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

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

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

Awards for Distinguished Research

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

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

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

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

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

Can ChatGPT Think?

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

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

Published in the journal Nature, “Unequal Climate Impacts on Global Values of Natural Capital” reveals a staggering forecast: By the year 2100, 90% of climate change’s impact on vital ecosystems, including woodlands, grasslands, and other sources of economic benefits, will be shouldered by the poorest 50% of regions worldwide. These regions, Conte said, are more reliant on this “natural capital.”

“Humanity derives a lot of value from natural capital, and this value has been ignored in most models of optimal climate emissions,” said Conte, an associate professor of economics at Fordham who played a pivotal role as one of the co-authors of the research. The study, funded by a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, was a collaborative effort with researchers from the University of California, Davis.

The implications of the findings extend beyond the scientific realm into global policymaking. “We’re allowing too many emissions, and we need to pay more attention to these impacts,” Conte emphasized, highlighting the urgent need to refine the framework used to determine acceptable greenhouse gas emissions.

To comprehend the impacts of greenhouse gasses on human well-being and national economies, Conte and his co-authors employed a sophisticated approach, using global vegetation models, climate models, and World Bank estimates. The study leveraged the World Bank’s wealth accounts to evaluate non-market ecosystem benefits, offering a standardized metric for comparison. The modeling allows more precise predictions.

“The World Bank’s values, although conservative in the scope of benefits included, provide a consistent approach to understanding the value of natural capital at the national level,” Conte said. “Our research takes this a step further by disaggregating a country’s total value of natural capital and distributing it across different ecosystems within its borders.”

Beyond the scientific discoveries, the research raises ethical and policy considerations of global significance. Conte highlighted the responsibility of wealthier nations to recognize and address the disproportionate impact of climate change on less affluent regions, emphasizing that climate change is not merely an environmental concern but a profound economic and social issue.

“Many of the low and middle-income nations located in the tropics are not responsible for climate change. Although they are not major emitters, they are bearing the burden of decisions that have been made by high-income nations,” Conte said.

Panjwani was born in India and raised in Dubai and Kuwait. At 18 years old, she moved to the United Kingdom, where she became a British citizen. She is now a Shakespeare expert who has contributed her research to journals and film festivals and has been invited to deliver talks at prestigious institutions, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Oxford. She is also host and creator of the podcast Women and Shakespeare and author of the book Podcasts and Feminist Shakespeare Pedagogy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), both of which include work from Fordham students. She is currently working on a new introduction for the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. 

For the past eight years, Panjwani has served as an adjunct faculty professor at Fordham London. In addition to teaching a Shakespeare course there, Panjwani teaches at Boston University and New York University. 

In a Q&A with Fordham News, Panjwani explained why Shakespeare’s work is important to the average person and how she involves Fordham students in her scholarly work. 

How did you become interested in Shakespeare? 

I grew up watching Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare. I also had a fantastic teacher—a fellow woman of color, Dr. Amina Alyal, who made me feel like people like me could own Shakespeare. 

Why is Shakespeare important to the average person? What can we learn from him? 

When most people think of him, they imagine an old, balding, middle-aged, historical, costumed guy on a pedestal who is not relevant to their lives. This is what some of my students imagine before they come to my class. But that is not how we teach Shakespeare here. In London especially, there are multiple histories of Shakespeare. You of course have the Globe, a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, which has been putting on plays since 1977. You have the British Asian company, Tara Arts, which has been doing Shakespeare since before then. There is also a Black theater company called Talawa Theatre, which has been doing Shakespeare since 1991, when they put on Antony and Cleopatra. All of these intersecting histories are important to note. I think students also realize how diverse people’s histories intersect with Shakespeare when they see a woman of color in London teaching them Shakespeare. 

But apart from these several legacies, I also think that Shakespeare is important for the average person because of the conversations that his work enables. A couple of weeks ago, my class went to see an amazing queer adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Shakespeare and Race Festival is opening at the Globe very soon. And our students want to have these conversations: How is Shakespeare relevant to our lives? So we talk about how he is making an appearance in social justice issues, in agency, in issues about gender that are happening today. My focus is always on what Shakespeare can do for us, what he has done for us, and how we can shape Shakespeare to talk about what is important for us today.

What is your favorite Shakespeare play? 

That is such a difficult question for me because there are many favorites, depending on my mood. My current favorite is A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it is overlooked quite a lot. People think it’s a silly play with fairies, but there are actually deeply embedded issues of consent to be explored there, as well as queerness.

In my Shakespeare course, the plays l teach vary according to what is being performed around London. This semester, we studied A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Hamlet. We also saw a queer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a production of The Tempest at Shakespeare’s Globe, and engaged with a Bollywood movie of Romeo and Juliet in the seminar.

What do you love about Fordham London?  

We have a great community here, including Vanessa Beever, senior director of Fordham London; Mary Bly, chair of Fordham’s English department; our great support staff; and colleagues who make time for each other, despite being adjuncts.

Mary has been a part of this community for a long time, even though she is based in New York. She herself visited our campus to teach the Shakespeare course. Although this was around 8 years ago, she has a great grasp on what Fordham London students need. She has given me feedback on the course and assignment design from time to time. She is also a guest speaker on my podcast Women and Shakespeare.

I have especially found great leadership and collaborative support from Mary and Vanessa. It’s great to see women in these leadership roles because women are often not included in the rooms where decisions about their future are made. It’s a breath of fresh air for my students to see them in these positions, and it gives me hope to be working in an institution that respects women. 

You create podcasts about Shakespeare with your students. How does that work? 

My podcast Women and Shakespeare invites experts, local playwrights, academics, novelists, and actresses—the culture makers of the U.K.—to talk about how Shakespeare is used to amplify the voices of women today and how women are redefining him and his work.

One of my guests, Kathryn Pogson, talked about issues of consent in Richard III and how these are relevant today. Another guest, Doña Croll, told us how she imagined Cleopatra as a sharp political operator as opposed to just sexy and sultry and how the treatment of Cleopatra by the Romans can be compared to the way in which the British press treated Meghan Markle. So they provide nuanced perspectives not only on women characters, but also on how Shakespeare’s plays are pertinent to issues today.

On my podcast, students have a chance to be researchers, interviewers, or producers. They also receive credit on the podcast. I think it’s a very meaningful way for the students to engage with local culture makers. I firmly believe that to be a global citizen, you have to learn how to be a local elsewhere, and this helps them to not only meet local culture makers and learn from them, but also to co-create a resource that is useful for themselves and their communities. I also think this is a great way of decolonizing education because you’re not going somewhere with just the aim of what you can take from them, but also the aim of what you can give back to your academic and social communities. 

What do you hope your students take away from your course? 

Anyone can harness Shakespeare’s cultural power and bring it back to their communities. Shakespeare need not be inaccessible—his work should be made to work for everyone.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“Once the project is completed, it will give us a framework under which hundreds of researchers can build interesting AI models that can be used every day in middle-income countries like Bangladesh and India, as well as with other Bangla language speakers worldwide,” said Amin. “This will potentially reduce the digital divide on a global scale.” 

A Popular Language With a Critical Weakness

Artificial intelligence has become an essential part of everyday life, from online spell-checkers to voice-enabled devices like Amazon Echo. In order to use AI, these machines first need to be trained to understand the human language. Their natural language processing (NLP) system needs to absorb large amounts of data in order to recognize all the unique parts of a language, including idioms, metaphors, and even sarcasm. 

English, the primary language of the internet, has a plethora of online texts to learn from, including a mature corpus: a large collection of English texts assembled by academics that are used to build up NLP for the English language. It includes social media, newspapers, and blogs. 

But that isn’t the case for the national language of Bangladesh, known as Bangla—one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. 

“When it comes to English, Google first understands a query, processes the query, and then provides a user with the best result. But that doesn’t happen with Bangla and other low-resource languages,” said Amin. “Google provides very good search results for some languages like English, Chinese, and Spanish. With Bangla, Google provides search results, but it can’t analyze that data because it doesn’t have a foundation of Bangla semantics information to draw from. Google does not understand the language, linguistically. So Google search results in English are very dynamic, but not in Bangla.” 

A Global Project to Develop Artificial Intelligence Abroad

Over the next two years, Amin is working with Giga Tech, a global technology company in Bangladesh, to develop the first Bangla corpus. 

“We want to create a large dataset labeled with grammatical properties by linguistic experts, which will then be able to identify people, places, and things. This will strengthen the Bangla national language’s NLP framework. Then we will develop a large-scale computational algorithm that can automatically detect those things from Bangla texts,” said Amin. “In the future, researchers can improve the model and local industries can build applications with it. That is the Bangladesh government’s goal—to create the framework so that information and communication technology within the country can lift off.” 

Amin is originally from Bangladesh. He was born and raised in the capital city, Dhaka, and immigrated to the U.S. in 2013. That same year, he developed Bangladesh’s first national search engine—Pipilika, which ran for a total of eight years—in a project co-funded by Telenor, Accenture, and a2i, a Bangladesh government program that aims to improve access to public services through new technology. 

Research Guided by Ignatian Philosophy

In 2019, Amin joined Fordham’s faculty, where he teaches and conducts research with undergraduate and graduate students. He also collaborates with academic institutions in North America, Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia. 

“Most of the problems solved by my team are local to the U.S., but that does not mean we have to only solve problems here. We can do the same thing for other languages and nations from where we are,” said Amin, who is virtually working with Giga Tech and the Bangladesh government on this project. 

Amin said that his research, whether it’s conducted in the U.S. or in Bangladesh, is always guided by Fordham’s Ignatian principles. 

“I am deeply motivated by the Ignatian principles, and I believe that education is one of the best ways to help people. We should continue to spread the knowledge we create within Fordham to touch people outside the University,” said Amin. “The best way to do it is through collaboration with outside entities—not just through academic research, but implementation that touches people’s lives beyond binaries and boundaries.” 

Fordham psychology professor Tiffany Yip, Ph.D., the mother of two teenage students herself, said she wanted to know how much research on school start times had actually been published. So, for a paper she published in Pediatrics in May, she decided to gather as many studies as she could find and analyze the data as a whole, in addition to exploring something that many researchers hadn’t studied—the impact of delayed school start times on students from different communities, particularly children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. 

“Some research suggests that people from higher socioeconomic communities already have better sleep, due to factors like safer neighborhoods, less noise and light pollution, and more regular work hours. In addition, parents from these communities may be more likely to advocate for delays in school start times,” said Yip. “In this analysis, I wondered whether delaying school start times would continue to exacerbate these disparities between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.”

The Importance of Sleep for Young People

The average start time for U.S. public high schools is 8 a.m. This is too early for teenagers, says the American Academy of Pediatrics. When adolescents don’t get enough sleep, they can experience several health risks, including being overweight and using drugs, as well as poor grades in school. 

“Sleep is important at all points in the developmental lifespan, but there’s a lot of focus on adolescents because sleep coincides with their biological changes. Their circadian rhythms are shifted, which means they go to bed later and naturally want to wake up later,” said Yip. “But this change in their body clocks doesn’t coincide with our current school start times.” 

Impact of Delayed Start Times  

Yip’s recently published paper offered several conclusions. Her team of researchers analyzed data from 28 studies and nearly two million study participants—mostly middle and high school students, with some elementary school children. They found that data showed that delaying school start times to between 8:30 and 9 a.m. has better developmental outcomes for young students. 

“Specifically, we found that kids sleep longer, and we also found that their negative mood was lower. Indicators of anxiety, depressive symptoms, and other negative psychological mood outcomes were lower when they had later start times,” she said.

Unfortunately, her team found that there wasn’t enough data collected on student demographics to make a well-informed conclusion on how students classified by sex, race, school size, and percent free/reduced lunch are impacted by delayed school start times. But Yip said research suggests that private school students tend to benefit more from later start times than public school students. 

“There is some sort of suggestion that kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds will benefit more from a delay in school start times. This means that potentially, a delay can exacerbate some of the sleep disparities that we’ve seen in other research. We need more data to figure that out,” said Yip. “But we know that as parents and educators, we need to be careful about how implementing delays in school start times in higher socioeconomic communities might contribute to existing disparities in sleep health.” 

A Controversial Topic Among Students and Their Families

As students return to classrooms this fall, this topic will reenter many conversations, said Yip. Many of those discussions are intense, she said.

“This subject gets people riled up like crazy because it has huge ripple effects,” said Yip. “Parents need to get to work on time, particularly those who commute into New York City … But for kids who have a 7 a.m. start time, we have to factor in how long it takes for them to get to school. In Manhattan, some kids commute really far—sometimes an hour and a half to certain magnet schools. What time are they waking up?”

Yip has a personal opinion, too. She has two children—a middle schooler and a high schooler—whose schools started to delay their start times in the 2021-2022 academic year. The middle school changed its start time from 8 to 8:30 a.m., and the high school switched from 7:30 to 8 a.m., she said. 

“My kids are probably not representative because I already study sleep, and I’m really strict about bedtime and all this other stuff. But I do think the delayed school start times help with the chaos of the morning,” said Yip. “It’s hard to wake up super early, especially when it’s winter and it’s dark outside. I think my kids like the new policy quite a bit. I like it, too.”

It’ll take more effort for other schools to delay their start times, said Yip. After all, there are many stakeholders involved, including parents, educators, and bus drivers. But when it comes down to it, the biggest motivator will likely be the students themselves, she said. 

“Having data like this is one piece. But what’s going to really drive this is what kids are telling us,” said Yip. “If they’re saying, ‘I want to sleep in’ or ‘I feel better when I get a little bit more sleep,’ I think those sorts of things are going to really help us move the needle on school start times.”

“It’s clear to see that there is very influential work being done right here at Fordham on COVID-19, from the beginning of the pandemic and following to its peak and now as we’re starting to enter the vaccination stage,” said Elizabeth Breen, a rising senior and integrative neuroscience student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who moderated the research discussion.  

In an hour-long conversation, three Fordham faculty members—Monica Rivera-Mindt, Ph.D., professor of psychology and co-director of Fordham’s clinical neuropsychology program; Berish Y. Rubin, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences; and Troy Tassier, Ph.D., associate professor of economics—discussed their research over the past 14 months. 

Rivera-Mindt spoke about her research on brain health disparities in the U.S., especially during the pandemic. Rubin presented his ongoing research with colleague Sylvia Anderson, Ph.D., who co-leads their Laboratory for Familial Dysautonomia Research, on developing a biological method that reduces coronavirus infections in lung cells. Tassier spoke about his research featured in ABC News this past February on how geolocation data in our smartphones has revealed nationwide economic trends during the pandemic; his work was also featured in a Fordham News podcast from December 2020. 

“We need to keep this in our rearview mirror and know that we can learn from this experience to ensure that this doesn’t happen at the same scale to us again,” Rubin said. 

The full recording of the event can be seen here.

“Today’s events are designed for recognition, celebration, and appreciation of the numerous contributors to Fordham’s research accomplishments in the past two years,” said George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs.

Hong said that Fordham has received about $16 million in faculty grants over the past nine months, which is an increase of 50.3% compared to the same period last year.

“As a research university, Fordham is committed to excellence in the creation of knowledge and is in constant pursuit of new lines of inquiry,” said Joseph McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said during the virtual celebration. “Our faculty continue to distinguish themselves in this area. Today, today we highlight the truly extraordinary breadth and depth of their work.”

Earning Honors

Ten faculty members, representing two years of winners due to cancellations last year from the COVID-19 pandemic, were recognized with distinguished research awards.

“The distinguished research awards provide us with an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our most prolific colleagues, give visibility to the research achievements, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps,” Provost Dennis Jacobs said.

Recipients included Yuko Miki, associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work focuses on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century; David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty; and, in the junior faculty category, Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work examines shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics. (See below for a full list of recipients).

Diving Deeper

Eleven other faculty members presented in their recently published work in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies.

Jews and New York: ‘Virtually Identical’

Images of Jewish people and New York are inextricably tied together, according to Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., professor of history and co-author of Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017).

“The popular imagination associated Jews with New York—food names like deli and bagels … attitudes and manner, like speed, brusqueness, irony, and sarcasm; with certain industries—the garment industry, banking, or entertainment,” he said. “

Soyer quoted comedian Lenny Bruce, who joked, “the Jewish and New York essences are virtually identical, right?”

Soyer’s book examines the history of Jewish people in New York and their relationship to the city from 1654 to the current day. Other presentations included S. Elizabeth Penry, Ph.D., associate professor of history, on her book The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, on his book Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now (Lexington Books, 2018).

Focus on Cities: The Reality Beyond the Politics

Annika Hinze, Ph.D, associate professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies Program, talked about her most recent work on the 10th and 11th editions of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America (Routledge, 11th edition forthcoming). She focused on how cities were portrayed by the Trump Administration versus what was happening on the ground.

“The realities of cities are really quite different—we’re not really talking about inner cities anymore,” she said. “Cities are, in many ways, mosaics of rich and poor. And yes, there are stark wealth discrepancies, growing pockets of poverty in cities, but there are also enormous oases of wealth in cities.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hinze’s latest edition will show how urban density did not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, as many people thought, but rather it was overcrowding and concentrated poverty in cities that led to accelerated spread..

Other presentations included Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., professor of political science, on his book Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor and chair of the division of psychological and educational services in the Graduate School of Education on her book Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology on her book America, As Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe (NYU Press, 2018).

A Look into Migration

In her book Migration Crises and the Structure of International Cooperation (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Lockhart, Ph.D. assistant professor of political science, examined how countries often have agreements in place to manage the flow of trade, capital, and communication, but not people. While her work in this book specifically focused on voluntary migration, it also had implications for the impacts on forced migration and the lack of cooperation among nations .

“I actually have really serious concerns about the extent of cooperation … on measures of control, and what that means for the future, when states are better and better at controlling their borders, especially in the developing world,” she said. “And what does that mean for people when there are crises and there needs to be that kind of release valve of movement?”

Other presentations included: Tina Maschi, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate School of Social Service, on her book Forensic Social Work: A Psychosocial Legal Approach to Diverse Criminal Justice Populations and Settings (Springer Publishing Company, 2017), and Tanya Hernández, J.D., professor of law on her book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

Sharing Reflections

The day’s keynote speakers—Daniel Alexander Jones, professor of theatre and 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, head of design and production and assistant professor of design—shared personal reflections on how the year’s events have shaped their lives, particularly their performance and creativity.

For Jones, breathing has always been an essential part of his work after one of his earliest teachers “initiated me into the work of aligning my breath to the cyclone of emotions I felt within.” However, seeing another Black man killed recently, he said, left him unable to “take a deep breath this morning without feeling the knot in my stomach at the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in Minnesota.”

Jones said the work of theatre teachers and performers is affected by their lived experiences and it’s up to them to share genuine stories for their audience.

“Our concern, as theater educators, encompasses whether or not in our real-time lived experiences, we are able to enact our wholeness as human beings, whether or not we are able to breathe fully and freely as independent beings in community and as citizens in a broad and complex society,” he said.

Ramos said that he feels his ability to be fully free has been constrained by his own desire to be accepted and understood, and that’s in addition to feeling like an outsider since he immigrated here.

“I actually don’t know who I am if I don’t anchor my self-identity with being an outsider,” he said. “There isn’t a day where I am not hyper-conscious of my existence in a space that contains me. And what that container looks like. These thoughts preface every single process that informs my actions and my decisions in this country.”

Interdisciplinary Future

Both keynote speakers said that their work is often interdisciplinary, bringing other fields into theatre education. Jones said he brings history into his teaching when he makes his students study the origins of words and phrases, and that they incorporate biology when they talk about emotions and rushes of feelings, like adrenaline.

That message of interdisciplinary connections summed up the day, according to Jonathan Crystal, vice provost.

“Another important purpose was really to hear what one another is working on and what they’re doing research on,” he said. “And it’s really great to have a place to come listen to colleagues talk about their research and find out that there are these points of overlap, and hopefully, it will result in some interdisciplinary activity over the next year.”

Distinguished Research Award Recipients

Humanities
2020: Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, whose work included a project sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation on Shaker art, design, and religion.
2021: Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work is on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century.

Interdisciplinary Studies
2020: Yi Ding, Ph.D., professor of school psychology in the Graduate School of Education, who received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a training program for school psychologists and early childhood special education teachers.
2021: Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of Economics and co-director of the Disability Studies Minor, whose recent work includes documenting and understanding economic insecurity and identifying policies that combat it.

Sciences and Mathematics
2020: Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., professor of computer and information sciences and founder director of Fordham Center of Cybersecurity, whose $3 million grant from the National Security Agency will allow Fordham to help Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions build their own cybersecurity programs.
2021: Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair and professor of chemistry, who highlighted his $7.4 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on perovskites.

Social Sciences
2020: Iftekhar Hasan, Ph.D., university professor and E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance, whose recent work has included the examination of the role of female leadership in mayoral positions and resilience of local societies to crises.
2021: David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty.

Junior Faculty
2020: Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, who published The Politics of Painting, Facism, and Japanese Art During WWII.
2021: Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work focuses on shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics.

According to Saul Cornell, Ph.D., that’s the lesson of a decision last month by the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals that ruled in favor of states limiting who can carry a gun in public.

Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, was cited multiple times by both the majority and dissenting opinions in the decision Young V. State of Hawaii. The justices in the case based their decision partly on his research on the models of gun regulation that were developed in the United States outside of the Slave South.

Rather than relying on the words of slave-owning judges in the antebellum South to guide their understanding of history, Cornell’s approach urges judges to take into account the history of all parts of the country when using the past as precedent.

The case began when George Young sued the state of Hawaii in 2012 for denying his application to carry a concealed or openly visible handgun. Hawaii law stipulates that the police chief may only grant such licenses to those who need a gun for their job or who show “reason to fear injury” to their “person or property.”

Young claimed this violated the 2008 Supreme Court decision Heller vs. District of Columbia, which was the first Supreme Court case to decide that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, and that was not just a right intended for state militias.

There is a catch though. When he wrote the Heller majority opinion, the late Antonin Scalia, a proponent of the legal theory originalism, cited the 1846 case Nunn vs. Georgia, which interpreted the right to bear arms in expansive terms.

Proponents of originalism assert that the Constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding “at the time it was adopted.”

But since the Nunn case was a product of the Slave South, and not the era when the Second Amendment was written, courts have since 2008 been considering whether it represented the attitudes of a majority of the country or just one region. Once Scalia linked the constitutionality of today’s laws to establishing a historical genealogy, it set off a legal scavenger hunt of sorts for scholars like Cornell, who first tackled the issue of the history of regional differences in A Well Regulated Right: The Early American Origins of Gun Control (Fordham Law Review, 2004).

Regional Gun Cultures

“Since Heller, we now ask not just ‘What is the history of the right to bear arms?’ but ‘What is the history of regulation?’ And when you start doing the history, what you discover is, America was a very complicated place even back in its early history,” he said.

“One of the most interesting and important qualities of America then that still exists today is the existence of regional gun cultures.”

Working with colleagues at places such as the Duke University Center for Firearms Law, Cornell has been excavating that history, most recently in History, Text, Tradition, and the Future of Second Amendment Jurisprudence: Limits on Armed Travel under Anglo-American Law, 1688–1868, 83 (Law and Contemporary Problems, 2020). It was one of the sources cited in the Young case, which runs to 215 pages and traces the arc of gun regulation over five centuries from English common law, which is the basis of much of American law, and has profoundly shaped today’s law.

“Heller stuck very close to a narrow range of sources, mostly case law. What Young did is, it took Heller’s injunction to look at the history of regulations as guideposts for judging,” Cornell said.

“It turns out the history is much more friendly to regulation than Scalia or gun rights activists would have imagined.”

In addition to finding clear examples of regulations in England before the American Revolution, Cornell found statutes in Massachusetts that prohibited “armed travel in populous areas.”

The irony, Cornell said, is that Scalia just assumed that the gun regulation laws in the slave-holding South would evolve in the same way as New England or the Midwest, where Cornell found examples of gun regulations from the 19th century. Originalists, including Justice Scalia, were so confident that the precedent set by the South would be commonplace, and history would bear out their view, they never bothered to consider other examples from different regions.

“I think what we’ve seen time and again since Heller—and it’s really quite striking—is that almost all the serious historical scholarship has found that Heller’s history is just demonstrably false in important ways.” he said.

“The authors of Heller went big on the history, but never anticipated or thought, ‘What happens if the history doesn’t support us?’ They were completely naïve because their view of history was just so simplistic. They really don’t think history changes, and that’s the essence of their originalism.”

Historical Precedent for Providing a Reason for Gun Ownership

Ultimately, Cornell said decisions such as Young show that if activists’ goal is to let any American buy a gun and carry it without a good reason, history will not be as helpful as they assume. The attitudes that Southerners had about guns were not representative of the whole country in the 19th century, and that remains true today.

“One of the funny things about modern gun debate is, gun rights activists say that asking someone to provide a reason to own a gun is unreasonable. But it turns out have having a reason has always been reasonable in most places in America.”

The interdisciplinary initiative, called “Taking Responsibility,” is a partnership between the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies and the Department of Theology. Bradford Hinze, Ph.D., the Karl Rahner Professor of Theology, directs the project with leadership assistance from Patrick Hornbeck, Ph.D., special faculty advisor to the provost for strategic planning; Theology Department Chair Christine Firer Hinze, Ph.D.; Michael E. Lee, Ph.D., director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies; and Catherine Osborne, Ph.D., GSAS ’13, as coordinator for the program.

“The projects and studies being supported by the Taking Responsibility initiative reflect current trends in interdisciplinary research,” said Hinze. “By focusing on Jesuit educational institutions in the U.S., these efforts will make an important contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon of clergy sexual abuse in this particular setting. The Taking Responsibility website will provide an active center for those interested in the current state of research and practical resources on these issues”.

The effort has been collaborative from the start, said the project staff. The steering committee was composed of various Fordham faculty truly invested in taking responsibility and faced the painful issue head-on internally. Members did not shy away from exposing abuse, but many also believed that institution and its structures were ultimately about faith and personal responsibility.

“The project acknowledges that not only is there a need for a multidisciplinary approach, but also and especially the victim-survivors of abuse, must be at the table to help Jesuit schools, colleges, and universities become safer, more transparent institutions,” said Hornbeck.

While the project’s website has been launched, the real activity begins this fall when announcements will be made about upcoming panels, webinars, reading groups, and a variety of events that will highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the grantees’ research.

Some of the funding tied to the four partner-institution projects will go toward established research, such as Georgetown University’s work with survivors that will “inform, educate, and foster institutional change” through the university’s Initiative on Catholic Thought and Public Life and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

Gonzaga University will use its funding to create an inaugural conference for researchers to be held during the 2021-2022 academic year. That project will home in on cutting-edge research that exposes sexual abuse in the Jesuit West Province, where Native American and Alaskan Native communities were disproportionately abused. Though the conference highlights abuse in a specific region and on a particular population, the Gonzaga conversation will likely widen to explore why the abuse often affects under-recognized communities nationwide, including, but not limited to Black, Latinx, and working-class populations.

Other partnering universities include Santa Clara University and Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Those outcomes will include creating literature reviews and other resources intended for administrators, staff, faculty, alumni, and students at Jesuit institutions. Another expansive goal is to create a Jesuit partner network dedicated to confronting the causes and legacy of clergy sexual abuse.

“Equally important, the initiative is an occasion for the formation of a network of Jesuit universities and high schools that can promote among participants in these institutions open discussion, deeper understanding, and shared practical wisdom about how these issues can be addressed by all those involved,” said Hinze.   

A quick glance at the Fordham research projects reflects participants’ deep and varied understanding of the Society of Jesus as well as organizational structures. One study’s cross-disciplinary investigators include C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., professor of Christian spirituality at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education; Henry Schwalbenberg Ph.D., professor of economics and director of the graduate program in International Political Economy and Development; and Michael Pirson, Ph.D., associate professor of humanistic management at the Gabelli School of Business. Their exploration is unflinchingly titled “Identifying and Reforming Institutions in Jesuit Schools and Universities That Foster Sexual Abuse and Its Concealment.”

“The causes of the Catholic sexual abuse crises are multiple and intersecting.  Understanding the pathologies that motivated both abusers and those who concealed their crimes requires us to draw insights from the study of religion, psychology, civil and criminal law, organizational theory, communications, and many other fields,” said Hornbeck.

Scholarship has long had the ability to help expose structural inequities and abuse. Project staff noted that the academy took on structural racism many years before the nation began to seriously examine its role through the Black Lives Matter movement. Likewise, scholarship can help expose structural sex abuse within the Jesuit order and beyond. Not only will the project take on how clericalism may have fostered the abuse, but it will also examine how that same culture could spill over to create an environment of abuse among lay faculty and staff.

“We need to look at the patterns of behavior that may make bad behaviors seem OK; this is about power,” said Osborne. “It’s also about the Catholic Church, our religious orders, procedures, and structures. Not every instance of sexual abuse at Jesuit institutions is committed by priests, so in the Jesuit tradition of taking care of the whole person, we need to deal with this sinful part of us is in the same way.”

Now, student-developed software that works with the camera technology promises to help conservationists better understand how to protect future generations of the toads so that they can continue to thrive in their natural habitat in Tanzania. Next year, two more students will pick up the project.

From Africa to the Bronx, and Back Again

Discovered in 1996, the Kihansi spray toad lived in a five-acre microhabitat created by the spray of waterfalls in the Kihansi Gorge, which came under threat with the construction of a nearby dam that dramatically changed the habitat and decreased the size of the mist zone. The species was last seen in the wild in 2005 and was declared extinct-in-the-wild by 2009 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, likely due to the environmental changes and the emergence of a deadly fungus.

As the toad population declined, a partnership between the Bronx Zoo and the Tanzanian government, and the World Bank facilitated the collection of 499 spray toads to be brought to the Bronx to initiate an off-site conservation program. Custom microhabitats replicating their home in Tanzania were built in bio-secure facilities at the Bronx Zoo and later at the Toledo Zoo where they successfully bred the toads in the hopes of reintroducing them to the wild.

Back in Tanzania, the government managed the Lower Kihansi Environment Management Project to create a gravity-fed misting system. The project resuscitated the toads’ habitat and in 2010 the first 200 toads were returned to Tanzania to a breeding facility at University of Dar es Salaam. The first of several reintroductions to the gorge occurred in 2013, making them the first amphibian species to be reintroduced after being declared extinct in the wild.

Enter Fordham

The Fordham piece of the project began about five years ago when Kelly Cunningham, FCRH ’14, worked with James MacDonall, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology, to study the pecking behavior of pigeons. At the time, contact switches and touch-screen sensors were the state of the art for recording pigeons pecking at a target as part of psychological learning experiments, but a disadvantage of that simple mechanism is that when the pigeons’ beaks began to hurt, they stopped pecking at the switches. Further complicating things was the fact that this technology missed when pigeons were distracted or facing the wrong way, said Lyons.

As a computer scientist under the tutelage of Lyons, Cunningham worked in Fordham’s Computer Vision Lab to institute the use of the Microsoft Kinect sensor for the study. The Kinect is a motion-sensing input system initially developed for Xbox. Its cameras presented a flexible and inexpensive image-based approach to solving the tired-beak problem, as well as a way to observe behaviors beyond pecking.

Lyons and Cunningham wrote a paper published in a Psychometric Society journal in 2014 on their findings, which caught the eye of Avi Shuter at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo. Shuter is the Senior Wild Animal Keeper in the zoo’s Department of Herpetology.

He was researching the behavior of the Kihansi spray toad, and he thought the technology might be helpful in the zoo’s efforts to better understand the animal. He reached out to Lyons, who in turn put Armando Califano, FCRH ’17, GSAS ’19, on the case.

Taking the Toads to Task

With the help of an undergraduate research grant from Fordham College at Rose Hill, Califano refined the tracking system developed by Cunningham, shifting the camera from Microsoft Kinect to the Intel RealSense, which had more accurate depth perception. But Califano could only take the project so far before entering graduate school, and the experiment was put on hold.  That’s when Philip Bal, FCRH ’19, came into the picture.

In Bal’s junior year he decided to shift his focus from biology to computer science—making him a perfect candidate to pick up the project.  Over the past year and a half, Bal wrote new software that would use the camera to track the toads and generate behavior analytics, ultimately by distinguishing toads from other moving and stationary elements in their tanks. With Lyons overseeing the computer technology and Shuter overseeing the biology, Bal was able to further develop software that responded to the needs of zookeepers.

A Tiny Target

The average size of the toad is no more than an inch, at most. The tanks that they are kept in are the typical fish tank size, about two feet wide, two feet deep, and about three feet high. The camera sits an inch and a half away from the glass. Researchers choose a subsection of the tank to focus on, just a few dozen cubed inches along the bottom or the top. A focal length is established to determine how deep into the tank the camera will take measurements. The camera has two lenses: one that’s recording color, and infrared that records movement.

“We have to do a whole bunch of calculations, try to figure what’s actually a toad moving and eliminate the noise, like moving leaves,” said Bal. “The first thing we do to track toads is to match them to a particular movement.”

Providing a More Accurate Picture

The group gathered approximately two days of footage that took up four and a half terabytes of stored data. Up until then, previous behavioral studies relied on direct observations of toads by scientists at predetermined time intervals. Those projects were an important start, but this new technology and software will give researchers a more complete view of toad behavior, said Shuter.

“Previous studies almost didn’t see any toads hopping,” said Shuter, who worked with the Fordham students and Lyons. “This can be a pretty shy species of toad that hides or stays still when you walk by. A lot of their behavioral repertoire also seems to be made up of split-second movements, like quick calls or hops. So, that’s part of the reason why I thought that a system where a computer could catch all that would give us a more accurate idea of what’s going on.”

One of the things that distinguish the Fordham research from other studies on these toads was that the technology and software were new.

“This is from the ground up; it didn’t exist before,” said Shuter, adding that as a result, the project is more complex than previous studies. “I’m amazed that it has only taken this long to get to where we’ve gotten since it’s totally from scratch.”

Bal said that the project taught him quite a bit about programming.

“I learned what I was capable of, I created thousands of lines of code I never thought I would be able to write,” he said. “This is one of my favorite things to talk about, my passion project.”

Shuter said that when the zoo first recovered the toads in the year 2000, the focus at the time was to build up a colony in captivity that could be relied upon in the event that the wild population continued to decline. The zoo was able to bring the number of toads to almost 2,000 toads.

“The struggle back then was to make more, make more, make more, and we didn’t publish research about their natural history or biology, aside from what would keep them alive, healthy, and breeding in zoos,” said Shuter. “Now, we’re a little bit calmer and things are going well in Tanzania, and we have a good handle on how to keep them alive. So now, we’re starting to look more into, ‘what’s their behavior like?’”

At a recent meeting at the zoo, Bal presented some interactions he observed in the data, including “meetings” of toads, characterized by a certain distance between the toads and the amount of time spent together.

Shuter plans to continue observing these interactions, and also plans to examine fighting behaviors and look to tell them apart from mating—also referred to as amplexing.

And he may get some help from the next cohort of Lyons’ students.

“These guys might end up doing some track analysis for that,” said Lyons, gesturing to two younger students in the lab. “That’s great! We might be able to distinguish fights from amplexing.”

Babich often peppers her lectures with pop culture references, and this lecture was no different. She began her talk deferring to colleague’s specialties as they relate to wisdom and Harry Potter.

“I am grateful to everyone who is here not just today, but at Fordham—always,” she said. She couldn’t help herself in adding in an aside: “I cannot say ‘always’ without thinking of Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape and his asseveration, his enunciation in Harry Potter,” she said, referencing the moment Snape acknowledges his enduring love for Harry’s mother, Lily. “Fordham is, of course, the Harry Potter school.”

She noted that one of her students once asked her if she was the Harry Potter teacher, but she said that distinction belongs to Judith Jones, Ph.D., associate professor of philosophy who taught a Harry Potter course in London last year. In the audience, Jones beamed at the acknowledgment.

She was to begin her talk by mentioning that philosophy was the love of wisdom, but on the fly decided to scrap the wisdom segment of her talk. She acknowledged that Professor Stephen Grimm, Ph.D., who was also in the audience, is the resident expert on wisdom, and so she moved on to love.

[doptg id=”138″]With citations and mentions that included Homer, Heidegger, and Hugh Grant, Babich framed the many kinds of love by referencing not only ancient and modern texts, but also the contemporary films Love, Actually and The Children Act. She said she derived her title based on the theme of love of wisdom, which could be more succinctly described as “love, actually.”

“My theme concerns ‘the love of wisdom’ or love, actually,” she said. “Beyond inclusive disjoint substitutions, my talk is inspired, as I tend to be inspired, by the comma:  love, actually.”

Her references to Emma Thompson in The Children Act went beyond the title to aspects of love that included different kinds of love, including agape and philia, though with less focus on eros.

She added that she’d skip the notion of erotic love, because it was “easy.”

“Erotic love never stays and typically things begin badly as well,” she said. “Thus, Eros knocks us over with a hammer, as [ancient Greek lyric poet]  Anacreon writes, leaving us in a wintry ditch; Cupid’s [Eros’ Roman counterpart]  dart is fatal, overcoming us with longing.”

But this was not the kind of love she wanted to focus on. She said that her interests centered on hermeneutics, “that is, the art of reading even films with love, forbearance, [and]  generosity.” It’s the kind of love that which includes “the benefit of the doubt we lend to speakers at Faculty Day,” she quipped.

Using Love to Approach New Things

Babich asserted that philosophy is about love, and like love, “it is difficult to keep up.” She said that she’s still recoiling from the “shock takeover by analytic philosophy” of her beloved “continental philosophy,” which springs from the 19th- and 20th-century European traditions. She said that analytic philosophy can be characterized by its nastiness and denunciation.

“You can indeed read a text with hostility, looking for flaws, tracking an author’s mistakes, but you will miss a great deal,” she said. “Nietzsche recommends love as a method to get to know new things, anything in fact, ‘no matter whether a person, an event, or a book.’”

She said the technique (or German is known as Kunstgriff) is to set out to treat something “with all possible love,” which required setting aside all negative responses in order to allow the person or event “every benefit of hope on their behalf.”

“We all do this in teaching,” she said. “Indeed, love is the prerequisite for scholarship of any kind.”

Loved Back

With their minds fed, the faculty left the lecture to celebrate and dine. As in years past, awards for teaching excellence were presented during dinner.

The Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in Science and Mathematics went to Joan Roberts, Ph.D., professor of chemistry.

“I wish to thank my students for allowing me to teach creatively and the faculty at Lincoln Center for making it a pleasure to come in each day,” she said later.

Johanna Francis, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, received the Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring; Diana Heney, Ph.D., assistant professor of philosophy, received the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Humanities; and the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Social Sciences went to Mark Chapman, Ph.D., associate professor of African and African American studies.