“He literally took a piece of chalk and drew a circle around a part of the park,’” Gooden said with a smile.

From there, Gooden went on to Fordham Prep and began running competitively.

“I’d run a mile and that was OK to me, but then what my coach used to do was he’d continuously add miles and just didn’t tell me,” he said with a laugh. “We started running two miles and then I’d say, ‘Coach, it felt a little longer today.’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, you’re just getting really good at it.’ Eventually, I started to realize that I ran three miles and he just wasn’t telling me.”

That baseline work set the stage for Gooden’s track and field career at Fordham, where he’s run a variety of mid-distance races, from 400 to 800 meters. During the 2018-2019 season, Gooden, who received an athletic scholarship to run at Fordham, earned two medals for Fordham within two weeks: He was a bronze medalist at the Atlantic 10 Championship in the 500-meter run, and he earned another bronze at the IC4A Championship in the 500-meter race while also helping the relay team place fifth.

Those two weeks were intense, Gooden said.

“Two of our best 400-meter runners went down, an old captain of mine and one of my teammates, and the team definitely needed me to just be able to be there for them and the ability to be able to give them 100% with both my individual [races], and my relay was, it was a really great feeling,” he said.

Finding Motivation as the Anchor Leg

While Gooden has had strong individual performances, his coaches said he really shines when passing the baton to others.

“He really thrives in the relays, and I think that’s because he’s such a team player,” said Brian Horowitz, head track and field coach. “[He has] exceptional performances on the track, and he’s definitely a good role model for some of our freshmen and sophomores this year, bringing them under his wing.”

Gooden, a senior English major at Fordham College at Rose Hill who loves to write, said it’s the competition in relays that fuels him.

“Being the anchor leg …is definitely a very big activation for me to ‘hunt down’ whoever is in front of me,” he said. “I love just being able to get parallel with somebody else and say, ‘OK, let’s see how much we can give.’”

Gooden said that he felt the team was really hitting its stride right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit last spring.

“We missed the school record by 0.2 [seconds],” he said. “We’d come really close to that. And that was a really big step for us.”

Advocating for Fellow Athletes

For Gooden, that passion and drive also extends to his commitments off the field, where he’s working to improve the lives of student-athletes and grow partnerships between the athletics program and the Bronx community. As someone who has faced discrimination and racial microaggressions throughout his athletic career, he said he wants to make sure other student-athletes don’t have to face the same issues. And being a commuting student-athlete gave Gooden insight into the needs of others like him—such as the importance of schedule flexibility to fit in training, or having to factor in commuting time to get to programs and activities.

“Being a student athlete, it seems like the life, [but]it’s a lot of hours, especially for me,” he said.

Gooden used his participation as a member of the Fordham Athletics Social Justice Task Force, Fordham Connect, and the Athletics’ Advisory Committee, to bring these issues to light. He’s also been working with his coaches and staff to implement changes, such as improved advising, more support, and an updated handbook for student-athletes on their rights. The handbook includes a new reporting protocol for bias-related incidents and hate crimes, a policy on student demonstrations, and an updated mission and purpose statement.

“I’m trying to encourage a lot of coaches to look beyond just the athlete, and look at the personal side, the home side, the individual themselves,” he said. “I think, one, that makes a strong team and two, it allows a coach to nurture an overall better athlete when you take all those things into account.”

Making Strides in Diversity

Horowitz said that Gooden, who has also had to battle hamstring injuries, has been a leader for other teammates and athletes.

“Arthur was quick to just jump in and lend his voice and work with myself and the entire Athletics Department to make sure that we are focusing on all the needs of our student athletes and being as inclusive in everything as possible,” he said.

Gooden highlighted the athletics department’s diversity initiatives, which he has been a part of, and his coaching staff’s attentiveness to the needs of student-athletes as signs of progress, in addition to the handbook, he said.

“There’s been different implementations of diversity training within the athletic staff now in a variety of ways, from guest speakers to workshops,” Gooden said.

‘Unfinished Business’

Gooden said he plans to continue working on his creative writing, and possibly pursue law school after getting a master’s in English.

“I fell in love with writing—when I have time, I write poetry for myself. I like stories. I love storytelling, spoken word poetry, and when I have more time I write music and things of that nature,” he said.

His goal is to continue running at Fordham in graduate school, as he had a few years left of eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I would definitely like to fifth year because those school records hang on my mind—when I was a sophomore, I missed the school record by 0.3 or 0.4 [seconds], so I definitely have an air of unfinished business to take care of,” he said.

Alexander Hendra Dwi Asmara, S.J., lives in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. But the homogenous society, he said, has bred intolerance, discrimination, and even violence against religious minorities. 

“People are very afraid that there will be war in the name of God. I believe religious education is one way to [defuse situations],” said Father Asmara, who will graduate this year from the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education with his Ph.D. in religious education. “I want to make a religious education model that unites people from other religions.”

‘Education Is in My Blood’ 

Father Asmara was born and raised in Ambarawa, a small town in Indonesia. His parents, an elementary school teacher and a junior high English teacher, inspired him to pursue a career in higher education. But he also wanted to become a priest, like the ones who led services at the Catholic church beside his childhood home. 

Father Asmara earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Driyarkara School of Philosophy in Indonesia in 2008. Five years later, he received his master’s degree in theological studies from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. In 2014, he was ordained a priest.  

“As a Jesuit priest, I could fulfill my dream of being a person who works in education,” Father Asmara said. “And education is in my blood.” 

His Jesuit supervisors assigned him to Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where he taught Catholic religious education for two years. Then they asked him to earn a doctorate in religious education. 

Finding A Fordham ‘Family’ in America 

Father Asmara found Fordham, a Jesuit school that aligned with his values and offered courses in a city unlike any other in Indonesia—the biggest, most diverse city in the world, he said. In 2016, he moved to New York, where he learned about the Black Lives Matter movement and, for the first time in his life, visited neighborhoods that overflowed with diversity. 

“I went to Queens and saw every kind of Asian—Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Indian … I went to Brooklyn, where there were many different cultures, and the Bronx, with many Latinos,” Father Asmara said. “I was so happy [to be here].”

He lived in Fordham’s Jesuit community at Spellman Hall, where he was welcomed by priests who helped him adjust to life in America.  

“I found a family here,” Father Asmara said. “I made the right choice to come to Fordham.” 

A New Education Model to Address A Nationwide Problem

Over the next four years, he said, his classes taught him how to think critically and analyze situations from multiple perspectives—as a Catholic, as a priest, and as a human being. His professors also helped him develop a dissertation on a topic close to his heart: the deescalation of religious conflict in his native country.

“In the U.S., people are divided by race,” Father Asmara said. “In Indonesia, we are divided by religion.” 

His dissertation, “Educating for Unity in Diversity: Religious Education for Transformation in the Context of Everyday Religious Conflict in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia,” proposes a “live-in” religious education curriculum where students live in a home with people from a religious community different from their own.

“Live-in provides students with an opportunity to have an experience of living in another religious community. It guides students to become deeply rooted in their own religious tradition, while being open to learning from and collaborating with people of other religious traditions,” said Asmara’s dissertation mentor, Harold D. Horell, Ph.D., associate professor of religious education. “Hendra further develops the model of live-in education currently used in some Jesuit schools for young people in his country. The model of interreligious education he has developed could inform religious educational efforts in other contexts about how to address religious conflict by nurturing interreligious understanding and solidarity.” 

Last fall, Father Asmara returned to his job as a lecturer in Catholic religious education at Sanata Dharma University. He said he sees himself serving as a bridge between different faiths for the rest of his life. 

“As a religious teacher, I teach my students to have an inclusive way of thinking through the Catholic tradition,” Father Asmara said, speaking over Zoom from his home in Indonesia. “I want to make sure that my students have an open mind, the spirit of dialogue, and a way of thinking that doesn’t claim one religion is the only right religion.”

“I know what it’s like to be an inner-city kid, and it’s not always easy. I feel like I can help kids who may not like school, who may see me as part of the establishment. I want to let them know that I’m someone just like them, who ended up accomplishing their goals and actually getting into their career, regardless of what my background was or what people thought I could do,” said Chevalier, a 2020 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill who will be graduating this May with her master’s degree in adolescence education for social studies from the Graduate School of Education. 

Chevalier grew up in a single-mother household on Bailey Avenue in the Bronx. She attended public schools with many students who looked like her, but she said only two of her teachers were women of color: a Latina second-grade teacher who taught English and a Puerto Rican high school social studies teacher. 

“Those two inspired me to become a teacher because I never had anyone who looked like me in the classroom,” Chevalier said. 

Culturally Relevant Teaching

This past year, Chevalier was a student teacher at IN-Tech Academy MS/HS 368—the same high school she graduated from. She said her goal in all her classes is to create a culturally relevant curriculum where her students feel represented. One recent example is an American history lesson plan where she taught students about not only the 1776 Declaration of Independence, but also another relevant event from that same year—a petition for freedom by slaves. 

“Instead of just teaching my kids about the Declaration of Independence alone, I taught them about how the language of freedom not only inspired the enslaved in the United States, but all over the world, including Haiti,” Chevalier said. “I bring in primary sources that reflect another population that is usually ignored. I want to create a 360-world view of one issue instead of a 180-world view, which is what we’re accustomed to in our history education.”

Her longtime mentor Diane Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of curriculum and teaching at GSE, said Chevalier is a natural educator who helps her students understand social studies differently.  

“Teaching is not only helping students understand new concepts, but also helping them reexamine how they think,” Rodriguez said. “As a teacher, this is very powerful. In Chantal, it’s innate.” 

As a Fordham undergrad, Chevalier was able to volunteer at a high school in the Bronx, where she taught in a classroom for the first time and realized she was passionate about teaching. This inspired her to pursue her master’s degree in education through the five-year track at GSE, she said. 

“That opportunity provided by Fordham was the catalyst for me becoming a teacher,” said Chevalier, who was accepted to the University through the Higher Education Opportunity Program. 

Anti-Racism Commitment at Fordham Was ‘Life-Changing’

Chevalier said the Graduate School of Education also showed her how to put anti-racism at the forefront of her teaching pedagogy.

“It’s been life-changing to see all of my classes talk about race, especially since many of my classes are Caucasian-driven. They make sure that people who are Caucasian are recognizing the racist ideologies in our society and advocating against them by being anti-racist,” Chevalier said.

A decade from now, Chevalier said she wants to start a nonprofit that provides early internship and college access for inner-city high school students, who often lack opportunities to network and explore potential career paths. For now, her goal is to stay in the Bronx and serve the community she came from. 

“My ultimate goal in life is to make sure that I touch as many students as I can in a positive way, and that students remember me for my rigor, passion, empathy, and ability to connect with them as human beings,” Chevalier said. “I hope I can inspire young Black and brown girls and boys to reach their dreams and to work hard for them, no matter how difficult they are.”

“I fell in love with the research process, and I realized that you can still make an impact on people’s lives as a scientist,” said Daso, a graduating senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who will begin a Ph.D. program in biomedical engineering at Northwestern University this fall. “You don’t have to be a physician to practice medicine and create cures for people.” 

Daso is a chemistry major and philosophy minor in the Honors Program at Fordham College at Rose Hill. She is a 2020 Clare Boothe Luce Summer Scholar who has received multiple undergraduate research grants from Fordham and tutored peers in chemistry and biology. Her research has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals outside Fordham, including Biotechnology Journal and ACS Omega. She is also co-valedictorian of her class with a 4.0 GPA; she’ll address her classmates with a recorded speech during FCRH’s virtual diploma ceremony later this month. 

Bringing Damaged Tissues Back to Life

Over the past three years, Daso has conducted research in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine under Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., professor and chair of the chemistry department. Their goal is to use chemistry to help repair damaged tissues in the human body. 

“If you damage your skin, it grows back pretty fast. But there are other tissues like bones that are a lot harder to grow back,” Daso said. “I work in the field of regeneration, where we’re trying to create materials that encourage cells and tissues to grow and heal after an injury.”

Banerjee said her mentee displays all the qualities of a good scientist, especially curiosity. 

“She has that fundamental quality: ‘I want to figure this out, I want to see how this works.’ She understands the concepts, and she’s interested at the conceptual level,” Banerjee said. 

Not everything runs smoothly in the lab, however. Experimental cells have become contaminated with bacteria. A carefully curated cell culture once became unusable after miscommunication between a classmate, and the entire experiment needed to be restarted, said Daso. But when their experiments are finished and ready to share with the world, it’s an incredible feeling, she said.

Blending Abstract Science with ‘Real-World Ethical Issues’

Through her bioethics courses at Fordham, Daso said she realized that scientists need to prioritize clear, consistent communication about their research with the public. 

“That’s something Fordham has encouraged me to do through all my liberal arts classes, and I hope to bring that to the science field,” said Daso, who has co-presented her research at several national and regional conferences. “That’s how you’re going to develop the best products for people—when you can communicate with the people you’re developing a product for.”

Daso is also grateful for her philosophy minor, which encouraged her to explore her work from the perspective of people.

“I love how it incorporates analytical thinking with real-world ethical issues,” Daso said. “We need to start thinking about who we are engineering these materials for and how it can impact the social dynamics of our society.” 

A Mentor for Women in STEM

Daso grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, as the oldest of four siblings. Her parents graduated from the same Ohio university, but their eldest daughter wanted something different for herself. 

“Everyone in my family had always gone to school in Ohio, but when it came time for me to decide where to go for college, I decided I wanted to go on my own adventure and explore somewhere new for four years,” said Daso, who also played the trombone for Fordham Orchestra and Jazz at Lincoln Center. 

Ten years from now, Daso said, she hopes to become a strong female mentor in the STEM field, like the faculty mentor who first welcomed her into her lab.  

“Without Dr. Banerjee, I don’t know if I would have been able to make it in research and realize my full potential,” Daso said. “I would love to play that same role for other women in STEM.”