In a collaboration between the Fordham Center for Cybersecurity, the NYC Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the NYPD, Chief Ruben Beltran was invited to the Lincoln Center campus on Oct. 19 to speak to aspiring cybersecurity professionals. The commanding officer of the NYPD Information Technology Bureau and founder of the NYPD Real Time Crime Center, Beltran shed light on various aspects of cybersecurity, such as email phishing and key security tools employed by his team, as well as the broader importance of protecting critical information.

Keeping Data Safe

“Right now, a part of our training is how to keep our department assets, data, and computers safe, and also how to keep your own data safe. It’s a little bit different when you’re talking about your personal information on your personal devices,” Beltran said, explaining how vital cybersecurity is at many levels in not only the NYPD, but for every resident of New York City. “I think there’s an opportunity here in terms of creating that awareness for best practices to keep your family’s assets, wealth, and information secure.”

In the landscape of cybersecurity, expertise in business, law, and political science is becoming increasingly critical, he said. In today’s world, effective cybersecurity strategies require cooperation between government agencies, educational institutions, and the private sector, he said, noting that cybersecurity is more than just a lucrative career choice.

Understanding the Need

“It’s cybersecurity—It’s flashy, and a lot of people go into the business thinking that they are going to make a lot of money, and they probably are, especially if they are good at it,” he said. “But, there’s a reason for the need for cybersecurity, and it’s important to know how people get into the business.”

Thaier Hayajneh, a computer science professor and director of the Fordham Center for Cybersecurity, introduced Chief Beltran and also explained how Fordham’s programs align with the demands of the ever-evolving industry.

“One key component of our programs really is [they are truly]interdisciplinary,” he said. “We work across multiple disciplines in business, and law, and political science. We strongly believe that cybersecurity is way beyond just programming and coding and math.”

A Rewarding Career

Reflecting on his own career, Beltran said, “Technology was a passion of mine, and I actually changed my major from criminal justice to computer information systems. But it really did set me up for where I am today.”

He told the students, “It’s important that you know that cybersecurity is going to be a great career; it’s going to be challenging, you’re going to learn a lot, and you’re going to grow.”

Bal initially majored in biology at Fordham, but he switched to computer science in his junior year. Working closely with Damian Lyons, Ph.D., director of the University’s Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, he used technology originally associated with gaming to help herpetologists at the zoo track and study the movements of Kihansi spray toads. The toads had been classified as extinct in the wild in 2009, but in the past decade, scientists at the Bronx Zoo, headquarters of the Wildlife Conservation Society, have been breeding the toads on site and helping to reintroduce them to their native habitat in Tanzania.

According to Lyons, Bal expanded the code to effectively track the toads solely using depth imagery. He also added a color-tracking feature so that made it possible to zero in on the toads when they moved, such as jumping onto a leaf. Bal also created new software to generate behavior analytics.

As an undergrad, Bal also was a volunteer EMT with Fordham University EMS, and he worked as a software engineer intern at Amazon, an experience he said he helped him not only get job offers but also learn “how to work professionally, scalably, and consistently in the real world.”

Today, he’s a software engineer at SpaceX, working on ground network software systems for Starlink, the aerospace manufacturer’s satellite internet service. But one day down the line, Bal said he hopes to launch his own company.

What Fordham course has had the greatest influence on you and your career path so far? How and why was it so influential?
Professor Damian Lyons’ Brains and Behaviors in Beasts and Bots. It was basically a class where we looked at different animal behaviors and then emulated them with robotics (e.g., a bug might walk around until it hits a wall, then it’ll turn and keep moving until it hits a wall, rotate, and so on. At one point we made a robot that did the same). It was a lot of fun, but I would say research outside of class was way more impactful. Classes are good for developing baseline skills, but the best way to solidify your knowledge, grow it, and put it to work is to utilize the resources available to students on campus outside of required coursework, like labs and research opportunities.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Definitely Lyons. Without the opportunities and encouragement he provided, I’m certain I wouldn’t have made professional progress at the same rate that I have. He introduced me to complex, real-world problems and helped me understand how to break them down into manageable chunks to create something useful. That overall thought process and all of the small nuances I learned along the way have been invaluable in my professional career.

What are you optimistic about?
I’m optimistic about our future. I think that the next few generations will have an extremely large impact on humanity’s trajectory due to their intersection with powerful and exciting technologies that they’ve grown up with, as opposed to previous generations that still remember what it was like to not have smartphones or the entire internet at their fingertips.

The program is currently accepting applications from potential students for enrollment in fall 2022.

Damian Lyons, Ph.D., professor of computer science, said the need for those with doctoral degrees in computer science is enormous, particularly in the private sector. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 15.3% increase from 2012 in the number of jobs in computer science requiring a doctorate degree by 2022.

Despite the strong market demand, there remains relatively low Ph.D. production in computer science, he said. Just 2% of all degrees conferred in the computer science discipline are doctorates, he noted, compared to 8% in the sciences, math, technology, and engineering fields overall.

He added that doctoral degrees are also becoming a more common prerequisite to private sector employment. Often, large, multi-sectoral organizations will reserve top-ranked positions for doctoral degree holders. For example, 16% of all positions at Google now require a doctorate.

A Focus on Ethics

A Ph.D. at Fordham will address more than just the technological aspects of the discipline, though. Students who earn the computer science doctorate will learn to wrestle with the thorniest issues of the field, including privacy and responsibility in fields such as artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity.

“Our program will promote ethically informed public-interest technological research,” Lyons said.

“The program is also unique in its commitment to training students in computer science pedagogy,” he said, “and in its commitment to engaging students in research within the first year of being in the program.”

The Ph.D. program is the latest expansion of Fordham’s focus on computer science education. In 2014, the department added a master’s in cybersecurity to its offerings, and a year later, it added a master’s degree in data science.

In 2017, Fordham was designated as a Center for Excellence in Cybersecurity by the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security. For 12 years, Fordham has hosted the International Conference on Cyber Security, jointly sponsored with the FBI.

A Research-Heavy Sequence

Research will be a key element of the Ph.D. program. Lyons noted that students will be required to take a research method class their first year and conduct an initial but significant supervised research project that will result in a peer-reviewed publication. That project may or may not be connected to their dissertation research, but it must be completed before any dissertation research can be proposed.

Students will be supervised and mentored at all stages throughout the program. “This curriculum has been designed to facilitate advising and nurturing students as they go through the process,” Lyons said.

The program is poised to offer students an excellent return on investment: It is estimated that 60% of computer science doctoral students enter private industry after graduating, at firms such as Google, Uber, Bloomberg, Microsoft, IBM, and others.

Artificial Intelligence: Seeing the Bigger Picture

Lyons is especially excited at the prospect of Fordham graduates addressing the challenges of artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity.

“There’s a great deal of information and sentiment out there about the role that such advanced computer science could play in society, with arguments spanning the spectrum from it being a tremendous good that will help everybody, to well-known comments by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk that it could lead to the downfall of society,” he said.

“The way you deal with that is, you ensure that the researchers you’re training understand that science is a part of society, that they aren’t so focused on the technical perspectives and excitement of what they’re doing that they don’t see the bigger, ethical picture.”

We connected with some of the countless Rams bringing people together to repair and lift up their communities.

A Pro Runner Blows the Whistle on Abusive Training Culture

In 2013, at age 17, Mary Cain was one of the top runners in the world, the youngest U.S. athlete ever to compete on a World Championships team. But soon after joining Nike’s elite Oregon Project to train with head coach Alberto Salazar, her health and her promising pro career deteriorated.

Her coaches forced her to lose weight, which led to the loss of her period for three years and stress-related injuries, including five broken bones, Cain said.

“You don’t go from losing weight to breaking bones in two days, right? There’s usually this long period of time where there’s this physical deterioration,” Cain said at Fordham’s ninth annual Sports Business Symposium, held virtually on March 25. “Throughout the day, I just was more prone to having silly things, like headaches, to just being more hungry, to being a little bit more irritated as a result, and to just being visibly fatigued.”

She began to dread the sport she had loved since fifth grade. Her physical, emotional, and mental health began to spiral downward. She developed an eating disorder and began to cut herself and have suicidal thoughts.

“What once had been something that came naturally to me, this beautiful experience … suddenly became a slog,” Cain said. “The longer that I was in this really circular system, the more my body broke down.”

Cain completed one year at the University of Portland while training with the Oregon Project before transferring to Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 2019. After moving to New York, she kept training with the Nike project until 2016.

In a November 2019 video piece for The New York Times, Cain said the all-male coaching staff, led by Salazar, did not include a certified sports psychologist or certified nutritionist, and that Salazar had tried to put her on birth control pills to lose weight and harmed her mental health by berating her and humiliating her in front of her fellow athletes.

“Women in sports are treated harsher when it comes to body image,” she said during the Fordham symposium in March. “And I believe the reason is mostly societal—the expectation to be a lighter weight is more attached to [women’s] looks and their meaning. And it’s this really toxic culture that I think permeates professional sports.”

After Cain’s story came out, many other women supported her claims, including Kara Goucher, an Olympic distance runner who had trained under the same Nike program. Salazar denied the allegations of abuse, but several weeks before Cain’s story was published, he received a four-year ban from the sport for doping violations, and Nike had already shut down the Oregon Project.

In January 2020, Nike completed an internal investigation of Cain’s allegations of abuse, and her story helped Nike identify initiatives to “do better in supporting female athletes,” including increasing the number of women coaches in sports and investing in scientific research into the impact of elite training on women and girls.

Today, Cain is the New York City community manager for Tracksmith, a running apparel company. She runs professionally as a member of USA Track & Field and continues to call for reforms, including having teams provide mental health counselors and sports psychologists who are separate from the coaching staff.

She said her goal in sharing her story is to make sure that no other athletes, particularly female athletes, have to go through the suffering she did.

“I hadn’t known that the situation was bad until somebody [told me], ‘That is bad. That shouldn’t happen to you.’ It’s normalized,” she said.

“I realized I didn’t want any other person out there to … be self-loathing, beat themselves up, and have this incredibly negative experience because they were under an emotionally abusive coach and almost didn’t know it.”

—Kelly Kultys, FCRH ’15

A Gun Violence Survivor Works to Heal Social Divisions

Lamont Young knows something about forgiveness and bridging interpersonal divides.

In 1993, he almost died after being shot seven times in the chest—point blank—by an acquaintance who was high on PCP. But he later found the strength to forgive his assailant, and in doing so, he was inspired to pursue a lifelong path of helping others.

That path eventually led him to the Graduate School of Education, where he earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling in 2018.

Then he made a career move that led to a personal transformation. He went to work with UNITE, a national initiative co-founded by Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver that seeks to help Americans overcome divisions, and he gained a new perspective.

“I went in with this psychological approach to addressing the human condition and suffering caused by racism and discrimination. I had a burning desire to promote human dignity and shed light on segregation and dehumanization, but I was so caught up in my head trying to find ways to address this,” he said.

“Once I met with the UNITE team, I had a spiritual awakening. I started to address them not from my mind or from my heart, but from my spiritual background. It was transformative to understand that in spite of it all, we have to love, we still have to forgive.”

Young and his mother, Glenda, are featured in The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening (Penguin Life/The Open Field), published in March. The book contains an interview with them conducted by Shriver, who knew Young from a young men’s group he once led in New Haven, Connecticut.

“A mother who raises a son who can take on the hardscrabble and often fatal streets of New Haven and not only come through it but come through it with forgiveness and an open heart—that’s a mother I want to learn from,” said Shriver, who spoke about the power of personal transformation at Fordham’s 2019 commencement ceremony, where he received an honorary doctorate.

Shriver said the book’s common thread is that when we treat ourselves and others with dignity, we unlock potential, even during disagreements.

“This is hard emotional, spiritual, political work,” he said. “If you want a quick solution, this is the wrong place. But if you want the best solution, there’s only one way, and that’s to unite.”

In addition to conducting research on dignity and respect for UNITE, Young works with people experiencing homelessness in New Haven at Columbus House and provides psychotherapy at Reliant Behavioral Health Community Service.

And he has learned about some new dimensions of forgiveness. “You can transgress against yourself by not forgiving yourself for some of the things that you haven’t done or some of the time you haven’t spent with your loved ones before they left this Earth,” he said. “I found that very powerful, to understand how to love and forgive yourself in the midst of turmoil and grief in order to free yourself.”

—Patrick Verel, GSAS ’15

A Nonprofit Leader Rescues Food Waste to Relieve Hunger, Promote Community

As the president and CEO of Community Solidarity, Jon Stepanian runs the largest vegetarian hunger relief program in the country. It’s a nonprofit he hopes doesn’t exist in a generation or two.

“When we started, we wanted to build a structure where we could theoretically put ourselves out of business in the communities where we operate,” Stepanian said. “We want to make sure that there’s going to be no need for us in 30 to 40 years if the community itself can take care of these needs.”

Based on Long Island, Community Solidarity rescues food from being wasted at supermarkets and farms and distributes it to people at food shares across four locations on Long Island and one in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each area, he says, is at risk of being a “food desert,” where fresh, nutritious, affordable food is hard to find.

“We rescue food waste because it’s common sense—it’s cheap to do it. But on a more philosophical level, on a more economic level, this is why people in our communities are struggling. We see it as a fundamental problem in our system that’s making people in our community poor and hurting people overseas and also destroying our environment by producing large quantities of stuff that we don’t need,” he said.

“We’re trying to rescue a small portion of that waste and repurpose it for something good, like feeding our neighbors, but we’re also trying to expose the problem.”

Stepanian knew he wanted to focus on helping local communities after graduating from Fordham. As an undergraduate, he studied history and political science—and an internship at the United Nations and a stint working at the American Civil Liberties Union gave him perspective on working within the intergovernmental and nonprofit sectors. Shortly after college, he and his friends started a Food Not Bombs chapter on Long Island, occasionally setting up a food distribution table on weekends.

Before long, he realized he needed to create a more sustainable structure to keep the food distribution going. Community Solidarity, with its 501(c)3 nonprofit status, was born out of this realization, although Stepanian said that a nonhierarchical structure was important from the outset.

“When we decided to become a nonprofit, we said we wanted no lines of demarcation between who can volunteer and who can get food,” he said. “We wanted to make it so you wouldn’t be able to tell if someone’s volunteering or in need or both.”

In a 2018 TEDxNYU talk, Stepanian talked about what he called “the myth of scarcity,” and how a communal response can not only address hunger but also help to create a deeper sense of belonging among neighbors.

“We’re also trying to raise awareness by saying that we will, in 10 years, be the largest hunger relief organization in the country, and we’re doing it for a thousandth of the price that the food banks are doing it, all because of this waste,” Stepanian said.

“This is how abundant that system of waste is. We want to make it eye-opening for people.”

—Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08

A Familiar Face Offers Financial Literacy Training to Fellow Women of Color

As a young woman growing up in Brooklyn, Felicia Gomes-Gregory knew she wanted two things: to attend Fordham University and to work as a computer scientist. She achieved both.

But now, more than 30 years later, Gomes-Gregory is focused on something new, which she calls her passion project: Heels and Higher Achievement, a nonprofit that empowers women and people of color by helping them learn about finance.

Her path to forming the nonprofit started in 2016, when she received what she calls a blessing in disguise. After a decades-long career at various financial firms in New York City, she was laid off from Neuberger Berman, an employee-owned investment management firm.

She asked herself what she would do next. “In my heart, I’ve always wanted to … get more women involved in technology or finance, and especially women of color, because I never saw anybody that looked like me—or not enough of it,” Gomes-Gregory said.

She kicked off Heels and Higher Achievement (HHA) in 2018, determined to make financial literacy fun while giving a voice to those in her community who are empowering young women in tech, finance, STEM, media, or “whatever it is that they want to do,” she said. “I wanted to create a forum so that people can speak, but mainly speak about financial education.”

That first year, she conducted in-person workshops at schools, churches, and “anywhere anyone would hear me,” Gomes-Gregory said. She’d speak about basic financial literacy concepts and invite people to schedule a complimentary financial review—a kind of “GPS of your money,” she said, “to make sure you can stop working for money at some point and [let]money work for you.”

She also launched an ambassador program to give young girls opportunities to network with professionals and serve their communities through volunteer work. But COVID-19 meant pivoting to online events and workshops in 2020.

In April, HHA sponsored its second annual series of online workshops for Financial Literacy Month, including, for the first time, programming for men. “[Because] of all of the things that were happening in the Black community— between George Floyd, the social issues, COVID—men need to talk, too,” she said.

The digital programming has gone well, she said. She’s hoping to launch a YouTube channel and resume in-person events soon.

“I’m learning that self-care and self-preservation—from a financial, physical, mental, and spiritual [standpoint]—are so very important,” she said. “And I didn’t learn this until I was 50. So, now I’m teaching all of the young ’uns. ‘Take care of yourself first. You’re important.’”

—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Students Share Their Expertise with Bronx Businesses

When the pandemic upended everything in March 2020, Rich Shrestha was working on a research project about consumer behavior in the Bronx. As the economy went into a tailspin, his mind went back to his childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father ran a Subway franchise for a decade.

“I saw him always grinding away every day, putting in 12-hour days. So, I can sympathize with the small business owners who are trying to survive in the age of COVID,” he said.

Shrestha, a rising senior majoring in economics at Fordham College at Rose Hill and a member of the University’s Social Innovation Collaboratory, reached out to friends he thought might be interested in helping small businesses.

Diontay Santiago, then a senior majoring in marketing at the Gabelli School of Business, was one of those who answered the call. In June 2020, they launched the Fordham Business Development Collaboratory. The student-run group, comprising more than 70 members, is split into teams that assist clients with finance, marketing, compliance, technology, and communications. Students offer their advice free of charge, relying on lessons they’ve learned in classes. They also conduct research, develop industry reports, and create case studies and videos for Bronx businesses.

For Santiago, who graduated from Fordham in May and had served as president of ASILI, the Black Student Alliance, the group has been a way to lift up the borough he has called home his whole life. “Doing this sort of thing weds the school to its actual geographic location and allows it to give back to the community it’s inhabited for the last two centuries or so. So when Rich presented me with the opportunity to work with him, I jumped at it.”

The group’s clients have included restaurants, nonprofits, a software company, and an insurance firm. In addition to word-of mouth and its website (fordhambdc.org), the group has connected with clients through the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation.

Sadibou Sylla, the interim director of Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory and an adjunct professor at the Gabelli School, said that all who contribute to the group personify what it means to be a “changemaker.”

“They understand that it is only in serving all that we serve ourselves,” he said, “and that business is nothing but an instrument for helping society.”

Shrestha is optimistic that the group will live on long after he and his classmates graduate.

“This is an opportunity to gain an understanding of the community you’re in, and how we can be a better part of it and better neighbors,” he said. “I think a lot of students are starting to realize how important that is.”

—Patrick Verel, GSAS ’15

Do you know a Fordham “Changemaker”?
Who are the unsung Rams working to foster collaboration and change in your community? Tell us about the people whose stories you’d like us to share. Write to us at [email protected].

Her path to forming the nonprofit started in 2016, when she received what she calls a blessing in disguise. After a decades-long career at various financial firms in New York City, she was laid off from Neuberger Berman, an employee-owned investment management firm.

She asked herself what she would do next. “In my heart, I’ve always wanted to … get more women involved in technology or finance, and especially women of color, because I never saw anybody that looked like me—or not enough of it,” Gomes-Gregory said.

She kicked off Heels and Higher Achievement (HHA) in 2018, determined to make financial literacy fun while giving a voice to those in her community who are empowering young women in tech, finance, STEM, media, or “whatever it is that they want to do,” she said. “I wanted to create a forum so that people can speak, but mainly speak about financial education.”

That first year, she conducted in-person workshops at schools, churches, and “anywhere anyone would hear me,” Gomes-Gregory said. She’d speak about basic financial literacy concepts and invite people to schedule a complimentary financial review—a kind of “GPS of your money,” she said, “to make sure you can stop working for money at some point and [let]money work for you.”

She also launched an ambassador program to give young girls opportunities to network with professionals and serve their communities through volunteer work. But COVID-19 meant pivoting to online events and workshops in 2020.

In April, HHA sponsored its second annual series of online workshops for Financial Literacy Month, including, for the first time, programming for men. “[Because] of all of the things that were happening in the Black community— between George Floyd, the social issues, COVID—men need to talk, too,” she said.

The digital programming has gone well, she said. She’s hoping to launch a YouTube channel and resume in-person events soon.

“I’m learning that self-care and self-preservation— from a financial, physical, mental, and spiritual [standpoint]—are so very important,” she said. “And I didn’t learn this until I was 50. So, now I’m teaching all of the young ’uns. ‘Take care of yourself first. You’re important.’”

“We hope to create a platform that will allow scholars and the general public to access data across museums through a simple and visually appealing online interface,” said Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, a co-principal investigator for the project.

Several representatives from major museums and libraries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress, were present at an October project workshop at Fordham. Joining them were scholars from Fordham, Harvard University, MIT, the New School, Sciences Po of Paris, and University of Potsdam in Germany. The group has been collaborating continually to produce a final report for the NEH in March, after which they’ll seek additional funding for the project.

Connecting Museums and Their Data

Auricchio said that the project is similar to how museums are connected in the physical realm through the exchange of traveling works of art, but instead of art they would be exchanging research data, or metadata, spawned by their collections. Auricchio distinguished the two data sets by using museum “tombstones” as an example. Tombstones are the placards one sees beside a painting in a museum. The metadata would be the boldfaced information found at the top of the placard: the name of the artists, the years the artist lived, the name of the work of art, and the medium. The research data would be the paragraph below the metadata, which would include more nuanced and detailed information about the painting: its history, influences, and place within art history. Also included in the research data would be essays from exhibition catalogs.

“Only a fraction of a museum’s holdings are photographed for catalogs, the rest is represented through this research data and metadata,” she said.

This new platform would help foster “a new kind of knowledge production for scholars, artists, curators, educators, and an interested public,” she said.

Anne Luther, Ph.D., a co-principal investigator on the project, said that one of the primary challenges is that museums publish their data in silos, and even within institutions the internal databases don’t necessarily follow the same protocol. Luther, along with Auricchio, brought the NEH-funded project to Fordham.

“A museum may have one database system they are using, but from department to department they are using it differently,” Luther said at the October workshop. “The goal is to make this data available as a public good, but at the moment they’re [the data]  not speaking to each other.”

The challenge in dealing with large institutions is that the computer science protocols have already been established, in many cases over the course of years. Luther said there have been long-standing efforts that try to connect museum data internationally, but projects that have tried to impose new standards and new protocols have failed.

“We’re not trying to bring new standards to describing metadata, but rather we want to build, on one side, a protocol that would allow us to connect them,” she said. “We want to allow for the diversity of metadata on object descriptions within the museums to remain the same. We’re not asking the museum to rewrite. We’ll fish that out.”

Speaking the Same Language

Of course, “fishing” for common phases that describe a period, or a work of art, is also one of the great challenges for the project.

Sarah Schwettmann, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, said a protocol layer that aligns metadata from museums’ digital collections could be the best route.  She noted that with machine learning, which is akin to artificial intelligence, there are increasingly more tools that allow computer scientists to work with and analyze metadata. She said the resulting platform needn’t be a simple search engine or website, but could be something more.

“We could build a protocol that actually asks, ‘Can we compare how different museums talk about items in their collection?’” Schwettmann said at the workshop. “This interface would allow one to interoperate specific terms and cultural language that the various museums have developed over time. This is important because each museum develops bodies of scholarship that are specific to that institution.”

“We want a protocol layer that points back to how individual museums talk about their objects and allows users to interact with and see the diversity in terminology,” she said.

One-Stop Research

Matthew Battles, associate director, metaLAB at Harvard University, noted that today art historians will often need to travel from several galleries, museums, and archives in order to gather the strands of a story about a particular artist, particular genre, and particular period.

“We want to facilitate the research activity of a scholar who wants to tell those stories across an institutional context so that rather than spending five years visiting 25 institutions, they could have access to the data of those various institutions in one place,” he said.

He noted that while diverse institutions feature objects from similar periods in history, they may interpret that history differently. As an example, he noted that all institutions agree there was a Byzantine era, though not all agree on a start date or end date. Where one researcher might want to have a numerically specific date, another might be interested in how various institutions have defined Byzantine.

He said that rather than proposing yet one more system to bring all of the museum systems into alignment, which hasn’t worked anyway, it would be better to provide a “roadmap” of how you can bring the various data into agreement or, if one chooses, eliminate the distinctions.

Battles said the NEH seed money—known as a discovery grant—was key, since the resulting research would be a public good that could impact the way stories are told at exhibitions, in elementary school classrooms, and in higher education, all of which would be “more richly informed by a broader array of resources.”

Gianna Migliorisi has worked in tech for more than a decade, but until last spring, she didn’t realize just how unwelcoming the industry could be for women.

“My entire career I was walking around, oblivious, thinking that I was no different from any of my male colleagues, that every other woman in technology was treated with the same respect and equality that I had been fortunate enough to encounter in the workplace,” she wrote in a post on Medium.

Her epiphany came at the 2018 Women of Silicon Valley conference in San Francisco, where she heard stories of female software engineers who had to work harder than their male counterparts in order to gain approval, or sometimes, even to get in the door. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, only 26% of professional computing jobs in the 2018 U.S. workforce were held by women, and only 20% of Fortune 500 chief information officer (CIO) positions were held by women in 2018.

The conference was such an eye-opener for her, she says, because she has always felt supported in her academic and career choices.

“I didn’t really appreciate how important it is for women in a science field to be recognized, because there are not many of us,” she says.

The Brooklyn native not only grew up with parents who both worked in the sciences—her mother is a scientist who taught anatomy to medical and nursing students, and her father is a pharmacist—but she also received a great deal of encouragement from faculty at Fordham.

During her sophomore year, computer science professor Robert Moniot, Ph.D., nominated her for a Clare Boothe Luce Scholarship for women in the sciences. The award gave her the financial support to enroll in Fordham’s dual-degree program in computer science. She began taking graduate-level courses as an undergraduate, and earned her master’s degree in 2008.

While finishing her master’s, Migliorisi began working at National Grid, the utilities company. She later joined HBO, where she was part of the team that launched the HBO Go app, and worked at a software company before joining Discovery Inc. in August 2015. As a senior director of technical product management, she works with engineers to build features and products for the company’s streaming apps, including those for TLC and Animal Planet.

Her professional success, and the experience she had at the Women in Silicon Valley Conference, has led Migliorisi to try to make sure she creates an environment in which other women can succeed.

“I’ve been making a conscious effort to try to be more supportive of [my women colleagues’]particular struggles,” she says. “I definitely make it more of a priority now to hire more women and make sure I look around to make sure other people are hiring more women.”

Migliorisi knows she was fortunate to find at Fordham an environment where she felt supported and could develop her skills and confidence.

“[My professors] never discouraged me from anything and never made me feel like I wasn’t capable of doing this job or learning,” she says. “They were super helpful, especially when you needed that extra effort, and they had a genuine interest in your success. I had a really, really good experience.”

Beyond academics, Migliorisi was a member of the Commuting Students Association, an orientation leader and orientation coordinator, and a member of the Senior Week Committee.

“As a commuter, I wanted to feel like I had a connection to my school and make sure that other commuters had that connection, too,” she says. “Fordham did a great job of catering to commuting students and making resources and activities available for them to be a part of.”

That positive experience has led Migliorisi to stay involved with Fordham however she can, from donating to attending events.

“Really, I had such a wonderful experience there that I definitely believe in giving back to a place that I feel like shaped me as a person.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?

This is hard because I get excited about a lot of things … but I feel like I’m most passionate about making others happy. I bake a lot, which relieves stress for me, but I bake things and bring them to work because it makes everyone so happy. Little things like that. Saying thank you for something small, buying someone some flowers to cheer them up … giving hugs … organizing happy hours. Everyone works really hard, and I like to make sure they know they’re appreciated, so it makes me happy to make others happy.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

“No one wants to mess with something that’s working.” My manager always reminds me of that when there is a lot of change going on in the workplace, and when certain changes can lead to uncertainty. Change isn’t easy, and when the future is uncertain, it makes it harder sometimes to concentrate and do your job. Remembering to just do your best and keep focusing on your mission will help you navigate the waters of change, and most of the time, bad change won’t come your way if things are going in the right direction.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?

How do you pick one place in New York City? I think anywhere there’s a spot of green in NYC is my favorite place. There’s nothing like hanging out at Bryant Park on a nice summer afternoon. In the world: Anywhere where there’s a beach with nice warm water is my happy place.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, has had a huge influence on me, particularly as a leader in a work environment. It teaches you to take ownership of everything, including the mistakes of a team. If you’re a leader, and your team is underperforming, it’s not their fault, it’s yours. You as a leader, no matter what situation you are in, have an obligation to the people you lead—to build trust, encourage, and inspire them. If someone on your team fails, it’s because you failed in some way. Never misplace the blame; always own your mistakes.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?

Professor Stuart Sherman in the English department. I absolutely hated English classes, and English professors didn’t like me that much. I was never very good at analyzing things from a creative perspective (I’m a logical thinker) and my writing wasn’t amazing. Professor Sherman took the time to help me be a better writer. He taught his courses with so much passion and love and enthusiasm, it was infectious. He made me love a course I absolutely hated, and in my mind, that is the mark of an amazing teacher. I may not remember everything I learned in his classes, but I remember him for his energy and his kind heart and his love for teaching.

The Gabelli School of Business seniors are both first-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe (her parents are from Hungary, his are Albanian). Both were born at the same hospital in Manhattan and attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the Upper East Side. Both commuted to Rose Hill as first-year students and transferred to the Gabelli School at Lincoln Center their sophomore year, where they both majored in global business with a concentration in digital media and technology.

Both have opted to stay at Fordham to earn master’s degrees in computer science at the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS). And they’ve been a couple since their first year at the University.

It’s been an eventful path to graduation for each of them.

A Nudge Toward Something New

Although Marko tried her hand at marketing when they first enrolled at the Rose Hill campus, it didn’t quite click for her. Becaj suggested she give computer science a shot.

“Before that, I never really knew what computer science entailed. No one ever talked to me about it. Then I took Computer Science 1 and I just instantly loved it,” she said.

Not only did she take to it, but because she had AP credits from high school and took summer classes, she finished her undergraduate studies a semester early and enrolled in GSAS this spring to begin her graduate studies. This summer, she’s interning at Take Two Interactive, the makers of Grand Theft Auto video games; she expects to graduate with her master’s in December.

Becaj started out with a pre-med concentration at Fordham College at Rose Hill before transferring to the Gabelli School, and will be taking a little longer to finish his graduate studies. At the Gabelli School, he tried his hand at finance and marketing as well. He credits Marko with giving him the strength to try—and fail at—new things.

Feeding Off Each Other’s Successes

“I’m actually more comfortable with trying things when she’s around. I’m just a lot more comfortable doing it. She steps out of her comfort zone all the time,” he said. In their sophomore year the couple were finalists for the Consulting Cup, a semester-long course where student teams are tasked with investigating real companies.

Marko currently works part-time as a salesperson for BLU Reality Group, but is hopeful that upon graduation, she will be able parlay her Take Two internship, which is in infrastructure automation, into a position in that area. Becaj is considering working this summer alongside his father, who turned 71 this year, before plunging full-on into his graduate studies. Like Marko, he’d like to intern for a software development company.

Both students say they take inspiration from their families. Marko’s father moved from Győr, Hungary, when he was 14, and found work as a limousine driver and personal assistant to Placido Domingo. Becaj’s father likewise made his way to the United States when he was a teenager; he has been a superintendent for nearly 50 years at a building on the Upper East Side—a far cry from where he came from.

“My dad was from a family of very poor farmers. The first time he had shoes, I think, was when he went into the army when he was 17,” he said.

Needless to say, Marko and Becaj, who both received scholarships to attend Fordham, are grateful for the opportunities they’ve been given. Marko credited Michael Kadri, an adjunct professor of computer science, with turning her on to computer science, while Becaj said James McCann, a lecturer of finance and business economics, made business easier to grasp.

The Great American Story

Vincent DeCola, S.J., assistant dean for the B.S. in Global Business at Gabelli, is their “number one” though, they said, and not just because he helped them transfer to Lincoln Center.

“I hear stories about what he’s done for other students who have gone through difficult times, and he’ll just be there to listen or provide advice. That’s technically not his job, but he goes above and beyond,” said Becaj.

Father DeCola, for his part, has fond memories of the couple visiting him five times, by his estimate, over a year and a half to change either their concentrations or minors. He called theirs a “great American story.”

“They both have very positive attitudes. That’s one of reasons I never got tired every time they came to my office thinking about changing their career path. They’re always so positive and just pleasant to work with. I always found it cute that they’d come in together, and that they were still together,” he said.

“And if they decide they want to come back and get married, I wouldn’t mind if they ask for my services in that capacity as well.”

The Fordham Founder’s scholar is currently on the national tour of the Broadway show Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. The tour started last fall, so the Fordham College at Rose Hill junior had to take exams to complete the semester between rehearsals, performances, and travel.

Louissaint said she was grateful that her professors worked with her to coordinate her classwork remotely. She finished papers, read e-books, and persevered with the support of her fellow cast members.

“They appreciated my tenacity,” said Louissaint, a first-generation college student who was born in Haiti. “I kept my 3.5 GPA, so I’m still on track to graduate next year.”

With 19 one-week performances underway this spring, Louissaint has taken a leave of absence this semester. But despite the lure of the professional stage, she has no plans to abandon her education.

Marla Louissant performing in 2016 at Declaration of Sentiments: The Remix 

Education as Foundation

While her parents are very supportive of her artistic endeavors, she said, they want to make sure she’s educated in a field that’s not as volatile as the arts. Having not had the chance at a college degree themselves, her parents see the value in a foundational education, she said.

“My family wants me to have a more solid career, something else that can help support us,” she said.

Louissaint was raised in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, near 158th and Amsterdam Ave. The extended family lives in the same neighborhood: Louissaint’s grandmother lives downstairs and her aunt lives next door. Louissaint helps pay for her grandmother’s rent as well as her own college tuition. Before landing the role in Beautiful, she worked desk jobs as a temp in various companies.

“My family can’t help me out, and a girl’s gotta eat,” she said with a laugh.

She recalled receiving an email just before she went into a computer systems class, saying she’d been selected to be a Fordham Founder’s scholar. “I called my mother and shouted ‘Amnwey!’”— which is Creole for “Oh my god!” “Wow!” and “Look here!”

A Day in the Life of the Theater

While on tour, Louissaint’s typical day starts with breakfast and a walk around whatever city she’s touring in.

“I like to see what the city has to offer,” she said. “It’s easy to want to sit around and catch up on TV shows, but I like to explore the cities because chances are I won’t be visiting again.”

She then makes her way back to the hotel to warm up her voice for 20 minutes or more, “depending on how long that cast was out on the town the night before,” she said.

Then it’s off to the gym for a couple of hours before the show.

“It’s important to condition my body, especially if I have to dance to the song ‘Locomotion’ once, sometimes twice a day,” she said.

Every day she says she sets aside time at lunch to call family back home.

“I find a cute cafe to eat in and get to dialing my mom, dad, sister, grandmas, and everybody I haven’t heard from in a while,” she said.

Even though she’ll be on tour, Louissaint said she’ll be at the Fordham Founder’s Gala on March 19. She looks forward to seeing her family, and reassuring them that she’s still committed to getting her degree. 

Where Art and Science Meet

While Louissaint said she was always proficient in math, she said she didn’t discover her acting talents until she was a junior in high school. There, she won a best actress award in The National High School Musical Theater Awards. She got an agent and was soon performing off-Broadway opposite James Earl Jones in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

While it may seem that her chosen fields of theater and computer science have little to do with each other, she said she sees the connection.

“You always have to use creative thinking [in both]acting and writing code,” she said.

Another similar factor, she said, is staying power. If something goes wrong onstage, the show must go on. She said the same persistence is required in writing code.

“It’s fight or flight in both fields,” she said.

As part of a seminar class, students learned firsthand about everything involved in putting on a modern exhibit, including digital technology that helps bring the exhibit to life. And they studied objects that revealed the ingenuity of ancient artisans—like, for instance, the maker of a clay vase that’s so well crafted it appears to be metal.

“I thought that was amazing that 2,500 years after it was created, I’m still fooled by the artist,” said Michael Sheridan, one of 18 students who organized an exhibit at Fordham’s Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art.

“The Classical World in 24 Objects,” the first student-curated antiquities exhibition at the museum, is the culmination of a seminar class in museum studies and ancient art. Kicked off with a reception on May 6, the exhibition runs through July 14.

Students curated objects that they picked from the museum’s collection—researching their history, writing the display text to accompany them, and helping to design the display in a newly created gallery at the museum, among other tasks.

“They were involved every step of the way,” said Jennifer Udell, PhD, curator of university art and the seminar’s instructor. She was able to realize her longstanding idea for the project this semester because of a gift from Fordham Trustee Fellow Robert F. Long, GABELLI ’63, and his wife, Katherine G. Long. The gift funded the creation of the special exhibitions gallery, which occupies a recessed area inside the Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art.

The students picked diverse objects including Roman imperial portraits, luxury household items made of bronze, and quotidian objects like coins and painted pottery. The ornate vase—or kernos—that caught Sheridan’s interest holds a few separate compartments for food, typically offered up to the goddess of the harvest.

“We have some great examples of what life really was like for the ancients” in both the high and low strata of society, said Sheridan, a sophomore double-majoring in history and art history. “So it’s just an interesting insight into a different people group from a different time. Most universities don’t have anything like this, so we really are lucky to have this collection here.”

One of the students, Michael Ceraso, got the idea for making an app to accompany the exhibit because he was taking an app-development class offered for free at Fordham by CodePath University. He teamed up with another student in the app class, Michael Gonzales, to develop the app, which runs on three iPods that are available in the gallery.

In addition to options for searching and sorting among the objects and reading detailed information about them, the app offers audio recordings in which each student explains why he or she chose that object and what makes it interesting.

The library staff was helpful in allowing the app to access the library’s online information about its collection, said Gonzales, a junior majoring in computer science. “It could be a great teaching tool for anyone who’s interested in the museum,” he said.

In addition to putting together the displays, students traveled to other museums and learned about legal and ethical issues—like minimizing looting—surrounding the provenance of artifacts.

The seminar involved a lot of back-and-forth among the students about why their selected pieces were interesting and what the exhibit’s approach should be, said sophomore Masha Bychkova, who plans to go to law school and practice art law.

“It was nice to collaborate with everyone to create an exhibit that encompassed the whole society during these times,” she said.

“It gets complicated very quickly,” said Swinarski, PhD, who managed the immense number of equations by turning to computers for help.

It proved an enduring interest. Today, his research program sits at the intersection of mathematics and computer science, two fields that are increasingly linked in the study of abstract questions but also more concrete topics like human health. Fordham’s joint major offering in the two fields, still awaiting state approval, is the latest sign of how they’re coming together.

“It’s not that they’re converging, it’s just that maybe the division between them has always been a little artificial,” said Swinarski, an assistant professor of mathematics who helped draw up the plans for the proposed joint major.

Advances in computing power are opening up lots of new possibilities in mathematics, as Swinarski came to appreciate while earning his doctorate at Columbia University. For his dissertation, he was trying to answer a question about string theory, concerned with infinitesimally small particles that are impossible to observe,.

“My adviser and I found a way to answer some very abstract questions with some very concrete calculations, but they were too difficult to do by hand,” he said.

This was the first time he had applied computers to algebraic geometry, and he was soon using computer programming to get results to many other math problems. “It just sort of snowballed,” he said.

Computers are an important part of his research program that involves students in a variety of projects at the Lincoln Center campus. Some projects have focused on economics, mathematical finance, and other areas; one current project, for which Swinarski wrote software, could lead to faster and more accurate analysis of large data sets.

Another project is applying math and computer programs—Visual Basic, Excel—to the subtleties of human physiology for the benefit of people suffering from emphysema and other conditions.

Swinarski and an undergraduate student, Jeremy Fague, are working with Columbia University Medical Center researchers to analyze the large data set gathered by placing 89 sensors on people’s chests, backs, and stomachs to measure changes in their chest volume while they exercised. They’re hoping this new data will offer better insight compared with data obtained from breathing tests administered while someone is at rest and lead to better ways to manage emphysema.

“The big question in pulmonary medicine is, ‘Why is this particular patient short of breath?’” Swinarski said. “Is it their lungs, is it their chest muscles, is it actually that they have poor circulation and this feels to them like they’re short of breath when actually their lungs are functioning fine (and) it’s the heart that’s the problem?”

“Answering the question is complicated for all those reasons,” and both math and computer science can be used to identify potential causes of the breathing problems, such as out-of-sync expansion of the chest and abdomen, Swinarski said.

The new computer science/mathematics joint major will give students more leeway for electives at the intersection of the two fields and better prepare them for working in today’s tech sector, Swinarski said.

For instance, problems in parametric statistics call for an extremely large number of computations because fewer assumptions are made about the variables in question. Because today’s computers are far better able to handle this kind of problem, it no longer needs to be relegated to the margins in the classroom, Swinarski said.

“If you take sort of a classic one-semester statistics course, that’s something you would maybe hear about for a week or two at the end of a semester,” he said. “Nowadays, with the explosion of data science in New York, this is the kind of thing we’d like to teach a whole second semester of statistics on.”