“Everyone brings something important to the table, regardless of the level of education you have,” said J.D. Lewis, Ph.D., a biological sciences professor who is leading the Fordham team in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Inclusive Excellence 3 Learning (IE3) Community. “Through this collaborative effort, we want to figure out how to teach STEM in a way that is accessible, relevant, and interesting to all our students.” 

Fordham is among more than 100 institutions involved in the IE3 Community. The goal of the initiative is to improve STEM teaching and learning in higher education, especially for first-generation college students, transfer students, and students from underrepresented backgrounds. 

More Inclusive Intro STEM Classes

After applying to be part of the initiative in 2019, Fordham was accepted into the inaugural cohort in 2021. The institutions were grouped into seven clusters, each with an assigned goal. The goal of Fordham’s cluster is to make introductory STEM course content more inclusive. Ultimately, Fordham wants students who better reflect the racial and intersectional diversity of the Bronx community to enter STEM disciplines and graduate at rates comparable to those of majority students, said Lewis. 

Lewis leads Fordham’s IE3 leadership team, which is currently planning the details of the project. They are joined by Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center Laura Auricchio, Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill Maura Mast, Associate Professor of Chemistry Robert Beer, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Patricio Meneses, and CSTEP Director Michael Molina.

One of the team’s goals is to build on the University’s previous successes with mentoring and early research experiences, especially Project TRUE, the ASPIRES Scholars program, the Calder Summer Undergraduate Research Program, and Fordham’s Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program, said Lewis. For example, they are currently working with CSTEP to include more CSTEP students in research opportunities earlier on in their time at Fordham, said Lewis. 

The team will also assess the University’s data on students taking STEM classes, starting with the biology department. They are planning on studying student outcomes, including the DFW rate—the number of students who earn D’s or F’s or withdraw from the course, said Lewis. They may also interview introductory biology instructors and students to understand the support they might need, said Lewis. 

“From them, we can get a sense of what’s working, what isn’t, what they’re struggling with, what they’re concerned about, and where and why they may not feel included,” Lewis said.  

Earlier Research Opportunities Built Into the Curriculum

In addition, the team is working on integrating student-directed research earlier in the STEM major. Upperclassmen typically conduct their own research in labs on campus, said Lewis, but their team is revising the curriculum so that they can introduce research to students as early as their first year of college. For example, the biology department recently introduced “research modules,” a new component in an introductory biology lab that gives students more creative freedom, said Lewis. 

“Instead of students simply following a manual type of lab activity, they are doing research where we don’t know the answer beforehand. They are experiencing those eureka moments, while still learning biology skills,” Lewis said. “Instead of waiting to work in a lab as a junior, they’re doing research that is yielding an unknown result—now, as a second-semester first-year student.” 

This fall, Fordham will finalize its project plan in collaboration with 14 other universities. Over the next six years, they will work together to achieve their goal through nearly $8 million in shared funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a science philanthropy organization founded by aviator and industrialist Howard R. Hughes. 

“We want all Fordham students and prospective students to see and feel that they can be successful in a STEM major and career,” Lewis said. “I hope that our data will lead us to what that should look like.”

He comes to Fordham from Santa Clara University, where he served as provost and vice president for academic affairs for eight years. Jacobs led Santa Clara’s strategic planning process, recruited all of the school’s current academic deans, helped faculty launch the first three online degree programs, and created a new office for diversity and inclusion. 

As a chemistry professor for many years, Jacobs conducted research on reactions relevant to semiconductor processing in the microelectronics industry. In 2002, he was named the U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

In addition to his role as Fordham’s chief academic officer, Jacobs is a painter, a father of three adult children, and a brand new grandfather.

In a Q&A with Fordham News, Jacobs speaks about his early inspiration and outlines his goals and plans for Fordham.

What inspired you to become a scientist? 

My father was a fifth-grade teacher, and he would bring home materials from his class. He stored a whole boxful of things in my room when I was quite young, maybe 8 or 9. I went through the box, trying to figure out all the stuff: circuit boards, batteries, lightbulbs, wires. I started connecting them to see if I could make them work. I would make burglar alarms and small robots. If I clapped my hands, the door to my bedroom would automatically open. 

I would also plug things into the walls in my room. Some of them would spark, taking out the power to the whole house; other times, small fires would start. But every time, I learned more and more about how the world works. And I realized that although I thought I wanted to be an inventor, really what was driving me was curiosity. It was asking the question, why? 

You’ve lived on the West Coast for most of your life. What drew you to Fordham?

Given the location Fordham has in New York City, this global gateway, this mecca around everything from finance to fashion to media, how can this Jesuit university at Fordham be a real guiding light and partner in this region, and in the world? There are very few universities in the country that can do what Fordham can do, given its commitments and its location, and so what attracted me is to come and be a part of that. 

You’re the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs. What does that entail?

The provost is the chief academic officer. I’m responsible for ensuring that the student experience fulfills the promise of a Fordham degree. It includes things like international study, what happens to the library, undergraduate research, and the ability of our students to interface with the arts here at Lincoln Center. Whatever it may be, if it shapes the academic experience, it is the responsibility of the provost. 

You’ve attended many student research symposiums here, including this year’s Calder Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium. What strikes you about their work? 

You can see a student on fire. I mean, you can see students lighting up because they’ve found something where they can make a difference. Whether they choose to do it for the rest of their life or not, it is a transformative moment for a student to be able to say, I worked on tackling this issue or problem.  

It’s also important that our faculty are engaged in advancing the frontiers of knowledge in their respective disciplines. We create knowledge through research, we share that knowledge, we disseminate it in our teaching. Research plays a vital role in Fordham’s mission.

One of your goals as provost is to improve undergraduate retention and graduation rates. How do you plan to address these things? 

Intentional programming that meets the full and comprehensive set of needs of students is part of helping students feel very early on—sometimes even in their first six weeks—that they belong here. We’re going to take a deep dive into looking at how we can do better in that regard at Fordham. 

Another goal of yours is to better integrate the academic programs and communities across the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses. Can you elaborate? 

I think what brings us together is often when we think about large problems or challenges that can’t be solved by a single discipline or unit. That’s when collaboration across units makes even more sense. 

One of the things I’ve been working with the deans on is thinking about these bigger areas where we want to make an impact. Imagine urban inequality. It would certainly involve economics, but it would also involve understanding sociology and anthropology. Understanding educational systems where inequalities often exist involves understanding the law and social services, creating a response that’s holistic in a community or serving a need. All of a sudden, you ally units—students, faculty—around those kinds of problems. 

The geographic divide between Rose Hill and Lincoln Center is yet another challenge. But it gives us two very different local environments in which to live and work. As an urban campus, we’re also situated better than many to have authentic relationships with our neighbors and partners and address across a broad swathe of challenges and issues spanning from the Bronx to Manhattan. 

The University is creating a faculty space with 3-D printers and virtual reality gear, where they can try out new technology that might be used in their classrooms. It’s one of several planned projects under the Continuous University Strategic Planning (CUSP) Committee, of which you are a co-chair. Tell me about that. 

Yes, there’s a renovation underway in the lower level of the Walsh Library to create the LITE (Learning and Innovative Technology Environment) space for faculty to experiment—using cutting edge technology, virtual reality, and other things—and create a new learning environment for our students. In other words, we’re creating a place for faculty to come together and think and reflect on how their teaching practice can change and adapt to better meet the needs of students. 

Our students come to us today with a very different mindset than 10, 20, 30 years ago. They’re digital natives. They interact with each other and the world differently. And higher ed is changing very rapidly now. For Fordham to get ahead on that, I think we have to create opportunities for faculty and administrators to reflect on where our students are, what their needs are, and how we can best teach them. 

We’ll have a kind of a maker-lab type of space for faculty to experiment and try new and innovative things—pilot them, assess whether they have benefits or not, and to the extent that they do, then support and scale them up. We’re waiting for the contractors to start renovation on the space.

Lastly, what’s something that many people—particularly new members of the Fordham community—don’t know about you?  

I paint paintings and I play the piano. My art is eclectic: everything from surreal to abstract to landscape. It all depends on my mindset at the time. (See Jacobs’ paintings on Instagram @dcjacobs2.) 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“The projects this year run the gamut, from fungus and bats, to lichens to blue-green algae, to an invasive tick, to evolution in lichens, to pollination trials, back to bats and how they are affected by light, and finally diversity in forests,” summarized Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, in his opening remarks. 

In 20-minute-long presentations, seven Fordham students spoke about what it was like to explore the sprawling 113-acre biological field station through CSUR: a 21-year-old program that allows Fordham undergraduates to conduct independent research projects with a Fordham faculty member and a $5,000 stipend. In wooded areas, Ian Sokolowski, FCLC ’20, foraged for Asian long-horned ticks with a white corduroy cloth and forceps. In the middle of Calder Lake, Julia Sese, FCRH ’20, retrieved water samples and analyzed algae blooms. 

Several of the students also shared how their projects began. Joseph Laske, FCRH ’21, recalled the day he found a wild bat while cleaning a Harlem park with members of the Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice club at Fordham. 

“I was raking some leaves, and I heard a squeak. I looked down, and there was this bat curled up on the ground in a fetal position,” recalled Laske, an environmental studies student. 

Concerned about the wild creature’s well-being, Laske snapped a picture of the animal and sent it to his professor, Craig Frank, Ph.D., who studies the effect of white-nose syndrome in bats. Could this bat be affected by the same disease, Laske wondered? 

It wasn’t. But his email sparked a conversation with Frank that would lead to Laske’s application to the CSUR program. For 10 weeks, Laske looked at how white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, grows at different temperatures and how one species in particular, the Eastern small-footed bat, is able to resist the dangerous disease. 

“Bats are important pollinators [and pest eaters]. They contribute a huge amount to the agricultural industry,” said Laske, who plans on working as a technician in Frank’s lab this fall. 

The keynote address delivered by Alexandria Moore, Ph.D., a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at Columbia University, also explored science research. Most of her speech spotlighted her work in coastal wetland restoration. But the rest focused on her identity as a queer person of color and how it informs her work as a scientist. 

“What I have talked about so far today has been sort of referencing gaps: The first one is a gap in our knowledge of how ecosystems work and how we can do a good job at recovering them; the other one is a gap in our understanding of the differences between people and the importance of those differences that people have,” Moore said. “What I do now in my work is combine all of those things together …. What I do at the museum is I ask the same kinds of research questions that I asked at Yale. I ask them in areas where we haven’t asked them with people who never really get to be part of those conversations.”

Sitting in the audience were eight local high school students in Fordham’s Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP)—an academic enrichment program for underrepresented youth from 7th to 12th grade—who presented their summer research posters that afternoon. 

The year before was the first time that STEP students participated in the program. One member of the inaugural cohort will be a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center this fall, said Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., who helped bring the students to the annual program. 

For DaiJon James, a rising senior at Equality Charter High School in the Bronx, the six-week research experience clarified his career path. It showed him that he wants to become a scientist—a first for his family, he said. But what surprised him this summer was the level of respect and collaboration that he experienced with his Fordham mentors, including Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D. 

“It was kind of like …  jarring because as a teenager, you don’t ever really expect to be given the kind of opportunity to show what you know,” said James, who studied how to best use teletherapy to improve post-procedure care for teenagers with liver transplants. “Working with Dr. Annunziato changed that perspective for me.” 

This summer, another student—Alexa Caruso, a rising senior at New Rochelle High School in Westchester County—performed data collection and analysis on perovskites, a promising material in solar cell research. 

“With the people and the resources that we now have in this day and age, we can definitely make something useful,” Caruso said. “What I did, it’s gonna help the future one day.”