“Thalia’s improvement may be attributed to the amount and level of treatment that she received. Thalia started with therapy before she was three years old. The number of hours of one-on-one daily therapy, her attending a school that specialized in children with autism, and Lorena working with her daughter provided the treatment that she needed in those early years,” wrote John A. Fortunato, Ph. D., professor at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business.

WHO GAVE IT: The New York State Department of Health
WHO GOT IT: Edward Dubrovsky, PhD, professor of biology
HOW MUCH: $77,005
WHAT FOR: A grant to explore the role of mutations in a gene called ELAC2 in prostate cancer

Orthodox Christian Studies

WHO GAVE IT: The Carpenter Foundation combined with a Fordham Faculty Fellowship
WHO GOT IT: George Demacopoulos, PhD, the Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies
HOW MUCH: $30,000
WHAT FOR: A yearlong sabbatical for his project, “Colonizing Christianity: Prejudice and Sex in the Crusader East”

Art History

WHO GAVE IT: National Endowment for the Humanities
WHO GOT IT: Nina Rowe, PhD, associate professor of art history
HOW MUCH: $50,400
WHAT FOR: To complete a book on late medieval illuminated World Chronicle manuscripts

Arts and Sciences

WHO GAVE IT: Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities
WHO GOT IT: Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and doctoral candidate in philosophy Joseph Vukov
HOW MUCH: $2,000
WHAT FOR: A grant to study how Fordham graduate students perceive their education in the context of the University’s mission

Graduate School of Education

WHO GAVE IT:  Marie Noelle Chynn, GSS ’60 and Kuo York Chynn, M.D
WHO GOT IT: Graduate School of Education
HOW MUCH: $104,000
WHAT FOR: Dr. J.T. Vincent Lou Memorial Endowed Fellowship

Irish Studies

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Brautigam, TMC ’74, and Richard Brautigam, FCRH ’73
WHO GOT IT: Irish Studies
HOW MUCH: $6,000
WHAT FOR: Four Irish Cultural Events in the Spring of 2016

Engineers Without Borders

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Jane McCartney, TMC’ 68 and George McCartney, FCRH ’68, LAW ’72
WHO GOT IT: Engineers Without Borders
HOW MUCH: $13,000 challenge grant
WHAT FOR: A challenge grant that raised $27,000 to support EWB’s trip to Uganda to build fish farms

Physics

WHO GAVE IT:  Christa and John Reddy, FCRH ’77
WHO GOT IT: Department of Physics and Engineering Physics
HOW MUCH: $10,000
WHAT FOR: Supplies for Experiments

Other major grant-winners last year included:

• Yilu Zhou, PhD, professor of information sciences, who received a National Science Foundation grant to research age recommendations on mobile apps;
• Winnie Kung, PhD, associate professor of social work, who received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the impact among Asian survivors and rescuers exposed to the World Trade Center attack; and
• Lise Schreier, PhD, associate professor of French, who won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her research on the 18th-century practice of “child-gifting.”

At Fordham, the celebration began a day early with an interdisciplinary symposium spotlighting faculty and students research focused on disability. The Dec. 2 event, “Diversity and Disability: A Celebration of Disability Scholarship at Fordham,” also marked the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Matthew Diller, dean of Fordham School of Law and the Paul Fuller Professor of Law, discussed how disability law influences people’s participation in the workforce. This participation, Diller said, is socially as well as economically important, because work signifies social status.

“Work is central to how we think about people, their role in society, and whether they are successful members of that society,” Diller said. “There is a social expectation that you should be in the workforce, and if you’re not, then you’re an underperforming member.”

Not everyone can fulfill that expectation, Diller said, so the law allows for some people to be excused from work owing to certain situations or conditions, such as a disability. Some people, however—including people with disabilities—are excluded from work altogether as the result of prejudice, discrimination, or other barriers that prevent them from fully participating in society.

“If we judge social worth by whether someone works, but then exclude some people from the workforce, then we’re inherently denigrating their social worth,” he said.

The value of the ADA, Diller said, is that it focuses on creating systems that integrate people with disabilities into the workforce, thereby restoring their right to work.

However, there remains room for improvement, Diller said. For instance, up until Congress substantially amended the law in 2008, courts regularly impeded the ADA’s enforcement by making the definition of disability extremely narrow. Many plaintiffs seeking excusal from or accommodations for work lost their cases on the grounds they were not disabled—an approach Diller said was “misguided.”

Christine Fountain, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, and Rebecca Sanchez, PhD, assistant professor of English, also presented.

Fountain is doing research with scientists from Columbia University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the sociological aspects of autism, particularly how a noncontagious illness has reached epidemic proportions and who is being most severely affected by it.

Autism, the group has found, is more prevalent in children of wealthy and well-educated parents, and that wealth and education play a role in how quickly and to what extent an autistic child improves developmentally.

Sanchez discussed her new book Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (New York University Press, 2015), which argues that “deaf insight,” that is, the “embodied and cultural knowledge of deaf people,” is not an impairment, but an alternative way of thinking and communicating.

She offered the example of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 silent film Modern Times. Chaplin, Sanchez said, deliberately chose to avoid the new “talkie” technology because silent pictures allowed for “a universal means of expression.” The plot of the film itself, she said, bespeaks the dangers of forcing people to express themselves in homogenized ways.

The event also included poster presentations by two doctoral students, Xiaoming Liu and Rachel Podd, and Navena Chaitoo, FCRH ’13.

Elizabeth Emens, PhD, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, offered the keynote presentation, “Disability Law Futures: Moving Beyond Compliance.”

The event was sponsored by the Office of Research and by the Faculty Working Group on Disability, led by Sophie Mitra, PhD, associate professor of economics. The group connects Fordham faculty who are researching some aspect of disability.

In a sample of nearly 6 million children born in California between 1997 and 2007, Christine Fountain, PhD and researchers from Columbia University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the incidence of autism was twice as high for ART births compared to non-ART births.

Their findings, which were published in the American Journal of Public Health in March, are part of the largest and most diverse study to date exploring the relationship between ART and autism.

“We were interested generally in the social factors behind the increase in autism diagnoses seen over the last decade,” said Fountain, an assistant professor of sociology. “One of the broad factors we looked at was parental age. That is where ART seemed to play a role, because ART allows women to push the upper age limits for childbearing.”

Autism spectrum disorder refers to a serious development disability marked by deficits in communication and social interaction. Currently, about 1 in 68 U.S. children have been diagnosed with a form of autism—a statistic that has increased rapidly over the last decade.

The precise causes and mechanisms of autism remain unclear, but scientists have identified several risk factors, including preterm birth, low birth weight, gestational diabetes, and other complications during pregnancy. The disorder has also been linked to certain parental characteristics, such as older parental age, higher socioeconomic status and education, and white race—characteristics that are also shared by many who use ART to conceive.

The researchers also found that the incidence of autism was much higher in ART children who were part of multiple births—twins, triplets, etc.—as opposed to singleton children. A significant number of ART conceptions result in multiple births because multiple embryos are transferred during the procedure to increase the chances of a successful pregnancy.

“In general, multiple births [whether conceived by ART or not]bring greater risks of complications during pregnancy, such as gestational diabetes, preterm birth, and low birth weight, which are also risks associated with autism,” Fountain said.

Fortunately, the team’s findings suggest a potential point of intervention to help reduce the risk of autism for families who use ART.

“When appropriate, transferring one embryo rather than multiples could be a way to reduce autism risk among ART-conceived children,” Fountain said. “However, we need more research in terms of understanding the actual mechanisms by which ART and autism are linked.”

Fountain’s next research study will be an analysis of ART-born children who have naturally conceived siblings. This, Fountain hopes, could help to isolate the biological factors from social and familial factors.

“Because many ART children come from families that are relatively well-off, it’s not surprising that there would be a higher rate of diagnosis than other children,” she said. “I’m hoping to untangle some of those social factors with this new study.”

Nearly three years ago, a doctor from St. Barnabas Hospital came to the Department of Computer and Information Science at Fordham for help with a medical research question.

David Dayya, D.O., M.P.H., was curious about data mining, a set of techniques for plucking valuable information from the torrent of data routinely generated by computers everywhere. He had found no reports of anyone applying these tools to the causes of disease and disability.

Dr. Dayya joined forces with Frank Hsu, Ph.D., Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science, in launching an interdisciplinary study group that today is producing fresh insight into a provocative public health issue: the potential links between lead and mercury pollution and autism.

It was a natural focus because of the nationwide spike in reported autism cases, and also because of the large data sets created by the federal government and other entities to study industrial pollution throughout the country, Dr. Dayya said. Making sense of that data, however, required tools that go beyond traditional methods of data-crunching to produce connections and comparisons that bring a new level of understanding.

“There is a big difference between data and information, and knowledge and wisdom,” said Hsu, an expert in the burgeoning fields of informatics and bioinformatics.

The group members, concerned about the nationwide shortage of physician-scientists, are also trying to cultivate more opportunities for medical residents to learn about informatics and statistics, and build the basic skills required for careers in research. Informatics has been applied to all sorts of tricky topics—including drug design and consumer behavior—that include diverse variables and messy data sets that can be hard to link.

For the study group’s project, the initial choice of variables was straightforward—lead and mercury are abundant in the environment, they can affect the nervous system, and autism is a nervous system disorder, in which communication and social skills are impaired.

It’s anything but simple, however, to conduct a broad study of the relationship between autism cases and mercury and lead pollution around the nation. In many states, lead and mercury are measured locally, while autism cases are only counted statewide and are often underreported, Dr. Dayya said. Some states have many pollution monitoring sites while others have few, or none.

Also, lead and mercury are diffuse in the environment. In one database, mercury and lead are measured in air particles; another shows mercury concentrations in rainwater and soil.

In light of the imperfections in the data, the study group is proceeding cautiously. “We’re progressing in a more exploratory type of analysis,” Dr. Dayya said.

The group also includes David Yens, Ph.D., an associate professor at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine, part of the New York Institute of Technology, in Old Westbury, N.Y.; Yanjun Li, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Fordham’s Department of Computer and Information Science; and Christina Schweikert, Ph.D., a visiting assistant professor in the department.

Meeting monthly at the Rose Hill campus, they produced research that Schweikert presented in June at the Ninth IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering, held in Taichung, Taiwan. The study was published in June in the proceedings of the conference.

The team used a data mining method in which variables are given ranks and scores to convert them into a common format, making them easier to compare.

They examined data collected in numerous states between 2000 and 2006, and found an association between autism prevalence and the combination of lead and mercury. They also looked for links between pollution readings and prevalence of autism in subsequent years, and found only one: mercury levels in water were associated with autism prevalence approximately four years later, Dr. Dayya said.

This finding could suggest that exposures to mercury during pregnancy are being reflected in later diagnoses of autism, especially since the condition is typically diagnosed around age 3. But the group needs to study this relationship further using data from more U.S. states to see if it holds up, he said.

The results comport with other research that shows environmental pollution could be related to autism. But the group’s study also acknowledges that the topic goes much deeper—for instance, it notes that some people’s genetic makeup may make them more likely to develop autism after being exposed to environmental toxins.

For now, the group will pursue new data to add to its mix and keep trying novel approaches to understand it better.

“The goal is to use multiple techniques to apply to autism, lead and mercury data to get different perspectives and learn something new about the data,” Schweikert said.

The project is one sign of a growing educational emphasis in this area.

Fordham recently established an undergraduate minor in Bioinformatics, as well as an advanced graduate certificate in Biomedical Informatics jointly administered by the Biological Sciences and Computer and Information Science departments.

A medical resident at St. Barnabas who took part in the study, Martin Torrents, used the experience to gain a certificate in biomedical informatics and research that was just launched by the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine Educational Consortium through the St. Barnabas Hospital affiliate.

Dr. Dayya invites medical residents from St. Barnabas and elsewhere to participate in the group’s sessions; he and Hsu are also seeking funds for a fellowship program to train more medical residents in statistics and informatics.

The dearth of doctors who are also trained researchers is a nationwide problem that has drawn the attention of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Dayya said. “There’s a nationwide call for more physicians in research, more clinical scientists, and there is a grave shortage of them,” said Dr. Dayya, who has a background in biostatistics. “They’ve been described as the bridge between basic science and the patient, i.e. the facilitators of translation research.”

“We don’t have a lot of physicians trained to be able to do this kind of research that we’re talking about, and this is our humble effort to help advance that national goal,” he said. “The relationship between us has been so productive that we are anticipating regular publications in this area.”