Sarah Girardi, M.D., PAR ’24, made her gift last year after seeing how hands-on learning unlocked a passion for physics in her son, Anthony, now a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill. In addition to the instrumentation fund she created, which will pay for the laser, she is also establishing a fellowship to allow physics and engineering physics students to pursue independent research projects over summer break.
She knows from experience how such projects can advance a young scientist’s career.
“If it represents a really genuine interest in what you’re doing, I think there’s nothing more valuable,” she said.
The laser will be housed at the Rose Hill campus in an optics lab, now being set up, where students will explore various properties of light and their possible applications. Optics innovations in recent decades include everything from advanced medical imaging to high-speed internet service to the barcode scanners used in supermarkets.
In addition, the laser—an Nd:YAG model—will advance faculty research into polymers and other aspects of materials science, said Steve Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics and chair of the physics and engineering physics department.
When acquired, possibly within the year, the laser will “open up the door to look at all sorts of optical phenomena that the students otherwise don’t get exposed to,” Holler said. “Having this kind of tool … is going to be extremely important for their future careers.”
Lighting Up with a Love for Physics
Girardi well remembers a pivotal moment in her son’s time at Fordham: In sophomore year, during a visit home, he showed her some things he had made in his lab courses, including a small motorized device that changed direction in response to light.
Talking about his creations, he lit up himself. “He was realizing how much he loved physics,” said Girardi, a urologist practicing in Manhasset, New York.
Also important to her son’s education and career discernment, she said, were the small laboratory classes at Fordham; the personal attention from associate professor of physics Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., who guided his research; and the classroom insights provided by Martin Sanzari, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics.
Then there was the summer research grant provided by Fordham, which allowed him to conduct research in quantum physics rather than seek a paying job to help cover his expenses, as he would normally do, she said.
That made her think of other students who may also face financial obstacles to summer research, giving her the idea to fund a fellowship. “When it comes right down to it, unless they can make some money over the summer, they’re not going to be able to participate,” she said.
She was also inspired to give because of the memory of her mother, Anne Klemmer, who died in 2022. “My parents valued education over everything,” Girardi said. “And so I thought I would like to carry on that legacy.”
Scientific instruments support academic excellence at Fordham, a pillar of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more about the campaign and make a gift.
]]>There are easier things to pin down. “Generally, as a field, economics is very focused on the ‘hard’ things,” such as wages and benefits, said Souther, now a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. “You have to be very careful to tease out the impacts of something like autonomy.”
To do that, he would need to design and conduct an experiment of his own. Luckily, he had received a Fordham scholarship that provided funding for just such a thing.
Leveraging Talent
Souther was one of the inaugural recipients of the Cunniffe Presidential Scholarship, created by a $20 million gift from Maurice J. (Mo) Cunniffe, FCRH ’54, and Carolyn Dursi Cunniffe, Ph.D., GSAS ’71, two of the most generous donors in Fordham’s history and supporters of its current fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.
Their presidential scholarship has had 43 recipients to date, including 25 current students. It is meant to leverage the abilities of the most talented students, helping them succeed while also making an impact on the world. It funds tuition and living expenses but also academic enrichment—“probably the most important part” of the scholarship because it empowers recipients to pursue an interest, “be really good at it, and through that, make a contribution,” Mo Cunniffe said.
For Souther, this academic enrichment funding proved crucial: it enabled him to attend a summer workshop in behavioral economics at the University of Alabama, pay 400 people to take part in an experimental exercise during his senior year, and buy statistical software needed for analyzing the data.
Benefits of Autonomy
That study, as well as a follow-up study he conducted with two Fordham economics professors, Subha Mani and Utteeyo Dasgupta, shed light on the impact of giving employees a say in the work they perform. The interpersonal aspect proved important—for instance, when an “employer” participant let other participants choose their preferred tasks, they worked harder than when they got their preferred tasks as a result of a random assignment. They were also more likely to give back to the group by contributing to a communal fund.
It’s possible that employees are more appreciative “if you know that there’s a human being explicitly making a decision to … give you the autonomy,” Souther said.
Such under-studied questions are timely, especially in light of conversations about workers’ autonomy that arose out of the pandemic, he said.
“A lot of us spend at least eight hours a day at work for almost our entire life, and understanding the conditions that make work meaningful and motivating and interesting are absolutely crucial for having a productive and engaging and equitable economy,” he said.
Today, he’s getting close to submitting the research to an academic journal. He said the Cunniffe scholarship did more than propel this project.
“What it also did was allow me to go to Fordham. And that itself has had countless effects on my career and my life.”
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Known as Project FRESH Air, it brings faculty and students together with local schools to monitor air quality, an on-the-ground way of building awareness of climate change and educating the next generation of climate activists.
McGroddy made a gift in support of the project. Then he learned about the University’s core curriculum revisions, aimed at fostering cross-disciplinary thinking, and decided to give again—seeing in the University’s various efforts the kind of forward-looking approach in which he has long sought to invest.
His new gift created the James C. McGroddy Award for Innovation in Education, which carries a cash prize. In April, the University announced the first recipients: three professors who had found an inventive way of teaching chemistry students about machine learning. (See related story.)
The gift reflects McGroddy’s deeply held belief in preparing students to handle future challenges—and seize future opportunities—that are just now taking shape.
“I see Fordham as aiming to lead change, being ahead of the wave rather than following, and that’s what motivates my support,” he said.
Forward-Looking Jesuit Education
McGroddy has long been familiar with Fordham. His father and brother graduated from the University, and he attended Jesuit schools himself—New York’s Regis High School and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia—before earning his doctorate in physics from the University of Maryland.
His views on education gelled during his student years and during his 32-year career with IBM, from which he retired as senior vice president of research in 1996. At St. Joseph’s, he studied electronic physics, a nontraditional major that combined in-depth education in science fundamentals with full-time work experience to prepare students for careers in the transistor and digital revolution, then in its infancy.
McGroddy credits much of his career success to that major, and education became one of his career’s through lines. During and after his IBM career, he focused on university-industry collaboration and served as a visiting lecturer and member of multiple university advisory boards and visiting committees, both in the U.S. and abroad. During a sabbatical from IBM he was a visiting professor at the Technical University of Denmark, and he later helped establish the IT University of Copenhagen.
Preparation for Health Care, Energy, Immunology Challenges
Since his retirement from IBM, a major focus for his philanthropy and consulting has been education, particularly science and technology education that balances “learning about” with “learning how to,” he said.
The emerging challenges for today’s students include developing alternative energy sources; building on “amazing” progress in the fields of genetic science and immunology; and changing the nation’s health care industry to create a system that achieves better results as well as lower costs, he said.
“Helping students develop a profile that will enable them to succeed, and lead, in the world which we imperfectly see ahead must be the key driver of educational innovation, and will be the hallmark of leading universities in the challenging years before us,” McGroddy said.
Learn about other opportunities to invest in academic excellence or other pillars of the Fordham experience at the site for the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. To inquire about giving to any area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected].
]]>What it was, for her, was a profound experience—a course that conveyed “a deep awareness of God’s love surrounding us in nature,” said Sharkey, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies in 2015 after a decades-long business career.
Her experience during that 2018 graduate class moved her to make a gift to Fordham that will amplify the study of theology and its intersections with environmental themes for years to come.
In a bequest last August, Sharkey set up the Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J., Endowed Fund for Theology & the Earth, which is already receiving gifts from other donors. It will support programs and research that bring theology together with other fields—the sciences, business, the arts—to explore the ethical and religious dimensions of environmental protection.
On March 21, Fordham kicked off this initiative with a lecture by renowned theologian Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., now professor emerita, who taught the ecological theology class that Sharkey took in 2018.
The fund propels the theology department in a direction it had wanted to pursue, “which is to do theology in dialogue with other fields of expertise [on]ecological or environmental issues,” said theology department chair Christine Firer Hinze, Ph.D. “This is going to energize theology and religion faculty but also faculty in other departments who want to reach out and say, ‘How do we work together here?’”
Hinze also expressed the hope that people with differing views on topics like climate action could be brought together by the kind of inviting, positive, inclusive tone that Sister Johnson struck at the March 21 event.
God’s Presence in Nature
Before taking the graduate class in 2018, Sharkey had lunch with Patrick Hornbeck, D.Phil., of Fordham’s theology faculty. Explaining the difference between religious studies and theology, he told her theology “was the study of people’s relationship with God”—a powerful idea that stayed with her.
“That’s why I feel that theology is for everyone—even if you are an atheist, you think about the concept of God,” she said.
In the graduate course, she found that studying theology gave her a renewed awareness of God’s presence in the natural world and how Earth is the common home for all—atheists and believers alike.
The course also helped her cope with a personal loss. “As the semester evolved, I found myself coming back to life,” she said. “I was finally able to hear once again the trees whisper and the birds sing. It was a gift, a moment of grace, as Sister Beth would say.”
“I believe that understanding the concept of God in such a tender, loving way is too precious to be kept for only a select few,” she said.
She’s inspired by the idea that her gift will make it possible for future young people to take a Theology and the Earth class at Fordham. “Planting this tree,” she said, “has been very fulfilling for me personally.”
To inquire about giving to any area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.
]]>In preparation for their second date, Dennis read the entire trilogy in a week. “The rest, as they say, is history,” he said.
They married in 1968, creating a kind of union of the arts and sciences. Dennis Marks, FCRH ’66, was a physics major who had wanted to be an astrophysicist for as long as he could remember. Patricia, a 1965 graduate of Douglass College, part of Rutgers University, had wanted to be a writer ever since playing with a portable typewriter in her bedroom as a girl.
They pursued their ambitions together, earning doctorates in astronomy and English and later securing faculty positions at Georgia’s Valdosta State University, where they are now professors emeritus.
Strong believers in liberal arts education, they recently set up a bequest to establish an endowed chair in cosmology at Fordham, supporting the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, which seeks to enhance the entire student experience.
Students will find plenty of mind-bending questions in cosmology, the science of the origins, structure, and nature of the universe. Dennis Marks, for his part, has focused his research on finding a common mathematical language for Einstein’s theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics of particles too small to be seen. He noted that cosmology is a broad field, encompassing scientific fields but also philosophy.
Patricia Marks, an Episcopal deacon, also deals in the unseen, or at least the little noticed. She built the web page Sisters in Faith to bring attention to the mission work of Episcopal deaconesses between 1885 and 1970. And in the latest of her six books, They All Said Amen: Unheard Voices in the Bible, she writes about the spiritual experience of people in the background during biblical events. Using a modern analogy, she wrote in the book that while those in the limelight are long remembered, “the ones who carry the trays of snacks are there too. The passersby in the hall, the assistants, are there. We are there too, and we are listening.”
Tell me more about cosmology and why you decided on that field for this endowed chair.
Dennis: Cosmology really is the place where you can tackle big questions. My favorite course to teach was titled Cosmology, and I co-taught it with a philosophy professor. It’s not only about the origin of the universe and how the universe grows and how it increases in complexity and consciousness, but also what’s knowable, and how do we know it? One of the breakthroughs in quantum mechanics has to do with the fact that when we measure something, we inevitably bring ourselves into the measurement, so there’s no absolute objectivism, but by the same token, our subjectivism is shaped by what’s outside us and not just what’s inside us. I believe that cosmology has ramifications in all other disciplines, from the origin of the chemicals to quantum theology.
Come again? Quantum theology?
In senior theology at Fordham, I was taught by a priest who proposed, essentially, a scientific experiment—what do different religions say about the mystical experience? He wanted to get something that was not culturally determined. What he found in common across religions was the idea that, essentially, all is one, that there is no separation between the other and the self, and so on. And to some of us, it really sounded like an application of quantum mechanics, in which there’s no separation between here and there. And so quantum theology builds a theology on the interconnectedness of the one and the other.
Patricia, how did you get the idea for writing about bystanders in biblical stories in They All Said Amen?
It probably stems from my coming in contact with students who are basically forgotten by the system. One of my students, an African American girl who was the first in her family to go to college, asked me this question about an assignment: “Would it be all right for me to write about Rosa Parks?” You can imagine that people had said to her, “We cannot talk about African Americans who are heroes.” And a friend of mine who was a very good Baptist used to come to our [Episcopal] Vespers group and join me in special services. She very much wanted to be a deacon in the Baptist church, but couldn’t, as a woman, so she came to a place where women were allowed to do many of the things that she couldn’t.
And so I started to think it would be interesting to take a look at the people in Bible stories who were probably standing on the side—the woman listening and thinking, “Oh, this is wonderful,” but unnoticed by anyone. This, I think, is very much related to what I’ve been doing—visiting people who were basically forgotten in nursing homes or who were having problems at church and personal problems. You listen to them, and it makes a real difference.
Does this kind of theme show up in your other work?
I love researching ideas and stories that were basically forgotten, which is why I’ve done all that research on the deaconesses. It’s very difficult in some cases to uncover any information about these women who went by themselves to foreign countries at a point where women were not supposed to travel by themselves, and yet they went ahead and they set up libraries, they set up hospitals.
You’ve both been affiliated with a number of universities. Why did you choose Fordham for this chair?
Dennis: We decided on Fordham because of its commitment to undergraduate liberal education, or education for life. One of the delights at Fordham was being in class and hearing resonances of ideas in other disciplines, so that the disciplines were each like a piece of a single cloth. Because of the accelerated physics major, we were block scheduled, and so you had a theology professor trying to prove to 28 physics majors that you can violate the laws of nature and have miracles. It was a challenge for the faculty, as well as for the students, and it was a wonderful experience. I really think that the boundaries between disciplines are just for administrative purposes. There really is, in my mind, only one academic enterprise.
To inquire about giving to any area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.
]]>The new chair is in addition to four others in the sciences that she and the estate of her late husband, Steve Bepler, FCRH ’64, funded in 2017. To be titled the Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in the Natural and Applied Sciences, the new position is expected to advance the University’s vision for excellence in science education by fueling new interdisciplinary research into today’s most pressing scientific challenges.
“I want to thank Kim Bepler on behalf of the generations of Fordham students who will benefit from her extraordinary generosity,” said Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham. “Kim understands the University’s needs as well as anyone, and has long been committed to high-impact philanthropy that furthers academic excellence and our Jesuit, Catholic mission. We are deeply grateful for her gift, and for her ongoing engagement with Fordham.”
The gift comes as Fordham is seeking to expand its STEM programs in response to students’ growing interest in the sciences. It will advance the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, and its goal of supporting student-faculty research, cross-disciplinary problem solving, and other facets of academic excellence.
The new Bepler chair will enable the University to recruit an intellectual leader and well-established scholar and teacher and provide this person with robust research support, said Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., provost of the University and senior vice president for academic affairs. The right chair holder could help attract other talent to the University while providing leadership on important scientific questions that bring multiple fields together, he said.
“Many of the most promising scientific discoveries of our day emerge in the interstitial spaces between disciplines—between biology and physics or between chemistry and math or computer science. Addressing the most complex and consequential problems facing society really requires an interdisciplinary approach,” he said, giving the examples of mitigating climate change, combatting infectious diseases, and reducing the devastating impact of neurological disorders.
For instance, he said, “when we initially fill the endowed chair, our greatest priority may be to recruit somebody who works on next-generation renewable sources of energy. Well into the future, Fordham may choose to recruit a Bepler chair who applies artificial intelligence to identify novel therapeutics or addresses other important issues and problems.”
Philanthropic Impact
The Beplers were already among the University’s most generous donors at the time of Steve Bepler’s untimely passing in 2016. They funded endowed chairs in theology and poetics and gave in support of the Fordham Founder’s Undergraduate Scholarship, the restoration of the University Church, a new organ for the church, deans’ discretionary funds, and many other areas.
Kim Bepler also recently made a major gift in support of the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center project, another critical piece of the Cura Personalis campaign, and created the Fordham Ukraine Crisis Student Support Fund to help the University’s Ukrainian and Russian students facing financial peril because of the Russian invasion.
“With this bold and generous investment, Kim helps set the pace for leadership support,” said Roger A. Milici, Jr., vice president for development and University relations at Fordham. “Our Trustees have strongly supported all of Fordham’s recent fundraising campaigns: their gifts have accounted for 35% or more of each effort. Fordham’s philanthropic culture is dynamic, and we are committed to helping our mission partners use their wealth and generosity to improve the human condition.”
The four other Bepler chairs in the sciences—established as part of a $10.5 million gift—include a chair in biology, held by Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., who studies the neurobiology of the human retina, and one in chemistry, held by Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., who is pursuing possibilities for automated scientific research.
The University is seeking to fill the other two chairs—one previously held by the mathematician Hans-Joachim Hein, Ph.D., and one that will be directed towards biophysics, Jacobs said.
The gifts to establish these four chairs, as well as the new chair, reflect Steve Bepler’s desire to give back to the University by investing in world-class science programs that he felt any world-class university needs, Kim Bepler said.
“Steve deeply loved Fordham, and it’s a privilege to be able to help realize his vision for the University and cement his legacy like this,” she said. “I’m honored to be counted among those who are supporting our extraordinary science faculty, with their dedication that so clearly shows the Jesuit principle of magis at work, and I’m excited to see how this professorship will help our science programs grow in new directions.”
Building Connections
Schrier said he decided to come to Fordham as a Bepler chair because of the University’s Jesuit identity and because the position offered greater freedom to not only pursue research but also involve undergraduate students in it.
The endowed chair creates a few different benefits, he said—it expands the faculty and creates capacity for new types of classes that might not be offered otherwise. And by allowing for exploratory, proof-of-concept projects, “it really kind of serves as seed money for doing creative and exciting things and then taking those initial results and showing them to federal funders,” he said.
“There’s just tremendous value for interdisciplinary work” in the applied sciences, said Schrier, whose own research applies computer simulations and machine learning to the search for applications for perovskites, a crystalline mineral.
“I hope that the holder of this position will be able to build connections and ties with different departments here at Fordham and show students how all of this type of work is connected,” he said. “I know I have a lot of fun talking to colleagues in math, talking to and working with colleagues in computer science and physics. I think interdisciplinary [work]is great.”
He spoke of a number of such projects, including his work with chemistry and computer science professors to develop teaching labs that expose chemistry students to data science, a model they published last year in the Journal of Chemical Education.
“I’m really excited about [the new Bepler chair], and I look forward to meeting the holder of the chair,” Schrier said, “because it’s always great to add to and build our intellectual community here at Fordham.”
The Kim and Steve Bepler chairs have contributed to an increase of more than threefold in the number of endowed chairs at Fordham over the past two decades. The new chair in the natural and applied sciences will bring that number to 73.
]]>Now all it needs is a home.
With help from two of the University’s most generous donors, the center is well on its way to getting just that—a dedicated space at the Rose Hill campus, designed around the heritage and iconography of Orthodox Christianity, that acts as a leaven for new academic opportunities and student engagement.
The center has been mainly about research and publications since its founding 10 years ago, said George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies and one of the center’s two founding directors. However, with this new multipurpose facility, “for the first time we’re really going to be able to focus on the undergraduate students themselves” by providing spaces for informal gatherings as well as events that enrich their education, he said.
He and the other founding director, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, are based at the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses, respectively, and the center has held events in various places at both campuses.
The center will hold all but its biggest events in its new dedicated facility, Demacopoulos said. Located in the 1,500-square-foot space in the basement of Loyola Hall, it will include offices, a conference room, a gathering area, and a small chapel with specially commissioned icons, as well as shelves for hundreds of donated volumes now sitting in boxes. Demacopoulos estimated that construction and renovation of the space could begin in late 2023, putting the center on path to a more rooted existence and doing away with constant searches for event spaces around the University.
The new facility will be a familiar place where students gather for study groups or stop in at the chapel for some quiet reflection. Academic experts and clergy will come for webinars, panel discussions, and other events that illuminate questions of Orthodoxy in the modern world. “It’s going to really be this multipurpose space that is focused on the Jesuit model of integrating learning with faith with service and so forth,” Demacopoulos said.
Housed within a Jesuit university, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is uniquely positioned to help heal the rift between the Catholic and Orthodox churches—something that was especially appealing to the benefactors who are funding half of the new facility’s cost.
Donors Step In
William S. Stavropoulos, PHA ’61, and his wife, Linda Stavropoulos, have been giving back to Fordham for years, funding scholarships, athletics, and the renovation of Hughes Hall to house the Gabelli School of Business on the Rose Hill campus.
Today, in recognition of the “unbelievable great job” Father McShane did as president of the University, they are making a major gift toward the completion of the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center, a key part of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. As part of that gift, they are also setting aside $250,000 for the construction of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center’s new home.
Their giving is rooted in William Stavropoulos’ Fordham experience, which was, in his words, “a game changer.”
“When I entered the University, coming from a rural high school with a graduating class of 15, I was not sure that I could measure up. I had real doubts in my mind that I could really make it,” he said in accepting the Fordham Founder’s Award in 2014. “But with Fordham’s incredible spirit and culture, they instilled into me a confidence and an education that truly transformed me.”
Professors took a personal interest in him, encouraging him to attend graduate school, he said in an interview. After graduating from Fordham’s College of Pharmacy (which has since closed) in 1961, he earned a doctorate in medicinal chemistry from the University of Washington and went to work at Dow Chemical as a research chemist. He retired from the company 39 years later—as chairman and CEO. He won several awards along the way, including one from the Society of the Chemical Industry recognizing the high ethical standards be brought to that industry.
Through their family foundation, he and Linda Stavropoulos have supported a range of efforts in health care, human services, and higher education—including Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, in part because of its efforts to help bridge a centuries-old divide.
Healing a Schism
Christianity split into the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches nearly a millennium ago, in 1054, due to religious disputes and political conflicts. There have been many steps toward rapprochement between the estranged eastern and western churches—in 1964, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI met in the Holy Land for joint prayer, the first time the two churches’ leaders had met in more than 500 years. A year later, they agreed to revoke the churches’ mutual excommunication decrees dating from 1054.
In 2014, Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met for a service in Jerusalem to celebrate the meeting’s 50th anniversary; in a homily, the latter called for shedding “fear of the other, fear of the different, fear of the adherent of another faith, another religion, or another confession.”
Among the attendees were William and Linda Stavropoulos, who went with a group organized by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “It was very moving, and encouraging, that the symbolism of that [meeting]could expand to something on a more tangible, everyday basis,” Linda Stavropoulos said.
The Orthodox Christian Studies Center promotes this cause through scholarship and events such as the Patterson Triennial Conference on Christian Unity. “I think these are times where we need that unity,” William Stavropoulos said. “It seems like we’re having polarization like I’ve never seen before in my lifetime, and I think this is one area where maybe we can get together. I think we’re better united than divided.”
As members of the Greek Orthodox church, he said, he and Linda Stavropoulos have “a natural affinity” for the Orthodox Christian Studies Center and believe in the work it’s doing. In 2014, they made a gift to help the center secure a National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grant in support of dissertation fellowships.
Fueling the Growth
This will be the first dedicated physical space the center has ever had, Demacopoulos said. Its large common area will enable informal gatherings by students who are pursuing the Orthodox Christian studies minor or who belong to the Fordham chapter of the Orthodox Christian Fellowship, a nationwide student organization.
Over the past several years, the center has fueled interest in Orthodox Christian studies, drawing students from as far away as California and Eastern Europe, he said. He expects the new facility to amplify this interest and draw more students to the Orthodox Christian studies minor—and not just Orthodox Christians, but also those from outside the tradition who want a better understanding of it.
“The center is not just theology; it’s the whole history, thought, and culture of the Orthodox Christian world, broadly understood,” Demacopoulos said.
By generating new interest in the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, the facility could prompt more faculty members to develop courses that fit the minor and create more opportunities for students to understand Orthodoxy across disciplines, he said.
“It’s going to lead students to see these connections in their other classes—when they’re taking their international business classes, when they’re taking their political science classes, when they’re taking their religion classes, when they’re taking their history classes,” he said. “It’s going to be a much more holistic academic experience for them.”
The new facility is a key priority of the center’s current $5 million 10th Anniversary Campaign: Engaging Orthodoxy, along with creating a research endowment for Orthodox Christian studies at Fordham.
To inquire about supporting the Orthodox Christian Studies Center or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.
]]>That’s the question recently addressed by a Fordham student’s faculty-mentored research project. While scholars have long suspected that people with disabilities tend to get left behind in schooling, in employment, and in other sectors of life, the research by Emily Lewis, FCRH ’22, found that there is even more of this inequality in richer countries. And it suggests that policies may be needed to ensure growth and development benefit all people in a society.
Disability “tends to be ignored when we speak about inequalities,” said economics professor Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., co-director of the disability studies minor and founding director of Fordham’s Research Consortium on Disability. “And yet, disability is key when it comes to understanding people’s livelihoods, people’s standard of living.”
Mitra was the mentor for Lewis, an economics and philosophy major who spent last summer analyzing international disability data with support from a summer research grant. Such funding for student-faculty research is a priority of the University’s current fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.
Lewis, Mitra, and economics doctoral candidate Jaclyn Yap are co-authors of the resulting research paper, Do Disability Inequalities Grow with Development? Evidence from 40 Countries, published April 25 in the academic journal Sustainability. The research sprouted from another project led by Mitra that highlights disability inequalities worldwide.
The Disability Data Initiative
Since 2006, more than 180 countries have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, an agreement to treat them not as objects of charity and medical treatment but rather as contributing members of society.
To support this goal and help policymakers move forward, Mitra spearheaded the Disability Data Initiative, a report on 180 nations’ census and survey findings regarding people with disabilities from 2009 to 2018. She led a team of graduate and undergraduate students, including Lewis.
Presented at a UN conference last June, the report showed that about one-quarter of nations didn’t ask about disability in their national surveys. In those that did, the data showed major gaps in the areas of education, health, employment, and standard of living between people with disabilities and those without them.
The database opened the possibility of doing an extensive study across countries to see if these gaps increased with development—something that had been long hypothesized but not tested on a large scale.
Eager to explore this question, Lewis made it her summer project. Her interest in the disability gap had been sparked during one of Mitra’s classes, at a time when she was looking for a way to get involved in undergraduate research.
“Seeing examples of how different researchers are approaching these questions was really interesting, and got me excited about how I could design this project for myself,” she said.
It was a big project—and a summer research grant gave her the means to spend the required time on it.
Help from a Fordham Benefactor
This and other grants to students were made possible by an alumni benefactor who has long funded undergraduate research—Boniface “Buzz” Zaino, FCRH ’65, whose long career in the investment world exposed him to the joys of researching and learning about new industries. “Once I got into it, it just opened the world, because you do get to explore and focus on areas that become very interesting,” he said.
He has funded students’ research for years, energized by the students’ enthusiasm for their projects, by what their projects have taught him about the world, and by the benefits to the student researchers themselves.
The research process, with its wide reading and focused inquiries, gives students a base for developing their interests and learning about new things over the long term, he said. “The University provides a student with the opportunity to develop a research process, and that’s got to be very helpful for them going forward, no matter what they do in life,” he said.
The Disability and Development Gap
Lewis met weekly with Mitra over the summer to design and carry out the project, examining 40 countries that have comparable data on peoples’ self-reported difficulties with seeing, hearing, walking, cognition, self-care, and communication.
Working on the Disability Data Initiative, they had already gotten glimpses of a wider disability gap in wealthier countries.
For instance, in low-income nation of Cambodia, 75% of adults with any kind of difficulty caused by disability were employed, just shy of the 79% for those without disability. But in economically booming Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, the gulf is far wider, with just 15% employment for those with any difficulty, compared to 56% for those without.
To see if such disparities represented a trend, Lewis crunched a big data set including lots of variables—levels of disability, gender, age, and urban versus rural location, as well as a nation’s place on Human Development Index, or HDI, a UN indicator of nations’ wealth and overall development.
She found that for many standard-of-living indicators, like adequate housing and access to electricity, there was little difference in the disability gap between richer and poorer countries.
But the story was different in three areas: education levels, employment rate, and a multidimensional measure of poverty. Gaps in all three increased as countries’ HDI increased. The results held up when Lewis looked at the data a few different ways, such as focusing on different development measures or population subgroups.
The results, the co-authors wrote, “suggest that as a country develops, policies, specifically in relation to education and employment, need to be implemented to narrow and, eventually, close the gaps between persons with and without disabilities.”
The research shows that while disparities may be greater in wealthier nations, disability inequalities aren’t just a problem in rich countries with older populations, Mitra said. Low-income countries have them too, even if they’re less pronounced.
“Even when almost everyone is poor, well, people with disabilities seem to be even poorer,” she said.
Lewis found it exciting to be involved in the research process and see it through from start to finish—figuring out the approach, changing direction as needed, and working independently. “[It’s] something I consider myself really lucky to have been involved in,” said Lewis, who was planning to work as a project assistant at a New York law firm after graduation to explore her interest in law school.
Mitra said that undergraduate research not only teaches students valuable skills but also gives them an inside look at how knowledge is produced, as well as all the caveats and limitations that come with it—an awareness that will serve them well in whatever field they pursue.
The University’s research grant program for undergraduates is “a unique opportunity for students, but also for as faculty,” Mitra said. “So I hope it does continue to attract the generosity of donors.”
To inquire about giving in support of student-faculty research or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, our campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.
]]>The event at the Lincoln Center campus brought Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., distinguished professor of theology, together in conversation with the prominent author James Martin, S.J.
During the buoyant conversation focused on her then-new book, Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril (her 11th), Father Martin credited her writings with changing his life. “Thank you,” he said, “for doing so much for making contemporary theology, feminist theology, and especially Christology so accessible to the general reader.”
Admission to the event was free, but attendees were asked to consider donating to a fund for women following in Sister Johnson’s footsteps.
Many were happy to oblige. Their gifts helped to grow the Elizabeth A. Johnson Endowed Scholarship Fund, which helps to bring more women’s voices and experiences into theological teaching and scholarship. With the field of theology—and particularly Catholic theology—dominated by men for so long, “having women involved in the whole field of thinking about religion is a great benefit,” said Christine Firer Hinze, Ph.D., theology department chair at the University.
Every year, the scholarship financially supports a woman who is finishing her doctoral dissertation, allowing her to focus full-time on her research. “When a student has a concentrated period of time to really dig in and get the dissertation done, not only does that produce a better dissertation, but it also produces more professional opportunities for the student,” said Patrick Hornbeck, D.Phil., theology professor and interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Providing such academic support is one goal of the University’s current fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Recent gifts have moved the scholarship toward providing a full year of financial support, but fundraising continues.
A Pathbreaking Career
Fordham’s graduate program in theology is highly selective, admitting only a few students per year and providing each with five years’ worth of financial support, Firer Hinze said. Students often need a sixth year to complete their dissertations, though, which is where the Elizabeth Johnson Scholarship comes in.
The scholarship was established in 2007 with a gift from Valerie Vincent, GSAS ’99, whom Sister Johnson had mentored. More than 100 other donors have contributed to it since then, often out of deep respect for her gifts as a teacher and her pathbreaking career.
A 27-year member of the Fordham faculty, Professor Johnson is internationally known for her work in Catholic systematic theology, feminist theology, ecological theology, and other fields. One of the most influential Catholic theologians in the world, she has received 15 honorary doctorates, many book prizes, and thousands of messages of thanks from believers inspired and heartened by her work.
In her particularly influential 2007 book, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, she examined how God is understood differently by men, women, the poor and oppressed, Holocaust victims, and people of a variety of faiths. Writing in The American Catholic, Joseph Cunneen called it “one of the most important and provocative books on theology to have appeared in the U.S. since Vatican II,” and religion students at universities everywhere commonly find it on the syllabus.
Her career has inspired women everywhere, Hornbeck said. In the decades following the Second Vatican Council, Sister Johnson and some of her colleagues “were the first women who really established themselves in the Catholic theological academy,” he said. “Beth, being one of the first women in that group, made it a special point throughout her career to nurture and to mentor and invest in the women theologians who were coming along behind her.”
He noted that she was the first woman to achieve tenure in the theology department at the Catholic University of America and one of the first women to serve as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
Inspired Teaching
Among those who attended Sister Johnson’s public talk in 2018 were Thomas M. Lamberti, FCRH ’52, and his wife, Eileen Lamberti, a former member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph who met Sister Johnson in 1959, just after they both joined the religious order.
After getting reacquainted with Sister Johnson at a Fordham event a few decades ago, she and Thomas started attending more of her appearances. “My husband and I are great believers in her role in theology and promoting women, so Tom and I were very interested in supporting her,” she said.
Sister Johnson has won praise for presenting complex ideas in an engaging way and stimulating students’ interest and interaction in class. Eileen Lamberti sat in on one of Sister Johnson’s courses and saw that when a question was posed, “many, many hands went up”—the kind of strong response that shows a great teacher at work, she said.
Another supporter of the scholarship fund, Margaret Sharkey, PCS ’15, a former student of Sister Johnson’s, found her to be a “a natural storyteller” and a thoughtful listener.
Thomas Lamberti noted that as a retired labor lawyer, he found the scholarship’s equity aspect appealing. “Women theologians play a particular role, I think, of importance to the church, as they have a different view than men about many things,” he said.
In an interview, Sister Johnson said “it’s a whole new thing” to have women coming into the theology profession after nearly 2,000 years of men’s predominance.
“Those who contribute to this scholarship are supporting that—that women’s voice be heard in religious matters,” she said.
She said that St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition of women as “deficient men,” the governing idea in Catholicism and other traditions for centuries, needs to be countered with an “anthropology of equal giftedness” that opens theology to the experiences of women of color, the LGBTQ+ community, the poor, and others.
Diverse schools of thought, methods, and interpretations are springing up among women who are theologians, “so it’s very, very vibrant and lively,” she said. “It’s very difficult to keep up in the field now, because so much is being done on so many fronts.”
A Young Scholar Strikes Gold
Meg Stapleton Smith, the current recipient of the Elizabeth Johnson Scholarship, is in formation to be an Episcopal priest. She said the scholarship made a pivotal difference in her dissertation research focused on Mary Daly, the self-described “radical lesbian feminist” and key figure in modern feminist theology. It gave her the financial latitude to explore Daly’s archives at Smith College, where she found an unpublished manuscript—“the young scholar’s dream,” she said—that Daly wrote between the publication of her books The Church and the Second Sex in 1968 and Beyond God the Father in 1973.
The unfinished manuscript offers insight into Daly’s seemingly sudden decision to leave the Catholic Church, Smith said, and it also offers insight into other works of someone who is often dismissed by many Catholic thinkers because of her departure, Smith said. She has a contract with Cambridge University Press to publish the manuscript in an edited volume containing several feminist scholars’ reflections on it.
“This is somebody who really knew the tradition, and really knew it well—somebody who went to Switzerland to get a doctoral degree in theology when women weren’t even allowed to get Ph.D.s in theology in the United States,” she said.
“Mary Daly had this very robust understanding of the virtues,” Smith said. “One of the things that she said is the way that virtues operate, at least in Catholic moral theology, they tend to not break open our imagination. So she wanted people to understand the virtues as these tools that can help bring about societal transformation and personal liberation.”
In her dissertation, she draws upon Daly’s ideas in juxtaposing the virtue of courage with Catholic sexual ethics and seeing it as a way to counteract sexual shame. In the dissertation, she said, she argues that “when we act courageously, these are actually actions that bring us closer to God.”
Sister Johnson called it humbling and amazing to see the scholarship’s growth.
“It’s like a gift to your life that says, ‘Something that I was passionate about, and devoted all my energy to, is going to go forward in these students, these women who get the scholarship,’” she said. “It’s wonderful.”
To inquire about giving in support of the Elizabeth A. Johnson Endowed Scholarship Fund or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, our campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.
]]>O’Shea was featured in a virtual fireside chat with Michael Gatto, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, as a part of the Gabelli School’s Centennial Speaker Series. The pair also gave an update on the new O’Shea Center for Credit Analysis and Investment at the Gabelli School of Business, which was founded thanks to $2 million in donations from O’Shea; his wife Michele, FCRH ’88; and Gatto, who will be the center’s director.
During the event, O’Shea and Gatto touched on a key benefit of the center: giving Gabelli students the kind of credit industry insight that other universities don’t provide at the undergraduate level, helping them stand out and succeed in the job market.
Pounding the Pavement
O’Shea was a “quintessential Fordham student,” according to Gatto. He’s one of five children, his dad was a New York City police officer, and he attended on a scholarship. While studying at Fordham, he decided he wanted to go into investment banking.
“I applied [for jobs] at every single major investment bank on Wall Street. And every single investment bank rejected me,” O’Shea said. “I used to hand deliver my resumes; I would take the D train down and try to hand them in to the human resources department in hope of getting an interview.”
O’Shea said that he was rejected by “a minimum of 50 firms,” but with some persistence he landed an interview at Security Pacific and impressed them enough to get a job working in the leveraged loan market. O’Shea said that while working there he had an idea for trading loans on the secondary market, where one investor purchases debt from another, and pitched this idea to other firms, including Bear Stearns.
“Bear Stearns, as a firm, was less focused on pedigree—it was a gritty firm, a very entrepreneurial firm, a firm that wanted young, hungry, driven people,” O’Shea said. “So when I came in and walked them through this idea that I had, and explained that I thought this was a really large market, and no one was really involved with it, they were the type of firm that would take the shot.”
One of the Youngest Partners at Goldman Sachs
After working at Bear Stearns for a few years, O’Shea was invited to dinner by a partner at Goldman Sachs, who told him that they wanted to start a bank loan business. O’Shea said that the partner laid out their plan, which was to underwrite bank loans the way they previously had with stocks and bonds.
“I told him, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t do it that way,’” he said. “What I would recommend is that you go in and become the number one market maker in loans [and] create an institutional product around bank loans.”
O’Shea said that the partner loved the idea and brought him on board to do it.
O’Shea “created the secondary trading market of bank loans,” Gatto said. “That opened up a whole bunch of new industries, especially for people like me who specialize in distressed debt investing,” he said.
At Goldman Sachs, O’Shea built a team to cover the bank loan industry and, at age 29, became one of the youngest people in the company’s history to be named a partner. He went on to run the company’s high yield business and their collateralized loan obligation business.
But O’Shea said as he was moving up, he began to notice that “the more senior that I was getting, the further away that I was getting from the business itself.”
Launching His Own Firm
In 2002, that prompted him and one of his partners at Goldman Sachs, Edward Mulé, to launch Silver Point Capital, a hedge fund based in Greenwich, Connecticut, that focuses on “credit and special situations investments.” Today the firm manages about $15 billion in assets.
O’Shea credits the company’s success to hiring the right people, including Gatto, who came on three months after they launched and became the firm’s first non-founding partner.
“It’s all about the people—if you hire exceptional people, and you build a culture of teamwork, you can produce exceptional results,” he said.
Launching the Credit Analysis Center: ‘Not One Other University’ Focused on Credit Training for Undergrads
In their work, both Gatto and O’Shea said that they began noticing a need for training in the credit markets.
“Credit drives our economy, the global economy, the U.S. economy—if you look at the history of the country, credit markets are at the center of the growth of the U.S. economy,” O’Shea said. “Without credit, businesses can’t grow at the same rate.”
Previously, banks handled the credit lending process, Gatto said.
“[The banks] put them through a six month credit training program, because it’s technical, but now, banks are no longer the driver of leverage lending—it’s private lending funds, public business development companies, and they’re not training people,” he said. “There is a demand for credit-trained people, and not one other university is focused on it today at the undergraduate level.”
Established in 2020, the center will formally launch next year. It will emphasize three main components—education, networking opportunities, and connection to industries.
“There is no concentration that combines accounting, finance, and how to assess companies’ credit profiles—that skill is tremendously valuable even if you were going to leave the credit world and go into the equity world. It’s a competitive advantage to understand,” O’Shea said.
Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School, said the O’Shea Center will be “a center of excellence that bridges the gap between academia and financial markets.”
“A critical part of the center’s work,” she said, “will be helping students to gain a competitive edge in an underserved financial area.”
Joseph M. McShane, S.J., said that the center would be “bringing our students and professors together with the professional world and the evolving realities of 21st-century finance.”
“We believe this sort of collaboration is essential for the Gabelli School’s mission, and what that mission is, is the education of compassionate business leaders that drive positive global change,” he said.
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