Aggressive Pigeon Behavior: Bridget Crosby, Taylor Goche, Cream Sananikone, and Van Tran

Going to school in New York City made these four biological science majors “fascinated by pigeons.” “I’ve noticed particularly how close pigeons get to us, how they’re foraging for food, how they’re really never alone,” Crosby said. “I’m just fascinated by pigeons, especially in Manhattan, in comparison to more suburban areas. We wanted to see whether there was a correlation between the aggressive behavior and the location that they live in.” Working with the Ecology Lab at Fordham, the team spent hours in four parks analyzing pigeon behaviors. They found pigeons were more aggressive in the urban parks—Bryant Park and Washington Square Park, compared to the more suburban parks—Van Cortlandt Park and Crotona Park, concluding that pigeons in more urban areas are more accustomed to traffic and people, prompting them to act more boldly.

Mental Health in Literature: Marianna Apazidis

A senior from Massachusetts who is double-majoring in psychology and English, Apazidis united her academic interests through research that examined the portrayal of mental health in literature, particularly in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. The novel centers on a protagonist often considered to be schizophrenic in literary interpretations. Apazidis received a summer research grant that allowed her to visit the Jean Rhys archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There, she conducted empirical research, first-hand interviews, and archival research to investigate why the novel’s protagonist is often diagnosed this way and whether this is an accurate portrayal of psychosis. “I started with psychology because I’ve always been interested in how people work and what makes them who they are,” she said. “I quickly found that English is a very similar parallel discipline. I think literature is one of the most important ways to study human nature.”

Detecting the Presence of Metals in Water: Eva Riveros

Riveros was drawn to chemistry as a tangible way to find environmental solutions. Her research project involved the development of a Thiazole probe—a solution that uses proton transfer and fluorescence to detect the presence of metals in water samples. Riveros hopes to eventually create strips using the solution that can be used more easily and efficiently. “One of the main applications we’re thinking of is drinking water, so safety,” said the junior from New Jersey. Riveros developed her love of research after completing the ASPIRES program, which gives incoming students practical exposure to labs and hands-on experimentation.

Religion as Rebellion: Christopher Supplee

Supplee’s interest in how shared narratives shape cultural experiences led him to research the role of Haitian Vodou in confronting the shared traumatic experience of slavery. Supplee applied the three-part trauma recovery theory from Dr. Judith Herman, a leading expert on trauma, as a basis to examine the migration of Vodou from Haiti to the United States. “I look at how the enslaved population used [the practice of]voodoo as a means of maintaining their humanity under the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and rebuilding the community bonds that were separated through the TransAtlantic slave process,” said Supplee, an English and theology major from Philadelphia, “but also making new ones as a result of the diverse peoples that were coming from or transported from the African continent,” he said.

Additional reporting by Kelly Prinz.

Dozens of faculty, staff, and students gathered at the Walsh Family Library on the Rose Hill campus for the annual Research Day Celebration. In opening remarks, Fordham’s president, Tania Tetlow, invoked several current issues—threats to democracy, artificial intelligence, climate change—in emphasizing the importance of “every insight” that Fordham faculty produce.

“There is so much that you achieve, on behalf of Fordham and on behalf of the world,” she said. “You matter in everything that you do, and you matter even more when you come together across disciplinary silos, when you think about how we can solve problems in ways that will never come from any one discipline and never come from any one way of thinking about the world.”

Fordham’s chief research officer, George Hong, Ph.D., noted a “remarkable achievement” in his introductory remarks: Since the academic year began last July, Fordham has received $34 million in external grant awards, its greatest-ever yearly total and a 40% increase over the amount received by this time last year.

Awards for Distinguished Research

The professors each received a distinguished research award in one of five categories and gave brief remarks. The humanities award went to history professor Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., for her studies of working families originally inspired by the “mommy wars” in 2004. “I couldn’t believe that it was the 21st century and people were still arguing passionately about whether mothers should be employed,” she said, adding later that she has strived “to illuminate and change the conversation about work and family among scholars and the wider public.”

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry, received the sciences and mathematics award for his nanotechnology research that’s applicable to renewable energy, biomedical sensors, or technology that scrubs viruses out of indoor air. He credited the undergraduate students who helped with his research. “As they’re learning physical chemistry, they’re also solving problems—real problems—for society,” he said.

Jie Ren, Ph.D., associate professor of information systems in the Gabelli School of Business, received the interdisciplinary studies award for her work on collective online behavior and its impacts across business, social media, and other areas. “Throughout many years of studying this topic, I realized one thing, which is individuals in the crowd need each other to be better,” she said.

The Distinguished Research Award for Junior Faculty went to Mohamed Rahouti, Ph.D., assistant professor in the computer and information science department, for his cybersecurity innovations that draw upon blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. Receiving the award, he said, “inspires me to further my research with even greater dedication and passion.”

The social sciences award went to economics professor Marc Conte, Ph.D., for his work in environmental economics and environmental justice, some of which was cited in the Biden administration’s Economic Report of the President in 2023. “I look forward to continuing my work … in the hope of guiding us toward a more stable and equitable world,” he said.

Can ChatGPT Think?

The event also included presentations by Fordham’s IBM research fellows and interns, and by participants in the University’s Faculty Research Abroad Program. The keynote speaker was David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at New York University, who gave a talk titled “Can ChatGPT Think?”

“It probably doesn’t yet have humanlike thought,” he said toward the end of his talk, “but I think it’s also well on its way.”

“It’ll be the first time that my husband and I are bringing our daughter to the Fordham campus,” she said of Jubilee Weekend, to be held May 31 to June 2. The couple were married in the University Church in 2015 and welcomed a baby girl this spring. They’re among hundreds of alumni planning to return to campus for the festivities.

“I’m really looking forward to meeting up with some friends who also have kids—who will be bringing them to Fordham for the first time—because it’s just such a special place for us and we’re really looking forward to introducing them to it,” said Schwall-Pecci, a 2009 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate.

Building a Skillset

Meeting her husband, Robert Pecci, GABELLI ’08, on campus isn’t the only reason Fordham holds a special place in the Long Island native’s heart. Rose Hill is also where she found faculty mentors. She majored in biology and minored in chemistry and sociology, which helped her build both the hard and soft skills needed to launch a successful career in health care communications, she said.

Working closely with professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., during her sophomore year, Schwall-Pecci researched nanotubes and protein hormones with the potential to advance drug delivery and the treatment of diabetes. She later earned a Clare Boothe Luce fellowship, which enabled her to conduct research in Germany the summer before her senior year. And after graduating from Fordham, she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry.

A Sense of Belonging

She also found that Fordham’s Jesuit identity instilled in her—and other students—“a sense of belonging and wanting to give back, and feeling like you’re a part of a community that is responsible for helping better the world around you.”

That commitment to giving back is why she’s chosen a career path that enables her to promote better public health. As a senior vice president at BGB Group, she works to make complex scientific concepts and information accessible for patients. She’s also a longstanding volunteer with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She first began volunteering with the organization after her father died from cancer when she was a student at Fordham.

When her father was diagnosed, she “was overwhelmed and naive to the fact that anything bad could actually happen to him,” she recently wrote for BGB Group. Her mother felt “numb, in denial, confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, helpless, and hopeless,” Schwall-Pecci shared. It’s an experience that fuels her commitment to helping patients and their families process their diagnoses, ask the right questions, and make informed decisions about their health care.

Staying Connected with Her Fellow Rams

Following graduation, Schwall-Pecci was a member of the Young Alumni Committee, an advisory and programming board for graduates of the past 10 years. She’s past that 10-year cap now, but she’s stayed connected to Fordham however she can—participating in panels, mentoring students, and speaking at events. And her first impression of the Rose Hill campus still rings true.

“I just felt like the people who were going there, who had chosen to go to Fordham, had a similar kind of mindset and values as I had and were the kind of people that I wanted to surround myself with,” she said.

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Health education and access to quality medical care and information. Medicine is inherently defined by specialized language that may not be the easiest to digest, especially when you are newly diagnosed. I want everyone to feel empowered to make decisions with their care providers and ask informed questions.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Take what you do seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously! It’s all about enjoying the journey—be committed to what you are passionate about, but don’t worry about making mistakes or changing your mind along the way.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
This is so hard—how do I choose? In NYC, it is honestly probably the Fordham campus in the Bronx, as cheesy as that sounds. That is where I met my husband and we got married, so it will always be one of my happy places. And in the world, it is likely Abisko, in the very north of Sweden, where I saw the northern lights!

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Probably The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It is a fascinating look at the evolution of our approach to understanding and treating cancer. It appeals to me both professionally and also personally, as I lost my dad to leukemia when I was a student at Fordham.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
There are too many to name, but Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., in the chemistry department was my research mentor while at Fordham. She is so passionate about the research she conducts and the students she mentors, which inspired me to commit myself to my own work and always put forward 110% in my studies.

Interested in hearing more of Schwall-Pecci’s story? Listen to her episode of the Fordham Footsteps podcast.

With help from recent graduate Beatriz Goncalves, FCRH ’23, and her mentor Professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., Phan looked into how specific peptides—strings of amino acids—could potentially mitigate an enzyme that contributes to ALS from “misfolding,” or failing to function properly.

The goal of the project was to design new peptide-based drug molecules on a nanoscale level that would limit that misfolding so that it wouldn’t disrupt the other proteins from working properly within and outside the cells, according to Goncalves and Banerjee. Goncalves and Phan showed that the molecules that they developed were able to reduce oxidative stress in cells, and that some of the molecules could mitigate misfolding over time.

“The results have been exciting,” Goncalves said.

Phan and Goncalves were just two of the students who spent the summer conducting research in Banerjee’s lab in John Mulcahy Hall at Rose Hill.

Banerjee, the chair of the chemistry department and program director of Biochemistry, said her students have been working on drug delivery systems, particularly those that target tumors and cancerous cells, and developing new biomaterials for tissue engineering as well as targeting protein misfolding in neurodegenerative diseases.

In the lab, the students have access to a variety of scientific equipment, such as a 3D bioprinter, which allows them to replicate tissue growth and investigate these tissue models for their research.

“My biggest passion at Fordham is working with students in the research lab, and preparing them to become next-generation scientists,” Banerjee said, adding that she mentors students throughout the year, both in the lab and in her classes.

From the Lab to a Ph.D.

For Goncalves, who was a biology major and biochemistry minor, the experience in Banerjee’s lab helped her get accepted into numerous Ph.D. programs. She chose to pursue her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, going for cell and molecular biology where she will work on immunotherapeutic research for targeting cancer.

“I’m an undergraduate student who had the experience and who has the resume to be able to go straight into a Ph.D. That’s an opportunity that was offered to me at Fordham that I probably would not have had at other schools,” she said. “I would probably have to take a gap year or do something else like a master’s in order to have the resumé I have now.”

Goncalves published at least five research papers with Banerjee at Fordham, including a few where she was the first author on the project. She and Molly Murray, FCRH ’23, who majored in chemistry and psychology, said that they spent 10-12 hour days in the lab in summer 2022 and during the school year working on a variety of projects, such as developing ways to deliver drugs into glioblastoma tumor cells as well as developing new peptide based drug molecules for targeting breast tumor cells. The pair also spent this past summer in the lab wrapping up their research projects.

“Beatriz and I last summer, we probably spent about 80 hours a week here,” Murray said. “There were a lot of times where we were here past midnight, but I feel like we’re both very well prepared for going into Ph.D. [programs] and that kind of time commitment.”

Murray, who was also accepted to several programs and will start a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of North Carolina next fall, said that before working in Banerjee’s lab she had minimal lab experience.

“I think she definitely challenges us a lot—especially when you’re first coming into the lab, there’s a ton of stuff to learn right off the bat,” she said. “We’re a lab that helps each other out a lot, but there’s also that part of it that you have to investigate by yourself, so having that push is definitely helpful.”

Research on Cancer, Aging, and More

Many students working in the lab over the summer were focusing on drug or treatment delivery systems that could target cancer cells. Murray focused on ovarian cancer, while Amrita Das, a sophomore biology major, started a research project investigating lung cancer.

“I plan on going to med school,” Das said, “so I wanted to get exposed to a research lab setting to get experience.”

Sophomore Aigerim Mukhit’s summer research focused on skin regeneration and aging, particularly around cells called fibroblasts.

The goal of her research was to investigate the impact of peptide conjugates on aged fibroblasts to examine if they enhance can express characteristic proteins, which are indicative of regeneration.

“I just want to contribute to biomedical research—I want to study aging, not only skin aging, but overall aging,” she said.

Their method for introducing machine learning in chemistry classes has been honored with the inaugural James C. McGroddy Award for Innovation in Education, named for a donor who funded the award’s cash prize. (See related story.)

The recipients are Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry; Yijun Zhao, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer and information science; and Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., the Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in Chemistry. They will share the $10,000 prize, awarded in April.

Chemistry and Computation Come Together

The three awardees’ project shows how to reduce the barriers to learning about programming and computation by integrating them into chemistry lessons. The project came together during the COVID pandemic—since chemistry students were working from their computers, far from the labs on campus, it made sense to give them some computational projects, in addition to experiments they could conduct at home, Thrall said.

Because little had been published about teaching machine learning to chemistry students, she got together with Schrier and Zhao to design an activity. Zhao, director of the Master of Science in Data Science program at Fordham, involved a student in the program, Seung Eun Lee, GSAS ’22, who had studied chemistry as an undergraduate.

Their first classroom project—published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2021—involves vibrational spectroscopy, used to identify the chemical properties of something by shining a light on it and recording which wavelengths it absorbs. Students built models that analyzed the resulting data and “learned” the features of different molecular structures, automating a process that they had learned in an earlier course.

For another project, the professors taught students about machine-learning tools for identifying possible hypotheses about collections of molecules. Machine learning lets the students winnow down the molecular data and, in Schrier’s words, “make that big haystack into a smaller haystack” that is easier for a scientist to manage. The professors designed the project with help from Fernando Martinez, GSAS ’23, and Thomas Egg, FCRH ’23, and Thrall presented it at an American Chemical Society meeting in the spring.

Thumbs-Up from Students

How did students react to the machine learning lessons? According to a survey following the first project, 63% enjoyed applying machine learning, and 74% wanted to learn more about it.

“I think that students recognize that these are useful skills … that are only going to become more important throughout their lives,” Thrall said. Schrier noted that students have helped develop additional machine learning exercises in chemistry over the past two years.

Machine Learning in Education and Medicine

Zhao noted the growing applications of machine learning and data science. She has applied them to other fields through collaborations with Fordham’s Graduate School of Education and the medical schools at New York University and Harvard, among other entities.

The McGroddy Award came as a surprise. “I don’t think that we expected to win,” Schrier said, “just because there’s so many other excellent pedagogical innovations throughout Fordham.”

Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the time the award was granted, said the professors’ “path-breaking interdisciplinary work has transformed lab courses in chemistry.”

There were 20 nominations, and faculty members reviewing them “were humbled by the creativity, innovation, and generative energy of the faculty’s pedagogical work,” she said.

In addition to the McGroddy Award, the Office of the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences is providing two $1,000 honorable mention prizes recognizing the pedagogy of Samir Haddad, Ph.D., and Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professors of philosophy and physics, respectively.

“People have known about protein interactions since the 50’s. But at the same time, these protein interactions—the ways in which we were able to target and think about them as molecular targets—have really evolved in the past decade or two,” Sawyer said.

In this faculty mini-lecture, he breaks down his research and explains how his work can make a difference.

“Protein interactions are involved in every living system and disease,” Sawyer said. “We can pick and choose what we study, and we’re trying to go after things that are important to people.”

Physicians use sophisticated tools, such as electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to diagnose and monitor brain disorders, but they see only the electrical impulses, which is a bit like hearing two people talking but not understanding what they are saying, says Nako Nakatsuka, Ph.D., a chemist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. “It’s like a very muffled conversation.”

Scientists have struggled to identify those complex chemical interactions at the time they occur. Often, that requires extracting liquid from the brain and putting it through tedious purification techniques in the lab, a process that can take days.

“I wanted to be able to insert a sensor close to where these interactions happen and monitor this chemical flux in real time,” says Nakatsuka, a 2012 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate who has spent the past several years developing a chemical biosensor to do just that. The technology she created consists of a glass pipette tapering to just 10 nanometers at its tip, able to get in close proximity to synapses and monitor chemicals at the source. “We’re using nanotechnology to approach the dimensions at which the chemistry happens,” Nakatsuka says.

The invention earned her a spot this year on MIT Technology Review’s list of “35 Innovators Under 35” (out of over 500 nominations). More importantly, it could revolutionize the study of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s by allowing neuroscientists to truly understand, for the first time, chemical interactions inside the brain as they occur.

Into the World of Bionanotechnology

Nakatsuka spent her formative years attending an all-girls school in Japan, where she was just as interested in art and athletics as she was in science.

“I was able to grow into myself and be confident in the things I liked and pursued without issues such as body image or imposter syndrome,” she says. “No one ever told me, ‘You can’t do that because you are a girl.’” Inspired by hands-on chemistry experiments in high school, she decided to pursue the subject at Fordham, where she also ran competitively on the cross country and track and field team.

An unexpected connection between sports and science led to her interest in nanotechnology. She was taking a course in organic chemistry, and professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., was her lab instructor. “I was ranting to her about how I had no idea how this stuff was applicable to real life,” remembers Nakatsuka, who at the time had torn a ligament and tendon in her ankle while running, and was on crutches and wearing a walking boot. Banerjee told her about her research in tissue engineering. “She said, ‘Imagine if you could heal yourself by using biocomposites you created in a lab that could mimic the tissue in your body, rather than getting surgery and being out of commission for a year.’”

Nakatsuka was fascinated by the idea. She joined Banerjee’s lab the following fall and plunged into the world of bionanotechnology, a highly interdisciplinary field focused on developing biomolecular composites for biomedical applications in tissue engineering, biosensors, and drug delivery. “She was my scientific savior at a time when I was pretty lost and didn’t know how to focus my energy,” Nakatsuka says. “She really put in a lot of time and effort in developing my potential as a scientist.”

At the time, Fordham lacked much of the equipment necessary for Banerjee’s nanotechnology research, so she would drive her students to Queens College, part of the City University of New York, where a colleague allowed them to use the equipment in his lab. Initially, Banerjee was worried that Nakatsuka’s sports schedule would keep her from the necessary work. Instead, she found her to be an incredibly dedicated researcher. “It didn’t matter if she had exams, or had a meet somewhere, I could rely on her,” Banerjee says. The two developed a tight bond, with the professor sometimes dropping Nakatsuka back at her dorm at 3 a.m. after a night of experiments in the lab and animated conversations about science over breakfast at an all-night diner.

“Since we don’t have a graduate program, I expect graduate-level work from my research students,” Banerjee says. Nakatsuka rose to the challenge, becoming lead author on a review paper on tissue engineering, and co-authoring seven other peer-reviewed papers with Banerjee during her time at Fordham.

Catching the Brain’s Chemical Signals

While presenting one of their papers at an American Chemical Society national meeting in San Diego, Banerjee and Nakatsuka met with Paul Weiss, Ph.D., a UCLA professor and nanotechnology pioneer whose research group combines science, engineering, and medicine. The ability to make a practical difference appealed to Nakatsuka, who joined Weiss’ group as a doctoral candidate after graduating from Fordham.

“It fascinated me to think about using chemistry and biology to do something I was passionate about, and contribute to society,” she says. While there, she began working with aptamers, short single strands of DNA that are specifically designed to attach themselves onto a chemical target.

Nakatsuka was intrigued by the ability these aptamers have to change their shape when latching onto their prey. “It is like when the fingers of a baseball glove come down to capture a ball,” she explains. “They structure switch.”

Nakatsuka began using that property to create a sensor that could detect the presence of a specific chemical in the body. Existing biosensors have struggled to differentiate similar molecules from one another accurately, especially when the desired chemical is in short supply.

“It’s like trying to find and capture one fish in a sea of similar-looking fish that exist in much higher amounts,” Nakatsuka says. Collaborating with nanoscientists and engineers, she created an ingenious probe with a tiny pore at one end that was covered in aptamers designed to capture a specific neurochemical such as serotonin, along with several electrodes. When serotonin was present, the aptamers would switch their structure to make the nanoscale opening more porous, and alter the electrical flow that could be measured by scientists in real time. By calibrating the sensor in advance, they could even tell how much serotonin was present in a given sample.

Toward a Better Understanding of Brain and Body Health

After designing the sensor and earning a Ph.D. at UCLA, Nakatsuka moved to ETH Zürich, a scientific institute with a specialized Laboratory of Biosensors and Bioelectronics, for a postdoctoral fellowship in 2018. She’s now a senior scientist there, working with a team of neuroscientists to train the sensors to detect neurochemicals that could provide new insights into Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, for example, by quantifying neurochemicals in the brain and blood associated with those diseases.

“What’s exciting to me is that there are neuroscience groups that have been focused on one question for a long time—for example, understanding how dopamine is regulated in brain development, or how serotonin is regulated in anxiety and depression,” Nakatsuka says. By distributing her kits to these scientists, she says, she can provide new tools to generate data and answer some of those questions in a much quicker and easier way.

While Nakatsuka’s sensors are currently being used only in the laboratory, she hopes that eventually they could be used in the body, inserted like an acupuncture needle to monitor brain chemistry in patients. They could have applications beyond neuroscience, as well, providing an ability to detect chemicals anywhere in the body—for example, monitoring iron in anemic patients or stress biomarkers for people with anxiety disorders. She envisions people wearing a Band-Aid-like device with the nanopores integrated inside that could withdraw small amounts of blood with a tiny needle to provide ongoing monitoring. “That’s more of an engineering challenge,” she says. “But it’s really not crazy to imagine implementing it in a way that is practical and applicable for daily use.”

From such tiny beginnings, Nakatsuka’s nanosensors have big potential, giving scientists new ways to understand and monitor diseases throughout the body. “Now I often hear, ‘Are you going to commercialize this? When are you going to go on the market?’” she says. “To be honest, I never thought about it, but now it’s something I want to start looking into to see how I might make a larger impact.”

—Michael Blanding is a journalist and the author of three books, including North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work (Hachette, 2021).

“We see all of the early, cutting-edge technologies,” says Juelis, a member and co-chair of the life sciences committee at Band of Angels, Silicon Valley’s oldest angel investment group. “In the life science area, particularly now, there’s a lot of redirecting of work towards a COVID cure and diagnostics, as well as digital health technologies that help the hospitals become more efficient and monitor patients at home.”

Juelis cites one of Band of Angels’ portfolio companies that is developing a special respirator used by emergency response crews for whom mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is no longer a viable option due to the spread of the coronavirus. Responders will be able to pump oxygen to people via the device while performing CPR. Based on that technology, Juelis says, the company was quickly able to develop a ventilator system that has been offered to several California hospitals.

“The sciences have continued to develop in all directions,” says Juelis, who majored in chemistry at Fordham before earning his M.B.A. at Columbia and working in finance and operations for both Hoffmann-La Roche and Schering-Plough (now Merck), including stints in Cork, Ireland, and Puerto Rico. “[It] used to be that chemists didn’t really talk to biologists that much. But now all of these disciplines, including computer sciences, have all merged together.”

As an angel investor, Juelis draws on his experiences as a chief financial officer for companies that ultimately developed lifesaving medications. He has also sat on the boards of directors of a number of smaller public companies and tech firms, and he currently serves on the board of El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California, where he is a member of the finance committee.

Juelis says that Fordham helped lay the foundation for his career, and that’s why he has remained a part of the community, helping students experience a global education and connecting them with career opportunities. In 2011, he set up an endowment for the Global Outreach program that allowed Fordham students to travel to northwest Lithuania to work with the Auksuciai Foundation, where he served as a board member, at its farm and forest center, and to travel to other countries in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine and Romania. Separately, he sponsored two Fordham computer science students with a summer internship in the research division of a public robotics company where he served as a board member. And the former Rams pitcher and team captain is now supporting the University’s baseball program, as well.

“I would always try to talk to the students that wound up getting the scholarships,” Juelis says of his support for Global Outreach. “It was great to hear what their motivations were.”

This year, Juelis was preparing for his 50th Fordham Jubilee when the COVID-19 pandemic put things on hold. He is part of a planning committee for his class and had begun reaching out to some of his classmates, who knew him as “Tucker” from his undergrad days.

“I was beginning to call a lot of my contacts that I’ve seen in the last few years, or maybe not for a long time, just to catch up with everybody and see how they’re doing,” says the Newark, New Jersey, native. He does plan to make the trip to the Bronx next spring, when 2020 Jubilarians will be invited to Rose Hill to celebrate belatedly. But when the Bronx comes to him via baseball, Juelis said he feels conflicted.

“I was a longtime Yankees fan, but being on the West Coast, I root for the Giants and the Oakland A’s [now],” he says. “So when the Yankees come out to play, I always have a hard time deciding who to root for.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Three things. First, entrepreneurship. I enjoy meeting with and mentoring Fordham and Columbia student entrepreneurs [through my work at Band of Angels]. And through the Fordham Foundry and other sources, I speak with some of the student entrepreneurs [at Fordham], a couple of whom have wound up here in the Bay Area and I’ve worked with [them]. Second, volunteering. And third, sports. I’m a sports fan, but mostly I like to participate: skiing, golf, hiking, fitness, and now playing catch with the grandsons.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
My parents and a couple of high school teachers encouraged me to work hard, take risks, try to succeed in a few different areas, and, of course, attend Fordham.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
I enjoy walking in midtown Manhattan, seeing what’s new, and ending up at Hurley’s Saloon in the Theater District. The 9/11 Memorial is incredible. I was on my way to a meeting at the World Trade Center on that fateful day, so the memorial is particularly meaningful [to me].

Other favorites: San Francisco; Cork, Ireland, where we lived for three years and got to travel throughout Ireland and much of Western Europe; and Vilnius, Lithuania, a fabulous city with my ancestral connections. It’s one of the least known, most beautiful cities in Europe, with a long important history. Their Jesuit high school and cathedral date back over 400 years despite various purges by the Czars, Nazis, and Soviet Russia.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Several books and letters written about the pre- and post-World War II period in Eastern Europe and Russia. At Fordham in the late ’60s and afterwards, we lived with the overhang of the Communist threat. Until recently, many details about the devastating effects of Soviet socialist domination on the local people in the Soviet Republics, like Lithuania, were little known. I’ve gotten to know several people who were child refugees that fled, on a moment’s notice, when the Soviets took over after World War II. Many of their parents, relatives, and friends wound up in Siberia and were never heard from. Even after the Soviet collapse in 1989, many of the same Russian threats still exist today, most recently in Ukraine.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Father Robert Cloney, our freshman chemistry professor. First-year chemistry was intimidating enough, but Father Cloney was a very kind, inspiring teacher who always made time after class to help students. The alumnus I most admire was Vince Lombardi, Fordham’s most well-known sports figure and NFL legend. A classic New Yorker and Fordham figure: tough, hard-working, successful.

Chemistry Department Chair Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., said the addition of these two scientists will expand not only the department’s ability to provide specialized research opportunities to students, but also the scientific community’s knowledge of important areas like solar energy and genetic diseases. 

“Dr. Schneider’s field of research is in the area of design and synthesis of novel organic semiconductors for building devices such as solar cells,” said Banerjee. “Dr. Thrall’s research may further advance our understanding of the mechanistic processes involved in diseases like cancer and provide more information about how a lack of proper DNA repair mechanisms are involved in genetic disorders.”

In time, these are things that Fordham undergraduates will learn, too. 

“The types of research that we’re doing—the techniques we’re using and the problems we’re investigating—are really cutting edge. These are things that are getting done at top graduate schools across the country,” said Thrall, a two-time Ivy League graduate. “These are approaches that [our]  undergraduates can learn.” 

A Long Line of Chemists

Thrall is an assistant professor of chemistry who started teaching at the Rose Hill campus this September. A Philadelphia native, she comes from a family of chemists. Her grandparents, especially her grandmother Jean Simmons who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago in the late 1930s and taught at women’s colleges, inspired her to become a chemist. Her other inspiration was the science itself. 

“Not to sound cheesy, but chemistry is the central science; it extends into biology and physics,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed the breadth of topics you can explore as a chemist.” 

Her lab at Fordham specializes in single-molecule biophysics: a field that explores how biological systems function by analyzing the behavior of biological molecules, one at a time. The goal is to understand how DNA replication and repair work. 

“It’s remarkable that we can look inside a living bacterial cell and see a single molecule moving around. If you watch the movies that we record in my lab, you’ll see a single spot of light bouncing around rapidly in this small cell. That’s a single protein in the cell,” said Thrall, who has published work in several publications, including Nature Communications. 

Thrall served as a National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School for six years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Columbia University.

This semester, she is teaching a physical chemistry lab for juniors and seniors; next spring, she plans on teaching a lab course and a physical chemistry lecture. Two undergraduate student researchers recently joined her lab. 

A Pastry Chef Turned Chemist 

Schneider is an assistant professor of chemistry who joined the Fordham faculty last fall. She was born in Paris, France, to a French mother and an American father. What drew her to chemistry was the ability to create something new—something that no one has seen before. 

“Every new molecule, every new structure can have new properties,” Schneider said. “There’s a ton to discover.” 

She said chemistry reminds her of her days as a pastry chef in Boston, where she concocted chocolate lava cakes, handcrafted ice cream, and Boston cream pies on a daily basis. 

“It’s nice making something, and then someone eats it at the end of the day. You served a purpose,” she said. “[Similarly,] I love organic chemistry because you get to make something.” 

She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Southern Connecticut State University and a Ph.D. in chemistry from McGill University, where she was a Vanier Scholar. From 2016 to 2018, she served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she collaborated with visiting researchers as part of the Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials. 

At Fordham, she teaches organic chemistry I and II labs to sophomore students, who learn how to identify, purify, and separate different compounds. Last summer, she mentored her first three undergraduates through University research grants. They began by setting up her new research lab and then started on the synthesis of a new organic semiconductor. This fall, Schneider and those three students—her new lab mentees—will continue to tackle that project. 

Schneider’s lab specializes in organic electronics. She has extensive experience in solar cells and transistors, but she now works on illuminating the structure-property relationships that drive these devices. 

“Through organic synthesis techniques, we can make materials with any properties we want. So if we want something to make a solar cell, we can design it to absorb light and give us electrons. If we want something to emit light, like an OLED [organic light-emitting diode]on your phone, we can design a molecule that makes that color,” she explained.  

Not all the materials may work, but they will teach us more about the behavior of organic semiconductors. 

“As we discover new properties, maybe that particular molecule won’t be super useful right away,” said Schneider, “but who knows what application it may have in the future.” 

In a recent conversation, Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., spoke about the science that has been taking place in his lab since he became the first Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in Chemistry last fall. His research blends three scientific branches: quantum mechanics, chemistry, and computational science. This month, his research on biases in chemical reaction data was published in the journal Nature. Fordham News spoke to him about his work.

The Bepler endowed chair has allowed you more time to tackle research projects. That includes your $7.4 million project, “Discovering reactions and uncovering mechanisms of perovskite [mineral]  formation,” funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Tell me about this project. 

Most experiments are designed, conducted, and interpreted by humans. The goal of this project is to create the capability of having machine-specified experiments so that computer algorithms can select new experiments to perform that accelerate the scientific discovery process.

What does “machine-specified” mean? 

We want to give computer algorithms the ability to perform experiments in the real world. But to do this, we need to make sure that the specifications of what to do are completely unambiguous. Humans are pretty good about working with imprecise instructions about what to do. If I say, “Hey, let’s go to the zoo,” you would infer it’s the Bronx Zoo and that “us” includes you and I and other individuals within earshot. But a computer is not going to know what I meant: What zoo? What entrance? How do we get there? Who should go? We are working to develop software that allows people (or computers) to specify the experiments they want to be performed. The software turns that into a set of instructions in an unambiguous way. This might include a mixture of instructions for human operators and for machines—just like the way that specifying where you want to go in an Uber ride fills in the details of how to get there. Finally, we want to make it easy to collect all of the things that happen during the process so that we can learn from that data.

Like programming a self-driving car, but for science experiments? 

Yeah. That’s the high-level goal: a “self-driving” or autonomous laboratory. Just like a self-driving car, we have to be able to “steer” the experiments (specify what to do) and “see” the world. So we are also collecting as much information about everything that happens in the laboratory so that the algorithms can make sense of what is happening when devising new experiment plans. Experiment specifications are the steering wheel, so to speak. As new experiments are performed, machine-learning models get trained on the new data. This is a general problem across many areas of science—how do we use data to more efficiently get scientific insight? Because of the scale of the data, we use algorithms to sift through the data and identify anomalies, and use the insights latent in that data to devise the next round of experiment plans. 

There’s another part to your project: using this “self-driving laboratory” to develop as many different types of perovskites—minerals that help create solar cells—as possible, and then identify the most useful perovskites. 

Yes. Essentially, what we’ve cooked up—in collaboration with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Haverford College—is a way to do these types of [perovskite]syntheses using commercially-available laboratory robots. More specifically, organohalide perovskite materials are hybrid materials that have both organic and inorganic building units—and changing these changes their electronic and optical properties. As a result, there is a general interest in using perovskites for high performance, low-cost solar cells. We are using the robotic system [called RAPID]to try to discover new materials that will have higher performance. But just to be clear, our focus for now is on discovering new compounds. We don’t yet build devices from these discoveries, although we are expanding work in that direction [in collaboration with researchers from MIT]. It would be neat if we also found some really great high-performance perovskites—but even if we do not, we’ll still be able to learn rules about how they form, and demonstrate this toolbox which can be applied to other scientific problems.

Another ongoing research project is the National Science Foundation-funded “Dark Reaction Project.” What is that about?

“Dark reactions” sounds mysterious, right? But it’s a simple idea. Most of the experiments performed in laboratories are never reported. Journals tend to publish only a single example of “success.” So this vast, unreported collection of marginal successes and failures never gets exposed to the world. So by analogy to the astronomer’s “dark matter,” we like to think of “dark reactions” as this vast majority of scientific experiments that aren’t seen directly [in journal articles], but yet influences scientists’ decisions in a non-obvious way.

The good news is that scientists keep good laboratory notebooks, so the “dark reactions” are in principle available. This project is an initiative to harness the unpublished failures and marginal successes [dark reactions]in laboratory notebooks, turn them into digital data, and use that to advance hydrothermal synthesis of oxides. Once you digitize the results, you can use that database to build a machine-learning model. With that machine-learning model, you can recommend reactions to perform in the laboratory. 

So the machine-learning model is learning from “dark reactions,” or our mistakes—what not to do? 

Correct. And you can only do this if you’ve got the complete record of success and failures. 

If you look at all the published scientific literature, all you see are successes. You never see any of the failures. So if you’re trying to identify a mathematical function that divides success and failure—and that’s really all that you’re doing with machine-learning, is finding the mathematical function—then your algorithm is going to look at all of these examples in the published literature and say, “Oh, good news, everything is successful.” Because all the examples that it sees are only examples of success. 

Lastly, you have a paper that was recently published by Nature: “Anthropogenic biases in chemical reaction data hinder exploratory inorganic synthesis.” How does it relate to dark reactions? 

This work is supported by the same project from the National Science Foundation, and is a natural continuation. “Dark reactions” are the experiments that have been tried in the laboratory, but not reported because they are “failures” or marginal successes. But what about the “extra dark” reactions that don’t even get attempted? In practice, chemical experiments are planned by human scientists and thus are subject to a variety of human cognitive biases, heuristics, and social influences that might lead to some reactions being systematically excluded. What we were able to show in this study is that such biases are present in the chemical reaction literature, and that the underrepresented reactions are not being excluded for any “good” reason—it’s not because they are more expensive, or more difficult, or more prone to failure, but rather simply because humans tend to get stuck in a rut when planning reactions. This might just be a curiosity, except for the fact that these anthropogenic (human-generated) data are now being widely used to train machine-learning models to predict chemical syntheses. The hazard is that we end up making the machine in our own image, so to speak, rather than letting it perform as well as it could. We were able to show that indeed, human-selected experiments were inferior to randomly-generated experiments for building machine learning models, even if you gave the humans many more reaction data.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“That was the first time I was like, ‘Wow, I want to be a surgeon,’” Sanchez said. “I want to be that guy who is in control of the room, who knows what’s going on, who has all the knowledge and the capability to save someone’s life.”

Today, Sanchez is a senior chemistry student on the pre-med track at Fordham College at Rose Hill. In his four years at Fordham, he’s conducted research in three labs. He’s shadowed three medical specialists and observed tumor removals and colonoscopies. He’s volunteered at St. Barnabas Hospital—just a 15-minute walk from campus—and served both English and Spanish-speaking patients from the Bronx.

But it was a buildup of experiences, beginning at home, that inspired him to pursue a career in medicine.

A Boy from Queens

Sanchez was born and raised in a family of health care professionals in Bayside Hills, Queens. His mother is a geriatrician; his father was an ultrasound technician. Both of them left their native Ecuador in their 20s to achieve the American Dream.

Whenever Sanchez fell ill, his mother “always had the answers,” he said. Those “answers” extended to their family members in Ecuador, who often called their home in New York for medical advice.

“I loved that she was that source of knowledge and information to people,” Sanchez said. “And I aspired to be that.”

Bringing Science and Solace to the Bronx

His dream of becoming a doctor slowly took shape.

At Fordham, he worked as a research lab mentor for three chemistry professors who taught him how to better navigate the heavy science associated with pre-med studies. Under the tutelage of Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., Sanchez synthesized cobalt nanowires for fuel cells. In the lab of Fariborz Firooznia, Ph.D., he learned how to separate different substances and measure heat transfers. And since last fall, he has worked in the lab of Paul Smith, Ph.D., where he analyzes cortisol, a stress hormone found in hair and saliva.

Last year, he also served as a STEM student representative for Fordham College at Rose Hill’s academic integrity committee, said Rachel Annunziato, the associate dean for strategic initiatives. In fact, she was the one who selected him for the role.

“He was just so thoughtful in terms of his ethical responsibilities,” said Annunziato, who met Sanchez and his family at the fall 2017 dean’s list ceremony. “He’s so personable, hardworking, and determined …. He’s a really good kid.”

In the spring of 2018, Sanchez started volunteering at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, where he surveyed patients on the quality of care during their stay. But he also connected with them, particularly those that spoke Spanish, his family’s native tongue. He bonded with a middle-aged Dominican patient, who, like him, loved the taste of arroz con habichuelas and pasteles.

“This was human interaction … conversational care,” Sanchez said.

Life and Death in the Operating Room

For years, Sanchez had wanted to become a doctor. But it wasn’t until 2017 that he formally decided to pursue a profession in medicine.

Two summers ago, Sanchez shadowed a family friend: chief surgical oncologist Mario Leone, Ph.D., who works at the Society to Fight Cancer, a hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador. For almost two months, Sanchez observed surgeries and clinical appointments.

Many of the patients he observed in Ecuador suffered from soft tissue sarcomas, or cancers that begin in the bone and muscle. One patient, who had lost an eye, complained about the wind flowing through his empty socket. Another had a fist-sized sarcoma growing from her scalp—a bald, pink mass that was only visible when she took off her hat. 

In the operating room, he watched Leone and his medical staff remove tumors in surgeries that took hours. As an electrocautery probe sliced across a patient’s body, he could smell the burning flesh. With the aid of a surgeon’s scalpel, he saw skin layers peel apart. But he wasn’t afraid.

“I was totally intrigued by learning the anatomy of it—learning how to be careful,” Sanchez said. “Not severing any major arteries or veins and being careful of the nerves.”

He also loved the vibe of Leone’s team. Sometimes they played rap or bachata music during surgery, he said. But what he liked the most was their team dynamic.

“The fluidity, the way they joke around, but also the way that they solve problems off the fly and rely on each other—that’s what I like,” Sanchez said. “[And] they all have the same goal: They want to save this person’s life.”

That doesn’t always happen. Leone told him about how he had cared for a child in Ecuador who later succumbed to liver cancer, Sanchez said.

“You’re not always gonna have a success in the operating room. You’re not going to be able to fix everybody that comes in there,” Sanchez said. “But you keep on trying.”

After he graduates from Fordham, Sanchez plans on taking a gap year before applying to medical school. He said he wants to gain more clinical experience, and plans on applying for medical scribe and research assistant positions. He looks forward to people putting faith in him the way they put faith in his mom.

“You look after these people with all your heart and soul because you genuinely love them,” Sanchez said. “I want to have that friendship where they trust me as a doctor, and a smile comes on their face every time I walk in the room—‘cause I know I’m going to have a smile on my face.”