initiative is about community building,” says Berry. “It is about the process of making something together, learning practical skills in writing and publication, and contributing to new narratives.”

While the program itself will be situated in Central New York and created and edited by formerly incarcerated people and their families from the region, the publication will be open to anyone whose life has been impacted by mass incarceration. Unlike other journals for the incarcerated, Berry explains that this project will not limit authors on subject matter.

“While prison narratives will be welcome, they will not be the publication’s sole focus,” he notes. “As writers explore different aspects of their lives and experiences, we do not to limit them. This approach is necessary because too often formerly incarcerated writers cannot leave behind the identity created by their being in prison.”

Take Me to the Palace of Love

Project Leads: Romita Ray, associate professor of art and music histories, Vanja Malloy, director and chief curator of the ���ϲ����� Art Museum, and Ankush Arora, graduate student, art and music histories

Artwork by Rina Banerjee will be on exhibit this spring at the SU Art Museum. (Courtesy: William Widmer)

Can we rescue love? That is the question posed by acclaimed artist Rina Banerjee, whose exhibition “Take Me to the Palace of Love,” will be on view at SU Art Museum in Spring 2023. An immigrant artist who was born in India, Banerjee’s art is shaped by her first-hand experience witnessing how love can go awry when ethnic and racial differences are leveraged to divide instead of to unite.

Her exhibition at ���ϲ����� is inspired by “Take Me…to the Palace of Love“ (2003), one of Banerjee’s noted art installations about home and diaspora whose focal point, a pink saran-wrap Taj Mahal, will be exhibited at the ���ϲ����� Art Museum alongside “Viola, from New Orleans” (2017), a multi-media work that explores inter-racial marriage in America, and “A World Lost” (2013), another multi-media installation that critiques climate change. These artworks will be complemented by folk art from India, African masks, Indian sculpture, other items from the museum’s collections, as well as artworks from additional museums in Central New York.

Rooted in cultural memory and storytelling, the exhibit collectively asks: What role does love play in identity-formation and place-making? And how does love shape or resist gendered and racialized identities?

With support from the EHN mini-grant, “Take Me to the Palace of Love” will be extended into the City of ���ϲ�����, allowing the University community and new American and underrepresented communities to document their own stories about identity and place—individually and collectively—in dialogue with Banerjee who will be in residence as the University’s in the spring.

The public will be invited to participate in the installation by producing short essays, poetry, fiction, podcasts, or short videos that will be curated in close consultation with Banerjee. Exhibition curators Romita Ray and Vanja Malloy, and community engagement coordinator Brice Nordquist will also contribute to the catalogue and solicit and select contributions from members of the University and ���ϲ����� communities.

The catalogue will be housed on the SU Art museum’s website, allowing it to become a dynamic site of knowledge-sharing and knowledge-building within and across different communities. There will also be a public display in the city of ���ϲ����� at a site to be determined.

Find more information on the .

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.”

Starting this fall, the $150 million expansion of TAP will support part-time students enrolled in six or more credits per semester, . Because NYS TAP is a grant, it does not have to be paid back.

As the College of Professional Studies continues to expand its , the expansion of TAP unlocks new opportunities for a wider population to attend ���ϲ����� part-time.

“The expansion of the TAP program removes the main barrier many part-time students are facing when pursuing a college degree—cost,” says Michael Frasciello, dean of the College of Professional Studies. “The expanded program comes at a time when the College of Professional Studies is maintaining and lowering costs to close the gap between tuition and what part-time students can pay. New York State is now fully aligned with our mission as a college that is accessible to anyone who otherwise cannot study full-time on campus.”

New York residents looking to study part-time at ���ϲ����� can affordably do so with the expansion of TAP. The flexibility of part-time study combined with TAP positions students for success as they pursue a range of future-focused programs available both online and on campus.

“TAP broadens access for students who might otherwise think attending college is financially out of their reach,” says Peg Stearns, director of financial aid at the College of Professional Studies. “This increases accessibility to higher educational opportunities for post-traditional students. Next to the Federal Pell Grant Program, NYS TAP is the most generous grant available to eligible New York State students.”

All students who plan to apply to ���ϲ����� part-time study are encouraged to complete the FASFA, as this is also the easiest way to apply for part-time TAP.

The College of Professional Studies’ Financial Aid Office will notify potentially eligible New York State students who have received their 2022-23 FAFSA results. The University’s main campus Bursar’s Office will process part-time TAP funding.

The College of Professional Studies’ Financial Aid Office is dedicated to providing TAP application completion assistance as needed. To learn more about part-time TAP eligibility, .

To learn more about financial aid opportunities at the College of Professional Studies, .

About the College of Professional Studies

The College of Professional Studies is a global, inclusive and future-facing college, providing access to diverse students and learners seeking a ���ϲ����� degree, credential, certificate or education experience.

Julia White

Julia M. White, associate professor in the School of Education’s (SOE) Department of Teaching and Leadership and director of the atrocity studies and the practices of social justice minor, has been awarded a $1.14 million U.S. Department of Education grant, with the primary aim of recruiting, preparing and retaining fully certified, diverse special education teachers and school counselors to work with students with disabilities with high-intensity needs.

Project IMPRESS (Interdisciplinary Master’s Preparation of Urban and Rural Educators in Special Education and School Counseling) will focus on recruiting professionals for two high-needs school districts in Central New York: the LaFayette Central School District (which includes the Onondaga Nation School) and the ���ϲ����� City School District.

Working with are Sultan Kilinc, assistant professor in SOE’s Department of Teaching and Leadership, and Yanhong Liu, associate professor in SOE’s Department of Counseling and Human Services.

“Project IMPRESS responds to the critical need to increase the number of special education teachers and school counselors prepared to work with students with disabilities with high-intensity needs in high-needs urban and rural schools,” says White. “This cohort-based project will prepare highly effective, equity conscious professionals with the knowledge, skills and disposition to serve these communities.”

To prepare and retain diverse (including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color) master’s level scholars, Project IMPRESS will provide inclusive, culturally responsive training with the goal of improving learning, developmental, social and transition outcomes for students with disabilities who have high-intensity needs. The professionals in training also will be encouraged to collaborate across disciplines through shared project experiences, including distance learning.

“This project represents an innovative partnership between our programs in inclusive special education and counseling, a key related service provider,” says Beth Ferri, professor of inclusive education and disability studies and SOE associate dean for research. “School of Education scholars will benefit from cross disciplinary training, particularly around supporting students’ social emotional learning and integrating high-intensity supports in inclusive and high needs settings. The project will have a lasting impact, addressing critical shortages of highly qualified teachers and counselors who are able to meet a range of student learning, social, and emotional needs in culturally responsive ways.”

Starting in May 2023, Project IMPRESS will prepare four cohorts of 12 special education (elementary and secondary) and school counseling (P-12) scholars per cohort over five years. To thoroughly prepare them to serve in high-needs schools, the students will be offered interdisciplinary collaborative experiences, including shared coursework, assignments, and mentored field experiences.

Upon program completion, graduates will be able to meet requirements for New York State certification in their respective fields, be prepared to work with students with disabilities who have high-intensity needs, and diversify the teacher population in school districts they serve.

For this round, ���ϲ�����CoE partner companies were invited to submit proposals in ���ϲ�����CoE’s focus areas of indoor environmental quality and building energy efficiency, clean and renewable energy, and water resources.

Projects that include research engagements with faculty and students, support for product development and testing, market analyses and proposal match requirements were encouraged. Awards for this program are funded by member companies of the ���ϲ�����CoE Partner Program with the purpose of helping companies advance product development and technological innovation.

The 2022 winning projects are the following:

• Power Converter Development for Off-Grid Renewables, Mission Drives: This project will help develop next generation electronics for off-grid solar, wind and storage applications with a longer-term path of revolutionizing power conversion technology generically. This program will complete a preliminary design of a new off-grid system configuration that is more flexible and lower cost.
• HABAlert: AI-Powered Real-Time Harmful Algal Bloom Monitoring, BloomOptix & Ramboll: HABAlert is a mobile, cost-effective handheld harmful algal bloom (HAB) monitoring system that can detect and quantify the presence of HAB-causing cyanobacteria in 10 minutes or less. Using artificial intelligence and a cellphone-based miniature microscope, HABAlert can provide users with cyanobacterial ID and counts in near-real-time, replacing traditional methods, which require multi-day processing times.
• MAKO Smart EV Charging Station, M3 Innovation, based at ���ϲ�����CoE, is developing a smart EV charging station and gateway that integrates seamlessly into their Sports Lighting Platform and eliminates the barriers of cost and added infrastructure to install conventional charging stations.

“The Innovation Fund awards are intended to help companies bridge the gap to commercialization of new products, as well as to provide thoughtful, constructive feedback from a panel of reviewers with expertise in the application of new technology in the marketplace,” says Eric Schiff, ���ϲ�����CoE executive director. “The projects highlight Central New York’s expertise in environmental and energy systems, as well as area companies’ enthusiasm for innovation and commercialization of new technologies.”

With these awards, ���ϲ�����CoE has supported more than 49 clean energy commercialization projects by 30 companies throughout New York State, totaling over $525,000. Participating companies have reported more than 176 jobs created and over $3,000,000 in additional funding leveraged from the Innovation Fund projects.

Eligibility for Innovation Fund awards is extended to all current members of the ���ϲ�����CoE Partner Program. Proposals may include collaborations with non-Partner Program firms and academic partners; however, proposals must be submitted and led by members of the Partner Program.

Learn more about the Partner Program or contact Tammy Rosanio at tlrosani@syr.edu.

SUSTAIN scholars at Camp Talooli, where they took part in team building activities, hiking, archery, kayaking and an astronomy lesson with the camp director. (Courtesy: John Tillotson)

In 2017,��, associate professor and department chair of the����in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), set out to improve upon the country’s retention rate of college science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors among underrepresented students through a new program combining scholarships, professional development and socialization opportunities.

“Typically, only about 40% of students who enter college with the intention of being a STEM major graduate with a STEM degree,” Tillotson says. Often students will change course in their first year. To his delight, though, this program—SUSTAIN, the Strategic Undergraduate STEM Talent Acceleration Initiative—retained 93% of its STEM majors in its first year.

Now in its fifth year, SUSTAIN is looking to build an enduring program upon the strong foundation of its original National Science Foundation grant. Like Tillotson, donors have also been delighted by the results of SUSTAIN, funding it with significant gifts and working to establish an endowment, to, as Tillotson puts it, “keep it going forever.”

What’s New

Thanks in part to that donor support, SUSTAIN has undergone some exciting changes this year.

First, more students are now being served. A&S welcomed its second cohort of SUSTAIN scholars in fall 2021. While the first cohort was 28 students who went through their four years together, 10 new students will now enter every year, with the result that there will always be 40 SUSTAIN students on campus.

Second, students in more majors can now participate. The original NSF grant funded students in A&S’ largest STEM majors: biology, chemistry, biochemistry, biotechnology, neuroscience and forensic science. Thanks to the expanded resources made possible by SUSTAIN donors, the program now includes all A&S STEM majors, adding mathematics, physics, and Earth and environmental sciences. In addition, the Earth and environmental sciences department has committed funds from its own endowment for three additional students per year, bringing the total number of SUSTAIN scholars on campus to 52 over four years.

Besides the financial stipend—$5,000 per year for the first two years—SUSTAIN scholars receive support in virtually every aspect of undergraduate life. They are brought to campus early, before the start of their freshman year, to get to know each other and the professors in the program. “There are lots of team-building activities,” says Tillotson.

Graduate Nori Zaccheo ’21 credits SUSTAIN for giving her a sense of balance amid her very challenging coursework. “I am somebody who felt guilty if I did anything that wasn’t focused on my education, even watching a TV show, like I was wasting time not studying,” she says. “SUSTAIN did a lot of fun non-academic activities, which forced me to stop and relax.”

Graduate Barrington Bucknor ’21 maintains that these early bonding activities helped with later coursework. “With all these [difficult] subjects and classes that we were going through, we were doing it together. If there was every anything I struggled with, someone else would help me, and vice versa.”

All SUSTAIN scholars have the opportunity to do early-immersion research in their freshman and sophomore years. They are paired with faculty mentors and can start working in a lab. “This is a powerful experience, because most undergraduates don’t have a chance to get into STEM research until their junior or senior year,” says Tillotson.

Bucknor, like others, appreciated this aspect. “I had the opportunity to go to Europe to do an internship in the summer of 2019, and that was only because I had had the background of having done research [in] my first two years of college,” he says. “As a kid, you imagine that you’d like to see the world, but I had no idea how. [My family had just emigrated to the United States] only two years prior, and I hadn’t been planning on it anytime soon, but there I was, with the opportunity to visit a whole different continent.”

New to the program next year, as a result of having new scholars enter annually, will be sophomores buddying up with freshmen for additional support, or “near-peer mentoring.” Junior and senior years, students will shift their focus from adjustment to campus life to career development.

“We’re working with partners from the Corning Foundation, and hope to set up similar meetings with Bristol Myers, and ���ϲ����� Research Corporation, to create a series of job shadowing and STEM internship opportunities,” says Tillotson. “Maybe down the road these STEM-focused companies would consider contributing scholarship funds, and hosting SUSTAIN scholars as interns and job shadowers, with the understanding that some of our graduates could seek employment with those companies and stay in this region.”

The Inspired and Inspiring People Behind the Program

The generous donors who provided funding to support the program beyond its initial NSF grant-funded inception include:

• Nina Fedoroff ’66, a summa cum laude graduate and recipient of ���ϲ�����’s George Arents Pioneer Medal in 2003. Fedoroff was science and technology advisor to Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush;
• The late Marylyn Grabosky ‘62, a native of Liverpool, N.Y., who graduated magna cum laude from ���ϲ����� as a philosophy major and “was a lifelong champion of women and diversity,” says her wife Laura Desmond. “Marylyn wanted to give support to people with real talent who might not always get the opportunity, the break, the access.”
• College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Advisory Board member Ed Mitzen ‘88 and his charitable foundation, Business for Good;
• College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Advisory Board member Laura Feldman ’81;
• Owen Lewis ’66, ’73 Ph.D.;
• Randi Rossignol ’75; and,
• Michael ’71, ’73 MBA and Deedee ’73 Giersch.

“I was precisely one of those very poor single parents who wanted to do science,” says Fedoroff, who made her name in the field of molecular biology, studying plant transposons and writing extensively on genetic modification. She credits a $1,000 grant in aid from ���ϲ����� in her senior year as being pivotal in allowing her to finish her degree. “It doesn’t sound like much now, but it made a huge difference at the time. When I got to know A&S Dean Karin Ruhlandt, I immediately became interested in contributing. It was already on my agenda to establish something like that at ���ϲ�����, since ���ϲ����� had helped me so much.”

Thanks to the vision of its founders and the generosity of its supporters, SUSTAIN has taken on an incredible momentum, benefiting students who also “just want to do science.”

Nori Zaccheo

Nori Zaccheo ’21
A lifetime interest in science blossoms into a career.

“I came in interested in forensics. The good thing about ���ϲ����� is they make you pair forensics with another science, because forensics is an applied science. So in undergrad I did both forensics and chemistry, and graduated in three years. I spent my fourth year at ���ϲ����� in grad school, getting my master’s degree, working in the bio forensics lab with Professor Michael Marciano.

Though I was committed to STEM, SUSTAIN, really helped, financially. Honestly, there’s no better forensic education than ���ϲ�����, and I don’t know that I would have been able to afford it without SUSTAIN. There was that risk of me just giving up on forensics, transferring somewhere else and getting just a chemistry degree. And I also had so much support throughout my really hard chemistry classes. I know a lot of people who started out as chem majors who weren’t in SUSTAIN and ended up switching.”
Zaccheo is currently working as a science tutor.

Barrington Bucknor

Barrington Bucknor ’21
A new immigrant solidifies his journey into medicine.

“I was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to the U.S. in 2015. One of the biggest supports from SUSTAIN was getting paired with a research mentor so early on. A person like myself, coming in as an immigrant, I didn’t have a strong educational support in my family, so this supplemented that gap.

I enjoyed listening to the different speakers and learning how they created their path to reach their final destination. A lot of speakers talked about going into college as premeds but once they realized there was more to do in the medical field, other than being a physician or provider, they created their own path. Hearing that there are other opportunities, even if I decided I didn’t want to be a doctor later on, reinforced that there were opportunities, but also forced me to confront my own feelings about my future, and made me more sure that actually, I really did want to practice medicine.”

Bucknor is currently a research specialist in the auditory neuroscience lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Olivia Santiago

Olivia Santiago ’21
A STEM-curious polymath finds her way.

“The most pivotal part of SUSTAIN for me was the career exposure and mentorship. It helped me realize that I didn’t want to be a scientist for the rest of my life, but I am a science-driven person. I ended up with two degrees, as a biotechnology major, and in Spanish literature and culture.

I remember one speaker in particular who came to campus. There was one woman who didn’t work in the hard sciences but did have the hard science background. She really liked talking to people. I identified with that—I had always wanted a career that was very client-facing, interacting with people. That was affirming—I saw a possibility for myself. A lot of the speakers were affirming for me even for me to listen and realize, wow I really don’t want to do that; figuring that out can sometimes be just as helpful if not more.”

Santiago is now a law student, pursuing patent law, which requires a science degree.

Story by Lesley Porcelli

Cartoon of a biological nanopore-based sensor (gray), which detects WDR5 (red) one molecule at a time. The detection signal (bottom) shows a cartoon of what the raw sensor signal looks like. (Courtesy: Lauren Mayse)

The job of a protein hub inside the nucleus of a cell is similar to a chef in a kitchen. Both need to manage multiple tasks efficiently for a successful outcome. For the chef, if they spend too much time chopping vegetables and neglect the main course cooking on the stove, the result is a burnt dish. Similarly, if the protein hub spends too much time interacting with one protein and is not given a break to accomplish its other important tasks, it can lead to disease states such as cancer.

Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences’ have been studying a protein hub, called WDR5, which is responsible for many important functions within the nucleus. WDR5 has recently been heavily investigated because it is a promising target for anti-cancer drugs. But until now, not much has been known about how WDR5 interacts transiently with other proteins inside the cell because the necessary technology to study WDR5 did not exist. Using a highly sensitive engineered biosensor, researchers have uncovered new information on how WDR5 connects and disconnects with other molecules.

The collaborative project was funded through a four-year,����(R01) from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), awarded to��, professor of physics, in 2018. The culminating results of the team’s work have been published in the leading journal��. The research team also includes Lauren Ashley Mayse and Ali Imran, both graduate students in Movileanu’s lab, as well as other researchers at SUNY Upstate Medical University, Ichor Therapeutics and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

How It Works

The goal of the team’s study was to create an ultra-sensitive device capable of detecting and quantifying WDR5. They designed, developed and validated a nanopore-based biosensor, which creates a tiny hole (nanopore) in a synthetic membrane and can identify proteins in solution at single-molecule precision.

The biosensor’s channel-like base creates a small hole in the synthetic membrane and allows ionic solution to flow through it. When the sensor recognizes a specific molecule, in this case WDR5, the ionic flow changes. This change in flow serves as the signal from the sensor that the targeted protein has been found.

“The idea behind this concept was to design nanopores that are equipped with hooks that pull certain proteins from a solution,” says Movileanu, who is also a member of the��. “By being able to fish them from a solution one at a time, we can better understand how these proteins function.”

A Tool for Detection

The team revealed new details about the conditions under which WDR5 starts and stops talking to other proteins, which is known as protein association and dissociation. This will allow researchers to better understand how these multitasking molecules carry out their various responsibilities.

“Proteins need to talk to each other for brief periods,” says Movileanu. “In the majority of cancers, you have a situation where at least one protein sits on another protein or talks to another protein for much longer than needed. Many biotechnology companies want to develop drugs that perturb those interactions.”

Mayse shares that their study uncovered new information about WDR5’s unique interface, where a peptide must wiggle into its deep and donut shaped cavity. Their discovery will help researchers develop more effective drugs to target WDR5. “We found that our sensor can recognize WDR5 with a weak connection, a medial connection and a strong connection to a peptide,” she says. “This shows that a potential drug must be able to prevent all three different ways a peptide can associate with WDR5.”

Biosensors like the one developed in Movileanu’s lab could one day lead to more accurate and efficient methods of scanning chemicals in the body, providing an opportunity for doctors to detect diseases much earlier than what is attainable today.

“In many diseases, there are markers, chemicals in our body that change quite a bit in a noticeable way when diseases, such as cancer, start to develop,” says Movileanu. “By integrating these sensors into nanofluidic devices that are scalable, we are not too far from being able to scan many markers from a sample of blood.”

In addition to the exciting adventures that await in Santiago, ���ϲ����� Abroad is excited to announce a new $2,000 travel grant for students studying in Chile this fall. All students enrolling at the for the fall 2022 semester will receive a $2,000 grant that will be automatically applied to program costs.

Santiago, Chile

The ���ϲ����� Santiago program is designed to maximize immersion and language acquisition through homestays and interdisciplinary field study, along with enrollment in semester classes taught in Spanish at local Chilean universities. ���ϲ����� students will enroll in classes alongside Chilean students in a wide range of disciplines, and both graduate and undergraduate students have the option to participate in a professional internship while in Chile.

Through highly immersive cultural experiences and a wide range of course offerings, this program is ideal for students studying International Relations, Political Science, Anthropology and students with a geographic concentration in Latin America. Courses are taken at both the ���ϲ����� Santiago Center, as well as local Chilean universities including Universidad de Chile and Pontificia Universidad Catolica. To participate in this program, students must have completed Spanish 201 (or equivalent).

This program not only dives deep into the history of dictatorships and U.S. foreign policy, but also provides ample opportunity for adventures throughout the diverse regions of Chile. This fall, students will have the opportunity to visit Buenos Aires, Argentina, which ���ϲ����� Abroad is excited to incorporate into our programming once again. Additional travel opportunities facilitated by Center staff include trips to San Pedro de Atacama and Patagonia, Chile

The application deadline has been extended to April 1 for ���ϲ����� Santiago, among other select Center and World Partner programs. still accepting applications for the fall 2022 semester.

To learn more about ���ϲ����� Santiago, students can contact the ���ϲ����� Santiago International Program Advisor at syrsantiago@syr.edu.

Katherine McDonald

A project led by , associate dean of research and professor of public health in , and assistant professor of occupational therapy at , aims to help individuals with developmental disabilities affecting cognition contribute fully to community-engaged research. The project is supported by a funding award through the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

The field of patient-centered outcomes research broadly seeks to understand how our approach to health care is experienced by patients and what outcomes they value. Studies using a patient-centered outcomes approach (including participatory action research and inclusive research) involve patients and other stakeholders directly in the research to inform what to study, how to study it and what to do with the findings.

Most research in the United States that involves patients or other human participants must be approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB), an independent group that seeks to protect and enhance research participant well-being. Importantly, those included in the research as advisors or data collectors and analysts must be trained in the principles of human participants research. However, the trainings that are available are often designed for scientists, individuals with advanced scientific education.

The project, , will work with people with developmental disabilities affecting cognition, researchers and IRB members to create and make freely available a new research ethics training that can be used by community research partners with developmental disabilities affecting cognition (for example, adults with intellectual disability and autistic adults).

“While it’s really exciting that more people with developmental disabilities are participating in community-engaged research, and patient-centered outcomes research in particular, most universities and academic medical centers aren’t set up to ensure that these research partners receive appropriate research ethics training,” says Schwartz. In the U.S., most research organizations rely on the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Program to train individuals involved in human participants research.

“CITI training isn’t cognitively accessible to individuals with developmental disabilities—it expects users to understand scientific jargon and be able to engage in largely written online learning. While some universities have developed innovative trainings that are geared toward community partners, they also don’t address the needs of people with developmental disabilities that affect cognition. The lack of accessible training is a barrier to ensuring that these individuals are fully included in patient-centered and community-based research, as some research roles are restricted to those who have completed required research ethics training,” says McDonald.

Schwartz described: “Our goal is to work directly with people with developmental disabilities and other stakeholders to inform every stage of the project—this project came about because people with developmental disabilities spoke out about their negative experiences and needs. The training must be cognitively accessible to community research partners with a wide range of experiences, strengths and support needs—that means the information itself and the way the information is presented is understandable. Not only will the training utilize plain language and provide visual supports, but the content will also be delivered in a way that reduces cognitive demands for individuals who may have challenges with memory, abstract thinking and/or integrating information across multiple sources. In addition to being cognitively accessible, our goal is for the content and learning approach to be useful to researchers across a variety of universities and research projects.”

The project team includes experts in human participants research, cognitive accessibility, user experience and design, along with community members and researchers.

“The goal is to build stronger teams inclusive of community researchers with developmental disabilities. Some investigators may believe it is impossible to obtain IRB approval to include community researchers as data collectors and analytics or have partners complete required CITI training, creating a negative experience for many. Our training will be a resource that makes it possible to expand the role of community partners with developmental disabilities in patient-centered outcomes research—to ensure they can take on the full range of roles of community researchers, including conducting consent and collecting and analyzing information from people. We also hope that we will lessen experiences that are traumatizing or stigmatizing for partners who have been asked to complete CITI training. People with developmental disabilities have been told that they aren’t smart or competent and have experienced testing that ultimately excludes them from participation in an array of activities,” says McDonald.

“If we can limit these experiences and instead create those that convey respect and enhance learning, we will help foster fuller roles for people with developmental disabilities and enable their input on best practices related to how they experience all aspects of health care and outcomes of interest to them,” she adds.

According to Greg Martin, PCORI’s acting chief engagement and dissemination officer, “This project was selected for Engagement Award funding because it will build a community equipped to participate as partners in community-engaged research and develop partnerships and infrastructure to disseminate PCORI-funded research results. We look forward to working with Dr. McDonald and Dr. Schwartz throughout the course of their two-year project.”

This project and the other projects approved for funding by the PCORI Engagement Award Program were selected through a highly competitive review process in which applications were assessed for their ability to meet PCORI’s engagement goals and objectives, as well as program criteria. For more information about PCORI’s funding to support engagement efforts, .

PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund comparative effectiveness research that will provide patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence needed to make better-informed health and health care decisions. PCORI is committed to seeking input from a broad range of stakeholders to guide its work.

About ���ϲ�����
���ϲ����� is a private research university that advances knowledge across disciplines to drive breakthrough discoveries and breakout leadership. Our collection of 13 schools and colleges with over 200 customizable majors closes��the gap between education and action, so students can take on the world. In and beyond the classroom, we connect people, perspectives and practices to solve interconnected challenges with interdisciplinary approaches. Together, we’re a powerful community that moves ideas, individuals and impact beyond what’s possible.

About MGH Institute of Health Professions
educates more than 1,600 students at its Boston campus pursuing post-baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral degrees, integrating a team-based interprofessional approach that has been a hallmark since its 1977 founding. The only degree-granting affiliate of Mass General Brigham, New England’s largest healthcare provider, the graduate school is fully accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. Several of its programs are highly ranked by .

Please note, this image pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic.

Companies at all partner levels—Industry, Affiliate and Start-Up—are invited to apply. Projects must��address a challenge within ���ϲ�����CoE’s��, which include indoor environmental quality, clean and renewable energy, and water resources. Projects that include research engagements with faculty and students, support for product development and testing, market analyses and proposal match requirement are encouraged.

Previous companies that received Innovation Fund awards include:

Visit the�� page to see how other partners have used these funds.

Applications, due by Thursday, Feb. 17, at 5 p.m. ET, will be invited to give a proposal pitch, via Zoom, with a panel of judges. Visit the ���ϲ�����CoE ��to learn more, or, if interested in joining the Partner Program, contact Tamara Rosanio at tlrosani@syr.edu.

Each year, following an international call for submissions, Light Work selects 12 to 15 artists for a one-month residency to pursue creative projects. To date, more than have participated in the residency program, and many have gone on to achieve international acclaim.��

A patron takes in a Light Work photo exhibition.

This grant signals national recognition that champions Light Work’s nearly 50-year legacy of advocacy through exhibitions, publication of the print publication Contact Sheet, a state-of-the-art community-access digital services lab, and comprising more than 4,000 photo-related objects and images.��

“We are honored by this generous recognition from the NEA,” says Dan Boardman, Light Work’s director. “This funding helps us continue to create transformative moments for artists, gallery visitors, students, educators and the public during this tenuous time in the arts community.”

GAP awards reach communities in all parts of the country, large and small, and with diverse cultural and economic backgrounds. These awards represent 15 artistic disciplines and fields: Artist Communities, Arts Education, Dance, Design, Folk and Traditional Arts, Literary Arts, Local Arts Agencies, Media Arts, Museums, Music, Musical Theater, Opera, Presenting and Multidisciplinary Works, Theater, and Visual Arts.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support arts projects that help support the community’s creative economy,” says Ann Eilers, NEA’s acting chair. “Light Work is among the arts organizations nationwide that are using the arts as a source of strength, a path to well-being and providing access and opportunity for people to connect and find joy through the arts. The supported projects demonstrate how the arts are a source of strength and well-being for communities and individuals, and can open doors to conversations that address complex issues of our time.”

For more information on other funded projects, .

Philip Arnold

For over 30 years Professor Philip Arnold has been teaching in the area of religion and colonialism. As president of the (IVI) and founding director of the , he has collaborated with the Onondaga Nation and scholars from Central New York-area institutions to advance scholarship surrounding decolonization.

His research has led him to explore a famous U.S. Supreme Court case that would ultimately shape the future of international property law. In that 1823 case, known as Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court ruled that a land sale in 1763 by the Piankeshaw Indian nation to British citizens was not valid because the Piankeshaw nation did not have the right to convey the land, citing the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD).

As the 200-year anniversary of the Johnson v. M’Intosh case approaches, Arnold will serve as principal investigator on a grant awarded to ���ϲ����� by the to examine and challenge the theology and legal theory of the DoCD. According to Arnold, the project, titled “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh (JvM): Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism,” will explore how the DoCD and related narratives, including the Columbus story and Manifest Destiny (policy of U.S. expansion across North America coined in the mid-1800s) established codes of domination that continue to impact Indigenous peoples in America and around the world today.

The DoCD was a framework issued by the Vatican in the mid-fifteenth century, which established a justification for seizure of lands not inhabited by Christians. According to the website , it was formulated as a series of papal bulls and sanctioned the conquest and colonization of non-Christians who were deemed “enemies of Christ” in Africa and the Americas.

Scott Manning Stevens

, associate professor and director of the Native American and Indigenous studies program, will serve as executive director of the new center. He is a 2021-22 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Stevens says, “Even though there is tremendous diversity among Indigenous peoples, there are global Indigenous issues that span places like Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, Canada and the United States and some parts of South America, there are common experiences of settler colonialism and common environmental challenges with a global reach.”

Provost Gretchen Ritter says, “I congratulate the ���ϲ����� team that created this compelling proposal for the Mellon Foundation’s highly competitive grants process. The project addresses all aspects of teaching, research and service in global Indigenous studies. It will create opportunities for faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students to explore how Indigenous cultures can add to perspectives from across academic disciplines and provide insight into solutions for some of the world’s most pressing problems.”

Stevens says that the center will explore options for Indigenous communities to take on common challenges such as cultural heritage preservation and language revitalization, defending political sovereignty, and climate change and the environment.

“Today’s students realize that they are on the front lines of climate change and environmental justice issues. They have a sense of urgency because they know that they will witness real life situations in communities in the Arctic, the Andes and other marginal climates throughout the world.”

“This generation and, in particular, our Indigenous students recognize that their cultures and others from around the globe offer wisdom that can contribute to solutions for these very urgent problems,” says Regina Jones, assistant director of the Native Student Program.

Student engagement is at the heart of the center’s design. , associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences and associate professor of African American studies, whose research and teaching focuses on race, gender and environmental justice, will contribute to the center’s efforts as faculty advisor. In this role, she will support curriculum development, facilitate student engagement activities and lead assessment of the center’s research framework.

“I want to thank everyone involved in this proposal for their tremendous efforts to help us realize this exciting goal,” says Karin Ruhlandt, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “We’re so energized about the opportunities that the new center will bring our students, faculty and the whole campus, as well as for meaningful collaboration with our Native and Indigenous neighbors. Professor Stevens has the vision and relationships to make the center a wonderful academic and cultural asset and will work across disciplinary boundaries to facilitate opportunities in Iroquois linguistics, art history, museum studies, environmental science and policy, food studies and more.”

Stevens says, “Students minoring in Native American studies tell us that it helps them stand out in the job market in all kinds of fields. It gives them a whole set of talking points and perspectives that can be interesting to a future employer. We have also found that museums, galleries and cultural institutions are specifically asking for individuals who are trained in Indigenous issues and have experience working with the source communities regarding appropriate display and preservation of cultural artifacts.”

He adds, “Now, more than ever, is the time we can reach people who are concerned about and involved in these pressing issues. I am excited to get started.”

Alison Patteson (left) and Davoud Mozhdehi

Researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences’����and�� have been awarded Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) grants from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The funding, awarded to Alison Patteson, assistant professor of physics, and Davoud Mozhdehi, assistant professor of chemistry, supports research that increases understanding of biological processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.​

Patteson and Mozhdehi, both members of the��, a collaboration of researchers from ���ϲ����� addressing global challenges through innovative research, are working to learn more about the function and design of proteins that play a key role in diseases such as cancer. Each MIRA award will fund research in their labs over the next five years.

Understanding a Key Structural Protein

Since coming to ���ϲ����� in 2018, physics professor����and�� have led cutting-edge studies on the structural protein vimentin. Often expressed in a cell’s cytoskeleton during cell motility (movement), vimentin plays a key role in protecting the cell’s nucleus and DNA from damage as it migrates through dense tissue during processes like cancer growth and wound healing. By knowing more about vimentin’s role in protecting cancerous cells as they spread through the body, Patteson says her group’s research could help pinpoint drugs that could slow the growth of cancer.

Collective cell migration through a collagen matrix. The red dots indicate cells’ nuclei enmeshed in an actin filament network (blue). (Photo courtesy of Minh Thanh)

With her��, Patteson seeks to broaden understanding of vimentin’s function in cells as they move. She says the grant will help her team tackle three objectives: determine how vimentin affects the cytoskeleton (structure that helps cells maintain shape) during migration; explore how vimentin helps the cell adhere to its surroundings; and identify the mechanisms by which vimentin helps facilitate collective cell migration through the three-dimensional network surrounding cells called the extracellular matrix.

“Our aim with this grant is to understand how vimentin regulates cell motility,” says Patteson. “We’ve seen proof that it does but we don’t understand why.” She says their research will answer important questions including: Why do motile cells express vimentin? And, what advantage does vimentin give to the cell?

“Vimentin is very understudied and this funding will help us answer some big questions about how this protein is influencing the cell and in turn how biological processes such as cancer and wound healing are affected,” says Patteson.

Thanks in part to her MIRA grant, Patteson and her colleagues recently developed one of the first��3D simulations capturing how cells containing vimentin move through body tissue. In the absence of vimentin, their model showed a breakdown of the cell’s nucleus as it moved through narrow channels. In simulations with vimentin, the cell was much more resistant to deformation and the inside of the nucleus and its DNA was protected.

Alexander Charters

The Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at ���ϲ����� Libraries is accepting applications now through Jan. 14, 2022, for the Alexander N. Charters Adult Education Grants-in-Aid program. The grant, up to $5,000 depending on the proposal, is awarded to scholars or practitioners doing research using SCRC’s adult education collections.

Alexander N. Charters (1916-2018) was an internationally recognized American expert in the field of adult and continuing education. ���ϲ����� Libraries has assembled historical documents and University records, including manuscript, print, visual and media materials related to adult education since 1949.

This material is known collectively as the Alexander N. Charters Library for Educators of Adults, in recognition of Charters’ efforts to promote and expand SCRC’s adult education holdings. Through the generosity of Charters, SCRC offers annual grants to one or more scholars or practitioners wishing to do research using SCRC’s adult education collections with the amount of the award dependent on the scope of the research outlined in the applicant’s proposal.

Details on the application process are available on the .

Amy Ellen Schwartz

Amy Ellen Schwartz, professor of economics and public administration and international affairs, is one of two principal investigators for a five-year research project to examine how, over time, COVID-19 has affected children’s health and education in New York City. Maxwell School faculty colleague Michah W. Rothbart is among the co-investigators.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the $3.5 million study is a collaboration by researchers at ���ϲ�����, New York University and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The team will investigate the effects of vaccine availability and uptake; examine racial, ethnic and income disparities; and explore the role of school and neighborhood resources in shaping outcomes and disparities. The total award to ���ϲ����� is $1.3 million.

Schwartz also serves as chair of the Department of Economics, is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Chair in Public Affairs and is a senior research associate for the Center for Policy Research. Rothbart is an assistant professor of public administration and international affairs and senior research associate for the Center for Policy Research.

Joining Schwartz as a principal investigator is Brian Elbel, professor of population health and health policy at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. In addition to Rothbart, co-investigators include NYU faculty members David Lee, Lorna Thorpe and Meryle Weinstein, and Sophia Day and Kevin Konty from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated anew, indoor spaces are crucial to the health, comfort and productivity of occupants. At the same time, building operations are responsible for nearly half of the energy used in the U.S. The DOE’s Building Technology Office envisions that a clean-energy future requires innovations for “grid-interactive buildings” (GEBs) that integrate energy generation or storage capabilities and management systems that interact with the regional electrical grid.

Participating companies will receive assistance to develop and commercialize energy hardware innovations for buildings, including heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, building envelope systems, building-integrated energy generation and harvesting technologies, and building-integrated battery and thermal energy storage systems. Beyond the innovation cluster, the goals of the project are to promote equity and public health in this sector and further the nation’s transition to net-zero carbon emissions.

“This award gives us the opportunity to strengthen and grow the regional cluster of businesses that are developing building technology innovations and products,” says Eric Schiff, interim executive director of ���ϲ�����CoE. “This project supports ���ϲ�����CoE’s mission to catalyze these innovations in New York state.”

The project will sponsor a series of events and resources for networking, technical, marketing and equity issues, as well as provide access to funding opportunities and national lab resources. Startup companies can join the which offers a suite of services with additional financial support from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). All companies can propose collaborative projects involving intellectual property, prototypes and proof-of-concept for their potential products for buildings.

“The ‘smart’ and high-performance building technologies regional innovation cluster is critical to Central New York’s economy. We are excited to partner with the ���ϲ�����CoE on this project as it will leverage and build on that existing regional expertise, and strengthen strategies to improve public health, particularly in disadvantaged communities,” says Rob Simpson, president of CenterState CEO. “Ensuring that we can help companies and innovators advance these systems to drive more equitable health outcomes is central to our vision of creating a place where business thrives and all people prosper.”

Kickoff Event
A kickoff webinar will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 19, at 4 p.m. The event will give a brief introduction to the program, including the opportunities available for Central New York companies. Event panelists will discuss the needs and opportunities for energy hardware innovations for “smart buildings,” including products that promote equity and health in addition to grid interactivity and energy efficiency. Monica Neukomm, technology manager for grid-interactive efficient buildings, with the , will join the panel. The event will also be joined by Eric Schiff, Ed Bogucz, Bing Dong and Bess Krietemeyer from ���ϲ�����, and Sarah Hood and Juhanna Rogers from CenterState CEO, and Joseph Borowiec from NYSERDA. For more information about the program, contact Tammy Rosanio at tlrosani@syr.edu. Interested participants can ��for the kickoff webinar event.

About ���ϲ�����CoE
Led by ���ϲ�����, ���ϲ�����CoE is part of Central New York’s innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem. The center is a hub for innovative research and product development to improve indoor environmental quality, energy efficiency in buildings, clean and renewable energy and water resources. One of , ���ϲ�����CoE strategically brings industry partners together with researchers and students in a thriving culture of collaboration and innovation, ultimately creating new businesses and jobs, strengthening regional and state economies.

About CenterState CEO
is an independent and forward thinking economic development strategist, business leadership organization and chamber of commerce; dedicated to the success of its members and the prosperity of the region. We serve as an advocate and resource for smart business, catalyze and facilitate regional growth, and promote community prosperity through results-driven partnerships, planning and problem-solving.

Soundarajan has received a (NSF) CAREER Award for her research on algorithms for network analysis. The grant is a single investigator award intended to support Soundarajan’s professional development. In addition to providing funding for research, it will support a number of non-research service projects.

“Anytime I get a grant it feels great because it is validation from the larger scientific community,” says Soundarajan. “This one especially because it is tied to me as an individual and not just the project. It feels like I am being validated as a scientist. It means a lot.”

Sucheta Soundarajan

Although the award is an individual accomplishment, it is supporting research that has potential to benefit communities around the world. Increasingly, information is becoming acquired from network analysis and what scientists are finding is that despite algorithms not having access to protected attributes like age, disability, gender identification, religion and national origin, they still end up discriminating against these groups.

“What we’re seeing is that people from these minority and disadvantaged groups are being wrongfully discriminated against at a higher rate,” says Soundarajan. “We want to create algorithms that automatically find people central within a network but do it in a way that is fair.”

Soundarajan says criminal sentencing and lending are two examples of areas where algorithms are used to make crucial decisions and where scientists have detected potential wrongful discrimination. Another example of a fairness issue is the way we connect with each other on social platforms. Friendship recommendation algorithms can exacerbate a tendency for people to seek out those who are similar to themselves.

“Taken to an extreme, if people follow these recommendations, people end up in silos where they only connect to people who are like them and that is how you end up with echo chambers,” Soundarajan says.

Outside of her research, Soundarajan will have the opportunity to hire a graduate student to help develop ethics-based modules that can become part of computer science courses with the hope it will help students develop ethics-focused thinking.

“We’re going to design these labs where we will give students a data set and they will apply some algorithms to it and then they will look at the results and they will have to think about if these results are fair,” says Soundarajan.

Soundarajan will also look into developing continuing education for lawyers. She hopes to create classes that focus on explaining how algorithms can cause discriminatory issues.

Committing her time and talent to something societally meaningful is important to Soundarajan. She credits the support she has received throughout her life as a factor in choosing her research area, and she recognizes the help she has received from members of her department contributed to her latest achievement.

“There has been so much invested in me as a scientist, I feel like I have the moral obligation to do something that benefits everybody,” Soundarajan says. “I have been really fortunate to be surrounded by people who really want to see me succeed and that’s been true at ���ϲ����� as well. People have given me their time, spending hours reading the proposal that got me this award, and that means a lot to me.”

Nanoparticles are tiny particles, made of only a few hundred atoms, that are helping to create the world’s newest “smart” surfaces and systems. Nanoparticles are playing a key role in the development of such cutting-edge consumer products as transparent sunscreens and stain repellent fabrics. They are also being designed for biomedical applications like drug delivery inside the body.

Sounds like a miracle substance, right? The hurdle is that identifying one in the lab is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Out of a potential pool of hundreds of thousands of nanoparticles, only a few may actually be viable—meaning they are the right size and will work within a specific temperature range (e.g., body temperature). So how can researchers facilitate the process? Machine learning.

Davoud Mozhdehi (left) and Shikha Nangia

Davoud Mozhdehi, assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), and Shikha Nangia, associate professor of biomedical and chemical engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS), have been awarded a to develop a machine learning approach to aid in the discovery and design of new smart nano-biomaterials.

This project stems from the team’s recent effort to . When the group used their theories to make a prediction about the size and stability for the particles to work at certain temperatures, they found out that their model was wrong. Undaunted, that setback motivated them to delve deeper into finding a new way to come up with predictive rules to guide the design of nanoparticles.

Thanks to a , Mozhdehi and Nangia collected preliminary data that contributed to a key part of their new proposal, which established the feasibility of using computers to predict the functional properties of nanoparticles. Their current project combines inputs from simulations and experiments, and uses machine learning to sort through vast amounts of data to better predict the properties for a nanoparticle to respond at specific temperatures.

Their collaborative project will integrate experiments from Mozhdehi’s lab that explore physical properties such as size and shape, and computational simulations from Nangia’s lab.

By incorporating machine learning, Nangia and her students will design algorithms to simulate millions of variations of nanoparticles, based on data from previous experiments and simulations, to speed up the design of temperature responsive nanoparticles. This integrated approach can reduce the design time by 100 to 1,000 times. That is, the work that used to take one year can now be done in one to four days with their new approach.

The team’s method will look to identify patterns in the data in order to determine which nanoparticles are stable at the precise temperatures. Researchers compare their process to Google and Facebook’s algorithms that comb through millions of user datapoints in order to group individuals based on the links they select and the items they purchase online. Their algorithms will cluster particles which look different but behave the same way—like different individuals who click on the same link. Their goal is to extract attributes and evaluate what made certain particles similar and what made them dissimilar in order to develop theories to help model stable nanoparticles.

Once they know more about functional temperatures, Mozhdehi’s lab will then run experiments to determine physical characteristics such as possible size and shape of the nanoparticles. Their results can then be applied back to the machine learning arm of the project to better calibrate those results.

Mozhdehi and Nangia, both members of the , are hopeful that this project will establish a cost-effective method to drive rules that will one day lead to the development of nanoparticles that are stable at a wide range of temperatures. Researchers say this foundational research could lead to the development of future nano-biomaterials that can deliver therapeutic drugs directly to cancerous growths and damaged organs.

Makana Chock

, David J. Levidow Professor of Communications in the Newhouse School, has been awarded a $75,000 research grant from Facebook Reality Labs to explore the impacts of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) on bystander privacy.

Chock will work with��Se Jung Kim, a doctoral student in Newhouse’s����program. They will focus on two countries with disparate cultural norms—the U.S. and South Korea—to examine the impact of cultural differences on privacy concerns and ultimately inform the design of AR/VR technology.

“This is another example of how many of the leading communications companies in the world are turning to the Newhouse School to better understand some of the challenges we are facing as a society,” says Newhouse Dean .

Chock developed her proposal, “AR/VR recording: Cultural differences in perceptions of bystander privacy,” in response to Facebook’s request for proposals on responsible innovation in AR/VR: “Consider Everyone.”

Chock says the “ubiquitous and covert nature” of AR/VR recording poses the threat of serious privacy violations as bystanders are captured without permission. At the same time, different societies often have different concepts of bystander privacy, and those differences are reflected in the way image recording is regulated.

In the individualist culture of the U.S., recording bystanders in a public space is largely accepted and often protected under the First Amendment. In the collectivist culture of South Korea, where a higher premium is placed on privacy, express permission is required to record individuals. Yet even there, younger adults regularly post images and recordings on social media that may contain bystanders.

Additionally, Chock says bystander privacy issues are especially important when it comes to vulnerable populations like immigrants.

“Over the last few years, immigrants in both the U.S. and South Korea have faced restrictions and increased scrutiny from the government agencies, as well as discrimination and bullying from some members of their communities,” she says. “These factors may heighten concerns about privacy and the potential misuse of immigrants’ personal information or images. It is therefore important to increase awareness among AR/VR users of bystanders’ concerns and the potential for inadvertent harm.”

The three-part study will begin with an online survey conducted in both countries to assess potential differences in bystanders’ privacy perceptions and concerns and identify additional concerns of targeted immigrant groups. The team will then conduct a series of in-depth interviews with a subset of survey participants to provide additional qualitative data about cultural differences in bystander privacy concerns. Finally, they will facilitate a series of focus groups comprised of U.S. and South Korean users in a multi-user social VR environment in order to determine if the cultural differences seen in “real world” public spaces also apply in social VR spaces.

Chock is set to be the founding research director of the Newhouse School’s new XR lab and is co-leader of the Virtual and Immersive Interactions����at ���ϲ�����.

Sajag Poudel

Mechanical and aerospace engineering Ph.D. student Sajag Poudel and Professor Shalabh Maroo in the College of Engineering and Computer Science were����a National Science Foundation (NSF)����grant to support Poudel’s research internship at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Fall 2021 semester.

Oak Ridge will provide Poudel with the opportunity to explore potential ways to reduce energy waste from power generators and improve thermal management in buildings.

“We are hoping to break the limit of where we can go,” says Poudel. “It will help us be able to solve different issues related to energy.”

Poudel will be researching new types of devices that can be used in heat transfer and energy management to enhance efficiency. Oak Ridge has some of the best facilities in the world for testing energy conversion devices up to 1500 degrees Celsius.

“We can go to the micron or nanometer scale to understand the physics of heat transfer as we develop new ideas,” he says. “If we can reduce the associated losses, a lot of energy can be saved.”

“This is a wonderful opportunity for Sajag to further advance his skill set, knowledge base and experience before he graduates with his doctoral degree next year,” says Maroo. “He took the initiative in reaching out to national labs, NASA and industry for internship opportunities and I applaud his efforts. Sajag also had interest in collaborating from NASA AMES but did not pursue further as it was remote-only. I am thankful to NSF for supporting his internship at Oak Ridge.”

Internet Backpack for Edge Connectivity (Courtesy: Imcon International Inc.)

The rise of the digital age and widespread use of the Internet have turned web access into an essential utility—similar to water and electricity. In the past year and half, the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of web connectivity, as it became the primary way people connected with family and friends, pursued an education, met with doctors and remained apprised of information regarding the pandemic.

Although there are areas where broadband is not available, most areas in the U.S. have ways of connecting to the web, as��. Most homes are hardwired into the web through high-speed cable connections or fiber-optic hookup. Homes located in more rural areas turn to technologies such as satellite Internet, although typically at a higher price. The same cannot be said for remote locations in Central American countries such as Costa Rica, says Danielle Taana Smith, professor of African American studies in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Renée Crown University Honors Program.

While over��, many poor, remote regions of the country do not. Smith has been awarded a $416,000 grant from the Internet Society Foundation to help establish Internet connectivity in underserved communities in Costa Rica through the use of an��. In 2019, with support from multi-stakeholder partnerships, the Internet Backpack was deployed in Isla Caballo, a remote island in Costa Rica, to provide Internet connectivity to the community. The success of this model for digital inclusion served as the foundation for the design of this current research project. Smith and her colleagues will set up these backpacks in public community spaces, making Internet available to any community resident in the participating communities.

���ϲ����� was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to be among 32 universities to help local manufacturers improve their energy efficiency, as part of a $60 million investment.

The investment will help remove barriers to decarbonization across the manufacturing sector and advance the goal of achieving a clean energy economy.

“America’s best and brightest university students are successfully helping local manufacturers reduce pollution, save energy, and cut their electricity bills,” says��Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “DOE’s university-based Industrial Assessment Centers are assisting��small- and medium-sized��businesses—particularly those in disadvantaged and underrepresented communities—in the transition to a clean energy economy,��building��the��next-generation��energy workforce,��and propelling America toward a carbon-free future by 2050.”

This new cohort of IACs at 32 universities will focus on��improving productivity, enhancing cybersecurity, promoting resiliency planning, and providing trainings to entities located in disadvantaged communities. The cohort will also engage in a new pilot project to expand to the commercial building market. As part of the pilot, selected IACs will partner with community colleges and technical programs to train diverse students and professionals to conduct energy-efficiency assessments of small to medium-sized buildings, including those located in disadvantaged communities.

To date, the IACs program, one of DOE’s longest-running programs managed by the Advanced Manufacturing Office, has provided nearly 20,000 no-cost assessments for small- and medium-sized manufacturers and more than 147,000 recommendations for improvement measures. Assessments typically identify more than $130,000 in potential annual savings opportunities.

At ���ϲ�����, there are 10 to 15 students involved at a time and the team conducts 20 assessments each year, says ,��assistant teaching professor and engineering management graduate program director, in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science.

“I am looking forward to working alongside our students to make an environmental impact by helping improve energy efficiency at manufacturing facilities across the state,” Anderson says.

Quinn Qiao

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Quinn Qiao and a research team from the College of Engineering and Computer Science received a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and industry members to develop an Industry/University Collaborative Research Center (IUCRC) for solid-state electric power storage with a site at ���ϲ�����. The University will partner with South Dakota School of Mines and Technologies and Northeastern University to build this NSF-sponsored center. The center will focus on developing eco-friendly, safe and economically feasible all-solid-state energy storage technology for portable and medical applications, automotive industry, centralized and decentralized electric grids, military applications, and energy security.

Potential research projects will include materials design and testing with particular focus on interface engineering, solid electrolytes development, electrode materials synthesis, advanced mathematical modeling, and in-situ imaging to characterize performance, manufacturing process testing, battery system development and fabrication of intrinsically combined solar/battery devices. In addition to the study of traditional materials, the center will also explore those relevant to earlier stage design and development of promising newer glass ceramic materials.

“Energy storage is critically needed to deploy renewable energies such as solar and wind, as well as development of electric vehicles,” says Qiao. “Energy storage allows clean energy to be available when sunlight is unavailable at night or on cloudy days, or when wind is not sufficient. Current lithium batteries typically use liquid electrolytes that may lead to safety issues from explosions or fires. This NSF IUCRC will provide ���ϲ����� a great platform to work with industry partners, which offers numerous opportunities for our faculty and students. Industry members will also help guide the research directions and projects that will lead to commercialization of solid-state batteries. This center will also help us to build the Cluster for Materials for Energy Applications.”

The center will work closely with industry partners in New York, across the United States and globally to develop high capacity, fast charging, safe and cost-effective solid-state batteries. The batteries developed by the center will be aligned with the energy storage set by the state of New York: 1,500 megawatts of energy storage by 2025 and 3,000 megawatts by 2030.

Qiao will be the principal investigator and site director for the NSF award. Mechanical and aerospace engineering professors Jeongmin Ahn, Bing Dong, Shalabh Maroo, Weiwei Zheng, Teng Zhang and Jianshun Zhang will be co-co-principal investigators or senior investigators.

“Mechanical and aerospace engineering faculty have a tradition of conducting quality research in energy systems,” says Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department Chair Young B. Moon. “With the establishment of this center, the faculty plans to elevate the research to the next level of international prominence working with other faculty members at ���ϲ�����.”

“We are very excited about this new IUCRC center,” says Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs Dacheng Ren. “It extends our established strength in energy research and elevates it to a higher level. Besides research innovation, the center also brings industry insights and new training opportunities for our students.”

“This center positions ���ϲ����� on the leading edge of solid-state power storage. It is not only a fast-growing field, but an increasingly important one as we look to meet the need for safer, higher capacity batteries,” says College of Engineering and Computer Science Dean J. Cole Smith.

Jamie Jeeyoon Kim, an assistant professor of sport management, at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang

The Tokyo Olympics will have a different vibe from other games. No fans in the stands will make for quiet venues. And what impact might that have on drawing young viewers into watching the games and participating in sports in general?

For the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, Jamie Jeeyoon Kim, an assistant professor of sport management in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, researched how young people were drawn into watching the games and more importantly whether they were then motivated to participate in sports—always a primary interest for host countries and those involved in the Olympic movement.

Kim has a deep background in the Olympics beyond her research. Before coming to academia, she used to work for the Korean Olympic Committee, assisting Korea’s successful bid for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and serving as a manager of the Korean national team.

For the 2018 Olympics, the PyeongChang Organizing Committee’s “New Horizons” vision was to expand winter sports in Asia, bolstered by what some in the sports industry described as the youngest and fastest-growing winter sports market in the world with the largest aggregate youth population.

To better understand the impact of the games and develop strategies for drawing in young people, Kim was awarded $18,000 as part of the International Olympic Committee’s advanced Olympic research grant for her project, “Building a Sport Participation Legacy Through the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.”

Through her work, Kim says that “social influence was found as the most influential factor in the Asian younger generations’ decision-making for Olympic consumption.” In Japan, that element might be missing at the upcoming games—as it will be hard to show how people are missing out from an experience when no one is in the stands.

Kim also received a $7,500 Falk College Seed Grant for the project, “Building Korea’s Brand Personality and Equity with the Olympic Brand and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics,” looking at the nation branding effects of hosting the Olympic games.

In this Q&A, Kim answers a few questions about her research on the legacy of sport participation from the Olympics, her longstanding connection with the Olympics and the thrill of the games.

Q: What did your research involve regarding your project on “Building a Sport Participation Legacy Through the 2018 Winter Olympic Games”?

A: As reflected in the vision of “New Horizons,” the primary goal of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics was to boost sport participation and spectatorship among younger generations in the Asian market through the “trickle-down effect” (i.e., watching the Olympics will inspire people to watch and play sport).

Based on “negotiation of motives and constraints,” a project identifying and testing the interaction among and assessing pre-post changes of key internal and external motives and intrapersonal, interpersonal and structural constraints was conducted with late adolescents in Korea and China. The project was funded by the 2017-2018 Advanced Olympic Research Grant from the International Olympic Committee’s Olympics Studies Centre.

Motives and constraints already known to affect general sport participation and spectating (e.g., enjoyment, escape, cost, time constraint) were found to affect Asian younger generations’ decision-making for Olympic consumption. Notably, social influence and curiosity newly emerged as context-specific factors with strong influences.

The scarcity of the event—being held every four years and the rare opportunity to attend—altered how certain factors affected sport participation and spectatorship (e.g., lack of knowledge about a sport is usually a constraint but functioned as a motive in the study).

Additionally, the exposure to the 2018 games brought short-term boosts of Asian younger generations’ intentions for Olympic sport participation and spectating.

Q: What outcomes were there that might be applied to other Olympics, including these upcoming summer games? How do you see the lack of in-person fans at the upcoming Olympics as impacting sport participation?

A: Among the motives and constraints, social influence was found as the most influential factor in the Asian younger generations’ decision-making for Olympic consumption. Social influence—being influenced by friends or family or to follow the trend—is a factor similar to the “fear

Jamie Jeeyoon Kim, an assistant professor of sport management, at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang

of missing out” that can be an influential motive as well as a moderator facilitating one’s overcoming of constraints.

For the Tokyo Olympics, it will be difficult to promote “social influence” among the Japanese audience, as banning in-person spectating hinders the building of the perception that “you do not want to miss out when many others are enjoying Olympic sport.” The fact that the majority of Japanese are preferring the postponement or cancellation of the games is another hindrance for forming “social influence.”

Q: What was the most satisfying part of your work serving with the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics Bid Committee and Korean Olympics Committee?

A: I cannot forget the moment when “PyeongChang” was announced as the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics. It was a moment of excitement and fulfillment, but I also felt relieved that the bidding process was finally over. It was one of the very few moments I’ve cried out of joy.

Attending the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics was also a satisfying experience. I was able to attend the event as a researcher. Seeing the Olympic bid plan actually being realized and being able to catch up with former colleagues were great enjoyable experiences.

My experience with the Olympics helped me stay involved with the Olympic movement in a researcher capacity. I have worked in a research consortium developing a bid strategy for the 2032 Seoul Summer Olympics and a legacy education program for the 2024 Gangwon Winter Youth Olympics. I also am working with the Caribbean Association of National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and its 29 member NOCs on a project about NOC sponsorship. Being able to conduct research that assists practitioners and seeing it making an impact is very rewarding.

Q: What are you most looking forward to with the upcoming Olympics? What is your favorite sport to watch?

A: The IOC allows organizing committees to add certain sports to the Olympic program. For Tokyo, baseball/softball, karate, skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing will be added. These sports were strategically selected to appeal to the younger generation and the host country residents.

Personally, I am excited about skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing as they make their debut at the Olympic stage. These sports are dynamic, energetic and fast-paced, and I believe the sports will bring more excitement and attract more of a younger generation to watch the Olympics.

My favorite sport to watch is not in the summer program. It is short-track speed skating in the Winter Olympics. I like the sport as it is one of the most fast-paced sports, very competitive and always nail-biting. As the former team manager of the Korean national team, the fact that Korea has been pretty successful in the sport did affect my preference of the sport.

Nikhila Krishnan, a Ph.D. student in biology, using the new Zeiss LSM980 confocal microscope. Housed in the Blatt BioImaging Center, the state-of-the-art microscope was acquired thanks to an S10 grant from the National Institutes of Health.

For the first time in ���ϲ�����’s history, a department has received a prestigious S10 Instrumentation Grant from the National Institutes of Health. The S10 program, which supports the purchase of high-tech instruments to enhance research of NIH investigators, funded the acquisition of a Zeiss LSM980 confocal microscope. The new equipment will provide researchers at ���ϲ����� with sharp, detailed images of specific sections of cells.

The S10 grant was awarded to George Langford, College of Arts and Sciences dean emeritus and professor emeritus of biology, in collaboration with colleagues at ���ϲ����� and SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Housed in the Department of Biology’s , which is under the direction of Assistant Professor Heidi Hehnly, the confocal microscope adds to the center’s variety of sensitive instruments. Thanks to many specialized microscopes, researchers have the equipment to investigate a wide range of samples, from microscopic level yeast cells all the way up to whole organisms. The Blatt BioImaging Center’s equipment is available for use with a reservation to anyone at ���ϲ�����, SUNY Upstate, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and other local institutions.

We recently caught up with Blatt BioImaging Center manager Mike Bates to learn more about the new confocal microscope and how it will benefit College of Arts and Sciences faculty and student researchers.

Researchers in the ���ϲ����� Stuttering Research Lab use sophisticated sensors to track movements of the lips and jaw during speech.

What do Hollywood movie production companies and researchers at the ���ϲ����� Stuttering Research Lab have in common? Each uses sophisticated state-of-the-art equipment like infrared motion tracking cameras and body sensors—but for very different purposes.

While the movie production companies use motion capture to animate digital characters, the stuttering research lab is putting it to use on Central New York-area preschool-age children in an important effort to determine what factors lead to childhood stuttering. By tracking movements of the lips and jaw during speech and analyzing data such as skin conductance and heart rate variability, researchers are using the stuttering research lab’s high-tech equipment to examine the association between a child’s level of excitement and stuttering.

According to Victoria Tumanova, assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’��, a person’s emotional state can lead to profound changes in their body, including changes in how movements are controlled. “Research evidence from sports psychology and music performance points to adverse effects of stress on skilled movement,” she says. “Speech is a sequence of highly skilled and fast movements. Thus, we predict that speech movement control can also be affected by someone’s level of excitement.”

Victoria Tumanova

Tumanova serves as principal investigator on a grant from the�� exploring the situational factors influencing speech movement control and speech motor learning in preschool-age children who stutter. She is collaborating on the project with Rachel Razza, associate professor in the Falk College’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, Asif Salekin, assistant professor in the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Qiu Wang, associate professor in the School of Education.

Stuttering is a speech disorder that affects over three million people and 5% of preschool-age children in the United States. It is characterized by repetitions of sounds, syllables or words, and emerges in preschool years during the time when children undergo rapid development of their speech motor control, language and emotional regulatory processes.

Tumanova and her team suspect that stuttering is affected by a child’s “emotional reactivity processes.” Emotional reactivity refers to how easily or intensely someone reacts emotionally to experiences in life. This study is the first to examine the effects of two important types of emotional reactivity processes—contextual and constitutional—on speech in children who stutter and their fluent peers.

The sensors allow researchers to examine the association between a child’s level of excitement and speech motor control.

“Contextual emotional reactivity” is someone’s physiological response, such as excitement, driven by a specific situation; it is variable and context-dependent. For example, if a child is at their birthday party opening gifts, they may be very excited; if the child is playing with a familiar toy, they may be calm. Tumanova says parents of children who stutter often report that their children stutter more when they experience emotional arousal or excitement, even when it is positive in nature.

On the other hand, “constitutional emotional reactivity” is the person’s inherent way of responding to their environment; it remains relatively stable over time. Some children are more outgoing, and some are more reserved; some children get easily excited, and some do not.

The group hypothesizes that increases in emotional reactivity, driven by the situational context, the child’s inherent way of responding to their environment, or by their combined influence, interfere with speech motor control and speech motor learning processes necessary for the early development of fluent speech.

By determining factors that lead to stuttering early in a child’s speech development, the team hopes to develop strategies to better identify and treat the disorder at its onset. They also expect that the results from this study will inform the assessment of risk factors for stuttering persistence and eventually contribute to improved intervention strategies.

The team is currently recruiting 3- to 5-year-old children from the Central New York area who do and do not stutter to take part in this project. Families interested in participating may email Victoria Tumanova at vtumanov@syr.edu��for more information.

A team led by Nina Sharifi, assistant professor of architectural technology in the School of Architecture, is undertaking a $1.59 million retrofit demonstration project and “living lab” for ongoing research using a South Campus dormitory at Winding Ridge. The pilot project aims to achieve net-zero energy, which means it captures as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year. In line with New York State decarbonization policy goals, the project prioritizes the reduction of emissions through building electrification and designing with materials not derived from fossil fuels. It is supported by a $1.39 million grant administered by the (NYSERDA) REV Campus Communities Energy to Lead program and $200,000 from the ���ϲ����� Climate Action Plan.

The living lab will span the entire scope of the retrofitting project, from evaluating the existing building, modeling energy and costs, sourcing low-carbon materials, installing retrofit systems, evaluating energy use and collecting data once the building is reoccupied.

“The goal is to develop replicable approaches that can be applied to buildings constructed prior to 1980 in New York state. The pilot project will produce data that can help individuals, organizations and communities in cold climates reduce energy use through sustainable design, construction and technology integration,” says Sharifi.

“Our school is building a very strong, STEM-based research culture with connections to industry and Assistant Professor Sharifi, lead member on this exciting NYSERDA funded project, along with team member, Associate Professor Bess Krietemeyer, are leading that effort. Both are helping to redefine research not only at our school but also in the academy and in the discipline, which historically have not focused on or valued such a strong STEM focus,” says Michael Speaks, dean of the School of Architecture.

Students from the School of Architecture will be involved in all phases of the project. Bing Dong, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, will lead the sensing and occupant behavior aspects of the project. Two iSchool faculty members, Jason Dedrick and Jeff Hemsley, will design streaming displays of energy performance and student data analysis, including designing an app that will share information in real time. In addition, Krietemeyer will work in partnership with the Museum of Science and Technology to design an interactive exhibit linking this research to other retrofit efforts and communicating the energy and environmental impacts to the public.

“Creating the living lab on campus is possible because Campus Planning, Design and Construction has been incredibly supportive. Melissa Cadwell, energy systems and sustainability management coordinator, and the ���ϲ����� Center of Excellence are critical partners in this project. Because of their support, students will have hands-on opportunities throughout all phases of the project,” Sharifi says.

“���ϲ����� is proud of the broad cross-disciplinary team applying expertise from architecture, the iSchool and engineering to a real-world problem in sustainable energy. This project will provide a rich research environment for our students during the retrofit and after, as they track performance metrics and qualitative feedback on the project,” says Interim Provost John Liu.

Students are participating in building evaluation and modeling, analysis of manufacturing and supply chains for technology and materials, using lifecycle analysis tools to measure carbon impact, evaluating energy-saving technologies and working with faculty to document all aspects of the project to create a research-based model that other building retrofits can follow. They will also have opportunities to participate in design competitions and other public-facing events.

Sharifi hopes that the project will serve as a proof of concept for the integration of human health and wellness criteria—including lighting, air quality and materials—into an approach that is also financially feasible for buildings like this one. Over 300,000 similar buildings exist throughout the state, and the ���ϲ����� and New York City Housing Authorities and residents are among potential stakeholders and beneficiaries of the project’s research outcomes.

NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen M. Harris says, “The colleges and universities recognized through the Energy to Lead Competition are leading by example and moving our fight against climate change forward by engaging the campus community in one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Their compelling projects will deliver meaningful carbon reducing results, help develop future climate leaders and improve access to clean energy with solutions that can be replicated and brought to scale.”

New York State higher education institutions are eligible to join����and apply to����and��.��REV Campus Challenge members can also receive exclusive offerings and support through NYSERDA’s����to kick-start their campus clean energy efforts.

Buildings are one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in New York state, and integrating energy efficiency and electrification measures in existing buildings will reduce carbon pollution and help achieve more sustainable, healthy and comfortable buildings. Through NYSERDA and utility programs, over $6.8 billion is being invested to decarbonize buildings across the state. By improving energy efficiency in buildings and including on-site storage, renewables and electric vehicle charging equipment, the state will reduce carbon pollution and achieve the ambitious target of reducing on-site energy consumption by 185 trillion BTUs by 2025, the equivalent of powering 1.8 million homes. Energy efficiency accounts for 75% of the clean energy jobs across New York, and the state’s ambitious plan to reduce carbon pollution will result in an additional $1.8 billion in societal and environmental benefits.

The Small Equipment Grant Program is designed to strengthen research capacity and capability at the University. Up to $600,000 will be awarded through this mechanism. These awards are intended to bridge the gap between major research equipment as funded through extramural grants (and requests for equipment in individual research project grants) and small items often purchased through faculty research accounts. ��are due June 11.

The Small Equipment Grant Program will pay 100% of the first $25,000 of equipment costs. For equipment costs between $25,000 to $50,000, costs will be equally shared between the Grant Program and the department, school or college. The minimum amount for an equipment award request is $5,000.

There is no maximum equipment cost; however, the Small Equipment Grant Program is intended to support equipment not obtainable through traditional mid-to-large scale equipment grant programs from extramural funders, so preference will be given to proposals for equipment that fall between $5,000 to $100,000. The Small Equipment Grant Program is also not intended to fund the purchase of equipment approved as part of a faculty startup package. The maximum amount of an award from the Office of Research will be $37,500 for equipment costing $50,000 or more.

The Small Equipment Grant Program was established in 2019. To date, the program has funded 32 projects. For questions about the Small Equipment Grant Program request for applications, please contact Christina Leigh Docteur. For questions regarding use of the application portal, please contact Jeff Falchi.

“The Heinz Endowment has enhanced our ability to advocate for military families through a combination of strategic communications, research and outreach to policymakers as well as the veteran community,” says Mike Haynie, vice chancellor and executive director of IVMF. “To make a difference in the lives of veterans of this generation and future generations, IVMF needs to work with government leaders and provide research that will set military families up for success. This grant will be instrumental in our ability to do so.”

The grant will help build on the momentum of successful government advocacy the past year. IVMF’s full support of the recently passed Senate Bill 785 (Commander Scott Hannon Mental Health Improvement Act of 2019) addressed veteran suicide, one of the most pressing needs in the veteran community. On May 12, Haynie appeared before a subcommittee on economic opportunity of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

“Our work to support veterans and military families in making successful, fulfilling transitions to civilian life is only possible with accurate, well-informed data,” said Megan Andros, senior program officer for veterans at The Heinz Endowments. ”IVMF’s research shines a light on the unique challenges veterans and their families face, and we are confident that their policy agenda will better help inform policymakers so they can successfully advocate for them. We are grateful for the trusted partnership we have with ���ϲ����� and IVMF, and we look forward to continuing to work together in bringing awareness and positive change to the lives of veterans and their families.”

“IVMF’s research and analytics, supported by a preeminent R1 research institution like ���ϲ�����, can help governments make strategic investments and legislation.” says Haynie. ��“I want to thank the Heinz Endowment for empowering IVMF to bring awareness of issues facing military families to the highest level of government leadership.”