Designed for working professionals, the 30-credit degree will give students the scientific knowledge and technical skills needed to succeed in a growing field where groundbreaking developments such as gene editing and personalized medicine are advancing at a rapid pace.

The degree can be completed in one year and offers three tracks: The first, Business and Law/Regulatory, will start in January. Two others, Biochemical/Biomolecular Technologies, and Data Analytics/Informatics, will be open for enrollment in September 2025. A fourth, generalized track that allows students to personalize their interests will also be open in September.

Biotechnology Is a Growing Field

Falguni Sen, Ph.D., head of Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, said hiring in the field of biotechnology is expected to increase.

“We see the potential for major growth taking place broadly in the life sciences areas, which includes biotechnology,” said Sen, who oversees the program.

Statistics paint an encouraging picture of the field. According to IBIS World Industry Reports, the market size of the U.S. biotechnology industry grew 7.7% per year on average between 2018 and 2023.

The industry, which combines engineering and natural sciences to create commercially viable therapeutics, is also important to New York City’s economy. In December, Mayor Eric Adams signed legislation offering tax incentives for growing biotech companies to create jobs in the city. According to the city’s Economic Development Corporation, an estimated 16,000 new jobs are expected to be created in the field by 2026.

What Can You Do with a Biotechnology Degree?

Sen said the specialization tracks were specifically tailored to the areas of the field where there are opportunities. A student who recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and aspires to be a scientist or scientist’s assistant would benefit from the Biochemical/Biomolecular Technologies concentration. Someone who is already working in the industry and wants to include a focus on AI, on the other hand, might be drawn to the Data Analytics/Informatics specialization. 

“The informatics track allows you to become a specialist in the analytics side, but you’re not just a run-of-the-mill analytics person. You’ll be an analytics person who knows the biotech industry. That gives you a leg up,” said Sen.

Sen noted that because biotechnology is a fertile area for startup businesses, the Business and Law/Regulatory track was designed for anyone who is working in the industry and wants to strike off on their own.

“They might have a Ph.D. already, but they have an idea and really want to be an entrepreneur. They need to know what the regulatory system is, how to get venture money, how to do all of that,” he said.

Other fields graduates will be equipped for include finance, government, compliance, and biopharma. 

Practical Biotech Degree Offers Flexibility and Hybrid Learning 

Classes are a hybrid of in-person instruction and online learning, with flexible schedules designed for working professionals. 

Several new courses, such as AI in Biotech, Marketing in Biotech, and Strategic Entrepreneurship and Business Development, have been created specifically for the degree. 

“What’s wonderful about this degree is that there is a core of five courses that really give you a sense of how this industry is structured, how it makes money, what its peculiarities are, and all the possibilities that are out there,” said Sen.

“You can take all of this knowledge and harness it for whatever direction you want to take.”

The program is being offered through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and leverages the expertise of faculty from the GSAS, the Gabelli School of Business, and Fordham Law.

“Healthcare in the Time of COVID-19” was hosted by Falguni Sen, Ph.D., a professor at the Gabelli School and the head of Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center. He was joined by Anthony Viceroy, CEO of Westmed Medical Group; Susan Fox, president and CEO of White Plains Hospital; and Jeffrey A. Meckler, CEO, and vice-chairman of Intec Pharma, Ltd.

Sen noted in his introduction that the same institutions that we rely on to help us survive the pandemic are now facing perils of their own, thanks to financial burdens brought on by a drop in elective surgeries, increased costs for ICU care, and physical and mental risks to staff working without enough protective gear.

“Flexibility is one of the most difficult of business challenges that we at the Gabelli School of Business have been trying to develop new theories and new practices on. On the one hand, it will require a lot of slack in resources, which can be very expensive. On the other hand, it demands creative uses of these resources, and the ability to build relationships and partnerships. It requires us to develop common goals and priorities,” he said.

Preparing for Financial Instability

Indeed, when asked for an example of a change his group made that had the biggest impact, Viceroy said conserving cash proved to be the biggest in retrospect.

“If you look at what was going on in March, overnight we lost 70% of our volume. There was also no end in sight of when things would improve,” he said.

That meant securing a line of credit from banks in February, instituting temporary furloughs, renegotiating with vendors, and taking advantage of grants offered by the state of New York. Viceroy was able to then direct resources toward securing personal protective equipment for his staff, in some cases from overseas.

‘No Playbook for This’

Fox said that one of the things that her hospital learned early on was that the normal response to crises that they’d trained for, such as active shooters or an Ebola outbreak, was insufficient.

“When started out, it felt very lonely, there was not a lot of information out there. There was no playbook for this,” she said, noting that a member of the hospital staff was infected with COVID-19 by the first patient on the East Coast, a lawyer from New Rochelle.

“Putting a command center together with a lot of people around the table; very quickly we learned that that didn’t work. There was so much coming at us so fast and furiously, so we put together a small command center of probably seven of the senior people in the hospital, and we weren’t there physically, but we were there mentally 24/7.”

Working Together to ‘Meet the Peak’

Viceroy and Fox both agreed that the emergence of telemedicine is the most obvious advance to emerge from the crisis. Fox said scaling up access to care was a lesser-known, but equally important success. When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo predicted that the state would require 140,000 beds to deal with a possible surge in infections, it was a daunting challenge, as the only 55,000 were available.

For her hospital, that meant adding 150 med-surge beds to its existing 225, an unthinkable expansion in a highly regulated industry, she said. Relaxing some of those regulations allowed them to innovate in real-time though.

“Ultimately, we didn’t have a need for 140,000 beds, but by challenging the system, increasing by 50%, and putting up field hospitals like the U.S.S Comfort and Javits Center, we put almost 100,000 beds into the system. We got darn close to needing almost every one of them,” she said.

Equally important, she said was the fact that disparate hospital systems worked together as one, in the same way, that her hospital works with 10 others in the Montefiore Network, transferring patients from overwhelmed facilities to those with room.

“Working together to create that one health system, we were able to meet those needs to the point where we were able to meet the peak, and obviously we’ve been coming down ever since. That is something for the history books,” she said.

Meckler likewise noted that the crisis has opened a door for new opportunities for the way the pharmaceutical industry operates.

“I think we have over 2,400 clinical trials ongoing worldwide and more than a dozen vaccines in mid-stage development, and this is all since that February/March time frame. That’s unprecedented,” he said.

Concern Over ‘Mindboggling’ Lack of Lessons Learned

The panelists were skeptical about the future though. Viceroy said the deep psychological impact of the pandemic on his staff is only just becoming apparent and is likely to still be a challenge should a second wave of infections take place in the fall.

Fox said it was mind-boggling that states such as Texas and Florida did not take to heart the lessons of the New York area and are now experiencing surges of infections and deaths after opening their economies prematurely.

“I’m disturbed by the lives that are going to be lost for no good reason when we can share these best practices. We had these experiences, we have these facts,” she said.

“Everyone did what they had to do, and now we’re sitting here bracing for that second wave, because a lot of people go to North Carolina and Florida in the summer, and we’re already seeing examples where our numbers are going up. Whether it’s our economies, our staff or our resources, we’re all in recovery planning now, and to go backward would be devastating.”

“Disabilities are often perceived as a small minority issue—something that affects a mere 1%. That’s not the case,” said Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., co-director of the minor program, founding director of the Research Consortium on Disability, and professor of economics.”

Around one billion people worldwide live with a disability, according to the United Nations, including one in four adults in the U.S. alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Since the minor started in January 2019, students in the program have learned how disability and normality are understood and represented in different contexts, from literature to architecture to fashion. The curriculum also helps bring awareness to issues of access on Fordham’s campus and beyond.

“Our minor program gets students to think about what it means to have a disability and what the consequences of having a disability might be in society,” Mitra said. “It’s an essential part of thinking about inclusion and what it means to be an inclusive society—and yet, it’s a dimension of inclusion that we sometimes forget about.” 

The program is designed to show undergraduates how to create more accessible physical and social environments and help them pursue careers in a range of fields, including human rights, medicine and allied health, psychology, public policy, education, social work, and law. 

Among these students is Sophia Pirozzi, an English major and disability studies minor at Fordham College at Rose Hill. 

“The biggest thing that I’ve taken away is that when minority rights are compromised, so are the majority … And I think when we elevate that voice and that experience, we come a little bit closer to taking into consideration that the only way to help ourselves is to help other people,” said Pirozzi, who has supervised teenagers with intellectual and physical disabilities as head counselor at a summer camp in Rockville, Maryland. After she graduates from Fordham in 2021, she said she wants to become a writer who helps build access for the disability community.

Now, in addition to the minor program, Fordham has a Research Consortium on Disability, a growing team of faculty and graduate students across six schools—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, the Graduate School of Social Service, the Gabelli School of Business, the Law School, and the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education—who conduct and coordinate disability-related research at at the University.  

Since this past October, the consortium has created new opportunities to connect faculty and graduate students working on disability-related research across the University and in the broader New York City area, including lunch meetings and new research studies. This month, it launched its new website. The consortium is planning its first symposium on social policy this November and another symposium on disability and spirituality in April 2021. 

The consortium is a “central portal” for interdisciplinary research that can help scholars beyond Fordham, said Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor and area chair in strategy and statistics, who co-directs the consortium with Rebecca Sanchez, Ph.D., an associate professor in English. That includes research on how accessible New York City hospitals are for people with disabilities, particularly in the COVID-19 pandemic.  

“What has come to light very acutely is the whole notion of how vulnerable populations have been differentially affected in this COVID-19 [pandemic],” Sen said. “The emergency responses to that population have not necessarily been as sensitive or as broad in terms of access as we would like it to be … And we were already thinking about issues of crisis because of what happened in 9/11.” 

The minor and the Research Consortium on Disability build upon the work of the Faculty Working Group on Disability: a university-wide interdisciplinary faculty group that has organized activities and initiatives around disability on campus over the past five years. The group has hosted the annual Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability and several events, including a 2017 talk by the commissioner for the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.

“Fordham is known for community-engaged learning and how its work, both the research that we do and others, have relevance directly in people’s lives,” said Sen. “And that’s what we are trying to do.”

Leaders from both parties, including President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and many Democratic presidential hopefuls, have discussed plans on how to address these costs. 

In the wake of all the conversation surrounding the issue, two Gabelli School of Business professors—Falguni Sen, Ph.D., who heads the Gabelli School’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, and Navid Asgari, Ph.D.—decided to make drug pricing a focus for the center this year.

One of their first events will be a panel and conversation titled “Facts and Myths in Drug Pricing,” to be held at Fordham Law School on Monday, Oct. 28, from 6 to 8 p.m., with a reception to follow.

All those who need at least one prescription are affected by this issue, Sen said.

“The whole issue is one of affordability—access to medicine and affordability of medicine; they’re highly related,” he said. “Access is, is there enough quantity right now available for us to get to distribution centers that will allow us to have it and prescription systems that will allow people who need it to get it? Then comes the whole question of affordability. Unless pricing changes, affordability does not change.”

One of the goals of the forum, he said, is to highlight the complexities surrounding drug pricing. The cost of new, innovative drugs and their high rate of failure can cause a legitimate increase in drug prices, Sen said, but the lack of regulation in the current system can allow those prices to increase exponentially.   

“Is it just our market system, where we do not do what the rest of the world does, where there is some kind of a reference pricing that is done?” he said. “Is that the reason for what is happening with pricing, or is it fear that some new kind of ‘local therapies’ are going to come into play so pharma better make all its money very quickly, before all those alternatives come in … We need to put all these things out on the table and have a proper discussion about it.”

The event will feature keynote speaker John LaMattina, Ph.D., of PureTech Health, who spent 30 years working at Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies. 

“I’m quite sure for him the facts and myths are going to be different than the facts and myths of other people, so we wanted a panel that would present the different points of view,” Sen said.

The panel will include Sen, Asgari, and Will Mitchell, Ph.D., of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, all of whom come at the issue from a different perspective. 

Based on Mitchell’s previous work, Sen said he expects him to provide a “down-the-middle” approach, highlighting the importance of maintaining innovation but also keeping costs down when appropriate.

“I personally come a lot more from the public health and the public good space, which is that drugs, especially life-saving drugs, should be easily available,” Sen said. “I feel that our prices in the U.S. are very, very high, mainly because of the fact that they are free-market pricing and whatever the market can bear, as opposed to really related to cost.”

The event is free and open to the public. Register here.

Harding, a native of Idaho who graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2018 with a degree in communication and media studies, said the film inspired to pursue her current career.

“I was interested in the power of positivity. I knew I didn’t want to do anything clinical; I don’t think I have the doctor personality in me. But I knew I wanted to help people, and I knew I wanted to work with kids,” she said.

As a care coordinator at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Harding assists children who need procedures such as bone marrow biopsies. In that role, she said, she constantly utilizes the skills she learned as part of the inaugural cohort of Fordham’s master’s degree in health administration.

“In my department, I am trying to make sure our patients not only have a wonderful patient experience, but I’m also thinking of the procedures. In my department, I have to know what codes to use for billing, and I have to know the ethics behind the children going under anesthesia,” she said.

“All of these things are in the back of my mind while I’m at work, and I learned all of that through my introductory course to health care.” The course is one of 17 courses that comprise the program.

An Industry With Potential

As one of 17 students to sign up for the degree, which is hosted in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and taps the expertise of faculty from the across the university, Harding was exposed to all the facets of an industry that is estimated by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to comprise more than one-sixth of the American economy.

It’s an industry that’s in great flux as well. On Sept. 10, the Census Bureau reported that about 27.5 million people, or 8.5 percent of the U.S. population, lacked health insurance for all of 2018, up from 7.9 percent the year before. It was the first increase in uninsured Americans since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.

Falguni Sen, Ph.D., a professor of business at the Gabelli School of Business who heads the program and the Gabelli School’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, said that instability was exactly what the program was designed to address.

“Students told us the program really prepared them to address the challenges that the Affordable Care Act had brought into the health care industry, in terms of integrated care, the importance of prevention in primary care, and looking at the patient as a whole person,” he said.

“They’ve been given the tools where they can identify and create solutions to new problems as they come up.”

A Diverse Cohort

A second-year cohort has already admitted 19 students, and except for a small change to one course to help students better use data, the coursework is the same.

Although all students admitted to the program were required to show that they had a passion for the field consistent with the Jesuit tradition of service for others, Sen noted that differences among the members of the cohort were important too. Not everyone was a recent college graduate like Harding.

“We had members of the group who have been in the medical profession for more than 30 years. They shared information and opportunities with each other, and we see that reflected in the types of new jobs and promotions that these students have ended up getting,” he said.

Jeffrey Moskowitz, M.D., a medical review officer at Con Edison who earned a doctorate of medicine in 1977, was one of them. One of his previous jobs was as an administrator of a large outpatient surgery center, and he said he wanted to learn more about how larger trends in the health care field affected his work.

“My perspective on the field has totally changed. The only thing I knew was what I had personally seen. Here, we got a world viewpoint, which was much greater than anything I’d known before,” he said.

“This was an eye opener in terms of how things work on different levels—not just on a practitioner level, but the hospital level, the lab level, and how government policy affects everything.”

Focusing on Patients, Not Paperwork

For his capstone project, Dr. Moskowitz designed a wellness program for ConEd focused on preventing employees from getting sick. In terms of coursework, he noted that courses on marketing and ethics were particularly useful.

“We reviewed how to look at situations from various viewpoints and make reasonable decisions while keeping moral and ethical thoughts in mind, which is really what health care administration should be about,” he said.

“If the focus is the patient, and nothing is black and white, how do you best choose among the different options? I liked that ethics course a lot.”

And while it’s true that the Affordable Care Act has ceased to continually increase the number of Americans with health insurance, other changes that it inspired live on, he said.

“One of the modern revolutions in health care is actually listening to the patient. Traditionally health care revolved around what worked for the doctor, which is why most health care is delivered between 9 and 5, when it’s inconvenient for people to get there,” he said.

“Now many hospitals now have patient experience coordinators, and Medicare is reimbursing doctors based in part on patient surveys. This was all brought out in terms of the course.”

That renewed focus on patients is evident in the way the degree is structured, he said.

“As a Jesuit university, Fordham cares a lot about people,” he said.

“So it makes sense that this degree is about keeping people healthier, rather than just the simple administration of rules and regulations that help an institution make money.”

The answer lies in innovation, according to a group of industry experts who spoke at a May 7 event at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus titled “Transforming Employer-Provided Health Plans: Innovating for Patient-Centered Value.”

Falguni Sen, director of Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, which hosted the event, framed the extraordinary scale of the challenge in his introductory remarks.

“We are going to try to the impossible,” he said. “Making health care better than it is by changing the nature of both affordability and access.”

Rapidly rising health care costs have impacted health benefits in a number of ways that often leave both employers and employees dissatisfied, Sen said. This often results in narrower provider networks, more frequent billing, and recurrent claims disputes, among other issues.

“Employers want their employees to be healthy and their costs to be lower,” Sen said. “Employees want their employers to be successful, but not at the cost of lowering their health care benefits.”

Sen and an expert panel of health care industry leaders explored innovative ideas that will help achieve these twin goals during a wide-ranging discussion that drew heavily on the panelists’ real world application of novel and effective techniques.

Mitra Behroozi, executive director of Benefit and Pension Funds for 1199SEIU, the largest health care workers union in the U.S., illustrated how health care plans can harness “the power of zero” to deliver exceptional service at an exceptional value.

The nearly 400,000 members covered by the union’s benefit funds pay nothing toward their premiums and are responsible for no co-pays, coinsurance, or deductibles when following plan rules. But despite the extremely rich benefits enjoyed by members, the funds’ costs are well below both regional and national averages on a per worker basis.

Behroozi, who co-moderated the panel with Sen, explained that while some employers have directed rising costs to workers in the form of deductible and premium increases, the 1199SEIU Benefit Funds have taken an alternate approach.

“When you engage in extreme cost shifting, patients avoid needed care as well as unneeded care,” she said, continuing, “Our cost-containing principles are to maintain the availability of quality care and avoid financial barriers for our members.”

1199SEIU’s example demonstrates that quality benefits don’t necessarily have to come with high premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, she said, if plans are designed to incentivize choices that reduce overall costs.

“Our opportunity when we design benefits is to make it simple for people to use the highest-value things and to avoid the lowest-value things,” Behroozi said.

Claire Levitt, the deputy commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Labor Relations, shared her public sector perspective on how the city achieved $3.4 billion in health care cost savings that were used to fund wage increases for municipal employees.

One crucial step taken by the city, Levitt explained, was to begin collecting data on patient care costs, which had never been gathered before due to privacy concerns. Guided by this information, the city began adjusting beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket expenses to encourage preventive care and reduce the number of cost-driving visits to urgent care and emergency rooms.

Michael Chernew, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, drew on his experience both as a health economist and as chair of the university’s benefits committee. He noted that employers must consider not only insurance carriers’ costs, but also how the services available through their plans will accommodate employees’ needs. “You want to look for a carrier that can manage the care and has relationships with the delivery system,” Chernew said.

Tom Traylor, general manager of pharma solutions at the Health Transformation Alliance, explained how his company identifies high-value providers and treatments through data and analytics. The Health Transformation Alliance is owned by 50 blue-chip companies, each of which share health care data that can be leveraged to compare outcomes and produce better results for all of the 4.5 million individuals covered under the employers’ plans.

He detailed how thoughtfully constructed prescription drug formularies can drive patients toward high-efficacy drugs and exclude low-value, high-cost drugs.

“Just because the FDA approved it does not necessarily mean that it provides any additional value,” Traylor said. “You can have a drug that is one to two percent better or worse but 20 percent more expensive, and it’s in a category where there are drugs already available. Why have that drug available?”

While it is difficult to predict possible policy changes and technological developments that will help shape the future of American health care, Sen said, the innovations discussed by the panel will have a major role to play.

“In the next few years we are going to really see major changes in the way health care is delivered and paid for,” he said.

Sen quoted a remark his co-moderator Behroozi made to him about the task putting into motion the changes that will drive this transformation: “The main innovation lies in making innovation happen.”

— Michael Garofalo

This spring, a group of 10 Fordham faculty members traveled there to see it for themselves. From March 17 to 22, they visited the Kino Border Initiative, a consortium of six Catholic organizations in the border city of Nogales—both on the Arizona side and the Sonora, Mexico side. Kino aims to promote border and immigration policies that affirm the dignity of the human person and a spirit of binational solidarity.

The trip was funded by Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning and featured faculty from arts and sciences, the Graduate School of Social Service, the Graduate School of Education, the Gabelli School of Business, and the Law School. The group raised $13,000 to purchase toiletries and necessities for the migrants and documented their time on a blog.

Big Changes in Just One Year

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., professor of communications and chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies, co-led the trip along with Associate Professor of Theology and Acting Associate Provost James McCartin, Ph.D. It was Reich’s second time in Nogales, having worked with Kino in January 2018. Although only 14 months had passed since her last visit, the experience was very different, she said. As before, the group stayed overnight in Arizona and crossed the border to work in a comedor, or cafeteria, in Mexico, that provided meals to people waiting for asylum claims to be heard in the United States.

In 2018, she said, they would typically have one seating of 40 to 50 people—mostly men, a few women, and very few unaccompanied minors. This time, there were multiple seatings with 300 people per meal.

“We spent a lot of time holding babies while people could eat, or entertaining children, or sitting and talking to groups of families that had left Honduras, Guatemala, or regions of Mexico that were affected by gang violence and poverty,” she said.

In addition to serving meals, the group hosted a party at a women’s shelter, met with border patrol agents, and hiked along the border to understand the conditions there. They also attended an “Operation Streamline” hearing in Tuscon, Arizona, where immigrants appear in a group before a judge, who often deported them for being here illegally after two quick questions.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., a professor of English and American studies and acting chair of the English department, said he knew a little about the crisis at the border before heading there, but learned a lot from the trip. He was surprised to learn, for instance, that a wall was constructed through the middle of the Nogales in 1994, long before President Donald Trump made building a border wall his signature campaign promise.

‘Never Got to Say Goodbye’

Although he does not speak Spanish, he was able to connect with a 6-year old girl at the comedor whose father was washing dishes nearby.

“It was an incredible joy to make a child who was going through a horrific experience laugh,” he said.

“The next day, we were serving a meal, and I heard a little girl yelling ‘hola, hola,’ and it was the same little girl again. She was happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. But there were so many people there, that they just got rushed out. So, I never got to say goodbye to this little girl. For some reason, that just broke my heart.”

Speaking with the border patrol complicated the picture for Hendler because it showed how difficult the job is, but it did not change his mind about the moral implications of the situation. In fact, he said he now felt more emotionally connected to what had previously been an abstract concept. He also said that the bonding experience he had with the other nine faculty was “very powerful.”

Accompany, Humanize, Complicate

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, echoed this, saying she was moved by the possibility of future projects at Fordham. Her scholarship touches on issues related to the border, so she was familiar with the situation. But she was moved to learn things like why black water bottles are a must for those crossing the border at night. (They don’t reflect moonlight).

“We were told to accompany, humanize, and complicate. To see those real items that our guide had collected on hikes through the desert, and also to see people get out of a van who’d been deported and go into the soup kitchen we were working in, was something that really stood out,” she said.

She was also shocked at the level of needless suffering taking place. When people are deported to Mexico for instance, they are given back any cash they had on them when they were apprehended in the form of a check. But the checks are only cashable in the United States, so once a week, a nonprofit group called No More Deaths visits the comedor to help people cash them. She also wasn’t impressed with the judge who spoke to them after presiding over the deportation proceedings.

“He said, ‘I’m just carrying out my marching orders.’ And I thought, ‘You’re a lawyer. You could leave and get a different job.’”

She felt more empathy toward border patrol agents. “They have fewer choices, and their job sounds really hard,” she said. “I found it really complicated to parse it all.”

McCartin said the goal of the trip was to give faculty members an experience different from their everyday work life that would also then affect their work life. The group will reunite soon for debriefing and discussion of possible future plans.

One conversation that will always stay with him happened when a man from Honduras asked him if Americans all thought they were criminals.

“I said ‘Oh gosh, no, I have no problem with you.’ This guy was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe that.’ I said ‘No, I can see how you have a sense that that’s how Americans talk about you, and there are plenty of them that do, but there are also a lot of us that don’t really begrudge you trying to have a better life,’” he said.

“This moment of his being surprised that we’re not unified in our attitudes toward people at the border—a lightbulb went on for this guy, and I’ll remember that.”

Carrying Their Stories Back Home

Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president and presidential assistant for planning in the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, said the trip was a necessity, given how immigration is now a major global challenge.

“Because this is such a major social issue and it impacts questions of justice, what we want to be as a society, and how a place like Fordham, as a Jesuit university, tries to develop students, we decided the border would be a great site for this immersion experience for a diverse group of faculty members,” he said.

Reich is making sure the issue lives on, having structured the syllabus of one of her spring classes, Films of Moral Struggle, to include representations of borders and migration. The class is also sending Easter cards to people in detention at the border to bring a little color and humanity into their lives, she said.

Above all, she said she’ll hold onto memories of conversations with the migrants she met, like one with a man at the comedor who was sporting a University of Michigan hat. He’d lived in the U.S. for 22 years before being deported after being stopped for a traffic violation.

“I will always carry their stories with me,” Reich said.

Photos courtesy of Fordham faculty.

Six distinguished faculty members were honored on March 13 for their achievements in securing externally funded research grants at the third annual Sponsored Research Day on the Rose Hill campus.

The University Research Council and Office of Research presented the Outstanding Externally Funded Research Awards (OEFRA) to recognize the high quality and impact of the honorees’ sponsored research within the last three years and how their work has enhanced Fordham’s reputation—both nationally and globally.

Faculty were honored in five separate categories and were given awards by Jonathan Crystal, Ph.D., interim provost, associate vice president, and associate chief academic officer.

Humanities: George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture

Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou, co-directors of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, shared the award for the Humanities category. Demacopoulos has received awards totaling $928,000 in the past three years, while Papanikolaou has received a total of $888,000. Last April, they secured two grants totaling $610,000 that will be used to fund a multiyear research project devoted toward the issue of human rights.

Interdisciplinary Research: Su-Je Cho, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Childhood Special Education at the Graduate School of Education.

Cho, an expert in the field of special education, has received two external grants totaling more than $2.7 million from the U.S. Department of Education and other foundations in the past three years. Her interdisciplinary project will produce approximately 40 professionals in special education and school psychology, which are the greatest shortage areas in the field of education.

Junior Faculty Research: Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Theology

Gribetz has received six external grants totaling $55,000 from the prestigious National Endowment for Humanities and other foundations in the past three years. Her research focuses on the history of time in antiquity and the important role that religious traditions and practices have played in the history of time. In 2017, she received the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, alongside nine other young scholars, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Sciences: Steven Franks, Ph.D., Professor in Biological Sciences

Franks has received five grants totaling more than $5.3 million from the National Science Foundation in the past three years. The results of the studies funded by these grants have been published in 17 peer-reviewed scientific publications since 2016. The papers, which are in high impact journals such as Evolution, Molecular Ecology, and American Journal of Botany, have been widely cited. His work has helped to advance our understanding of responses of plant populations to climate change and the genetic basis of these responses.

Social Sciences: Janna Heyman, Ph.D., Professor of Social Service and Endowed Chair of the Henry C. Ravazzin Center on Aging and Intergenerational Studies at the Graduate School of Social Service

Heyman, who is also director of Fordham’s Children & Families Institute center, has received 10 grants totaling more than $3 million from a variety of external foundations in the past three years. Last year, she co-edited, along with Graduate School of Social Service Associate Dean Elaine Congress, D.S.W, Health and Social Work: Practice, Policy and Research (Springer, 2018). She has taught social work research, advanced research, and social welfare policy courses in Fordham’s master of social work program, as well as policy implementation in the doctoral social work program.

Organized by the Office of Research and the University Research Council and sponsored by the University Research Compliance Council and the Office of Sponsored Programs, the daylong event featuring a keynote speech by Denise Clark, Ph.D., Associate Vice President for Research Administration, University of Maryland at College Park.

A forum of science researchers featured Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, Deborah Denno, Ph.D, director of the Neuroscience and Law Center, Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cancer, Genetic Diseases, and Gene Regulation, J.D. Lewis, director of the Urban Ecology Center, Amy Roy, Ph.D., director of the Pediatric Emotion Regulation Lab, and Falguni Sen, Ph.D., director of the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center.

To answer the industry’s pressing need, Fordham has created a new multi-disciplinary master’s degree in health administration that will launch in fall 2018.

The degree taps expertise from across the University, including the Graduate School of Social Service and Fordham School of Law. Befitting that multidisciplinary approach, the degree program is hosted in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and headed by Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor of business at the Gabelli School of Business.

“People are beginning to understand that health care is not something that is just owned by business, or regulatory services, or social service people, or by ethics experts,” said Sen, who heads the business school’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center. “It’s something that everyone has to come together to really deliver.”

Sen said the 12-month degree program is meant to appeal to the burgeoning field of mid-level practitioners with titles like care coordinator, case manager, hospitalist, physician assistant, information technology assistant, nurse practitioner or medical entrepreneur.

The field is also drawing liberal arts undergraduates looking to join a growing sector of the economy. “They may never have to create a balance sheet but since they’ll be tasked with putting into action many of the changes under health care reforms, it’s important that they’re able to read one,” Sen said.

That’s because even though the industry has embraced “patient-centric care,” it still operates from a surplus-generating business model, he said. Those two models—one focused on doing whatever it takes to keep a person healthy and another with an eye on the bottom line—need to be balanced delicately.

“Ideally, we can achieve proper health care if we can bring together the clinical model and the business model to focus on patient centric care” Sen said.

“This master’s degree will help you understand how to make your organization work for both of these models.”

Of the 14 courses required for the degree, nine are brand new. They include Strategy and Operations in Health Care, Behavior Health, Patient-Centric Care, Population Health, Public Health and Outcome Measures, and Negotiating and Communicating in Health Care.

In the growing field of electronic health records, Sen hopes the new master’s degree will close training gaps among longer-term health care workers.

“We’re not going to make people IT experts or teach them how to create new systems, but we can teach them how to use the systems properly and not be intimidated by them,” he said.

Sen said that other big shifts are underway in the field. Health care companies are looking to increase ways to measure patient satisfaction. They are moving toward “value-based payments,” in which insurers place a higher premium on the quality of treatments over quantity. And they are improving transitional care, which takes into account how patients fare when they return home or their community or are moved to nursing or long-term care .

“These changes are here to stay, and I don’t see anything in the new plans being debated in Washington that will stop them,” Sen said.

“Will we have a greater number of uninsured people who will put a serious strain on hospitals? That’s a possibility, and those are serious issues that are being debated. But these administrators will be in demand and expected to perform.”

The future of the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare” which was signed into law in 2010, is in doubt today, as Republicans who control both houses of Congress have begun the process of repealing and replacing it.

To get a sense of what this means for the future of healthcare in the United States, we sat down with Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor of management systems at the Gabelli School, and head of Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center.

Full transcript below:

Patrick Verel: What do you make of the effort underway to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act?

Falguni Sen: I was very gratified to hear our president-elect say that everyone’s going to be covered, there’s going to be insurance for health care for all, and that it’s going to be cheaper and better. How can one argue against that? What I’m concerned about is that in trying to do that, we may come up with a plan that is very expensive for some, for instance, those who had pre-existing conditions, and that your premiums based on this different what they call risk pools. We keep talking about the Affordable Care Act in terms of insurance access to people, but originally the Act was called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in order to bring in a patient-centeredness and an integrative approach to patient care. That’s already in place and I do not see any reason why that will change.

Patrick Verel: What would you say is the biggest risk to making changes to the law right now?

Falguni Sen: I think the biggest change right now is the transition period. There are far too many uncertainties. Economic growth may get affected if people suddenly feel that their health care … They’re unsure about their coverage. The good part of it is that everyone now knows that even in a Republican controlled administration, the fact that people deserve health care has become part of the conversation.

Patrick Verel: So, what changes do you think need to be made to make the law work better?

Falguni Sen: I consider a failure in the insurance part of it is that the healthy adults who are uninsured did not go in and get insurance. What that has done is that it has made the pools much riskier, thereby creating a much higher than anticipated cost to the insurance carriers than what would have happened if the healthy adults had also got into the pool.

It might sound strange to say this, but I think the primary change that needs to be made is to figure out how to reduce the risk to the insurance carriers by making sure that healthier people get into the pool.

Months into her battle with Alzheimer’s, Jessica Morales’ mom developed aspiration pneumonia—the most common cause of death for Alzheimer’s patients. Breathing problems and infections led to frequent and frustrating trips to the emergency room. Morales knew her mother was dying. But she also knew she needed more extensive care than could be provided at home. So she brought her to Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, where staff treated her physical symptoms and so much more.

“I knew I needed the support to get through this time with her,” said Morales, FCRH ’97, an actress who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. ““The care there was so different from the beginning.” Hospital staff turned her mother in her bed every two hours, she said, brushed her hair the way she liked, and played her favorite Mexican music to soothe her. “It was an individualized approach.”

“Every time we have a meeting here, everybody’s hugging,” said Michael J. Brescia, MD, FCRH ’54, Calvary’s executive medical director. It’s a side effect, he said, of the culture of the facility, where alleviating emotional and spiritual suffering is as crucial as treating the physical symptoms of disease. “You have to touch your patients. You have to hold their hands. And it’s got to mean something to you.”

Fordham and Calvary have enjoyed a close relationship for years, forged in part by Brescia’s love for his alma mater. “Fordham gave me the gift of faith,” said Brescia, who says a silent prayer each time he enters a patient’s room. That personal connection led to a professional partnership. Fordham faculty have conducted research at Calvary, and Calvary medical staff have lectured in Fordham programs. An October 20 symposium at the University highlighted that research, fostering a discussion on the complex issues surrounding palliative care.

Mary Beth Morrissey, PhD, FCRH ’79, LAW ’82, GSS ’11, a healthcare attorney and researcher, and the director of Fordham’s Healthcare Management Certificate Program in Public Health, Palliative Care, and Long-Term Care, organized the conference.

“The relationship with Calvary is a very meaningful one for Fordham,” she said, particularly when it comes to research. “Our faculty is working across the whole spectrum of palliative care.” In one study, Fordham psychologist Barry Rosenfeld, PhD, and Fordham psychology graduate students explored meaning-centered talk therapy with Calvary patients as a way to provide a sense of peace at the end of life. “We’re trying to understand that palliative care is both medical and social,” Morrissey said.

Insurance companies have been slow to fund palliative care, and so Morrissey and her colleagues aim to put it in the larger context of healthcare reform and value. “This is really about changing a cultural paradigm,” she said. “I think the problem is, in our Western culture, we have been very reluctant as a society to engage in any discussions about limits on care or how we’re going to allocate resources.”

Fixing a Broken System

Presenting the keynote at the October 20 conference was Philip Pizzo, MD, FCRH ’66, pediatric oncologist and former dean of the Stanford School of Medicine. A nationally respected policy advocate, Pizzo has helped lead major studies on palliative care and end-of-life care for the Institute of Medicine: the groundbreaking Relieving Pain in America, published in 2011, and last year’s Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life.

“It’s not whether to choose more or less care, but whether to honor individual preferences,” said Pizzo, a microbiology and immunology professor at Stanford and founding director of the university’s Distinguished Careers Institute. And pain, he points out, is not just an end-of-life issue. An estimated 100 million people in America suffer from chronic pain. A few years ago, he became one of them. “It became very personal,” he said of the chronic neuropathic pain he experienced after an injury. “Suddenly I was completely incapacitated, so I absolutely appreciated how it literally saps the energy and the sense of purpose from anyone.”

At Calvary, Brescia and his staff view depression and psychological pain as one of several types of suffering to focus on when caring for patients. Patients also struggle with spiritual suffering, he said, asking themselves, “Is there a supreme God that loves me and knows what I’m going through?” And Calvary staff are equally cognizant of familial suffering. Morales, who slept on a cot in her mother’s room during her stay at Calvary, received a massage through the Family Care Center, which she called “a little haven.” And when her mom died, a Calvary chaplain was there at Morales’ side.

When it comes to physical suffering, hospital staff fight aggressively, Brescia said. Calvary physicians have worked to find alternate methods of delivering opioids for pain relief, and they’ve perfected techniques like using a gastrostomy tube to alleviate nausea common in end-stage cancer patients.

Cost Versus Value

That kind of comprehensive care is not without its costs. Calvary, a nonprofit, loses millions of dollars a year, much of it made up in fundraising. But the world-renowned physician was never in this work for the money.

Before he got involved in palliative care, Brescia achieved fame in the mid-1960s for the Brescia-Cimino fistula, a surgically created connection between veins and arteries used in hemodialysis patients. People came to the Bronx from all over to be treated for chronic kidney disease, he said, and Calvary was beginning to collect full compensation for dialysis so they could build a new facility.

“But I went to tell my father, a little Italian immigrant,” Brescia said. He explained the invention and said that centers would open around the world in a year’s time, and he’d stand to make quite a bit of money. The older man said, “A year? Why a year?” When Brescia explained that it would take time to set up the lucrative contracts, his father asked, “How many die in a year?” Brescia told him 50,000, and his father’s face dropped. “‘Give it away,’” he told his son in Italian. When Brescia protested, his father said, “‘When you shave in the morning, the faces of the children will appear in the mirror, [children]who should be with their parents. They will not be because my son, who I should be so proud of, has to have five cars, five boats, five houses.” Brescia knew his father was right. “I left his house and [we]published [the research].”

Clinicians began using the procedure and contacting Brescia for his expertise. “Doors just opened,” said Brescia, who is considered a pioneer in modern palliative care. “They wanted to hear about all the renal work. The price of that was that they had to hear about the palliative work,” which he was now doing at Calvary. He said he and his colleagues were able to get many federal laws passed “that enabled us to survive and prosper.”

Collaborating on Care

But getting insurance companies to cover the cost of palliative care is still a challenge, despite the empirical evidence that it lowers hospital readmission rates, said Falguni Sen, PhD. Sen directs the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center at Fordham, which presented the October 20 panel discussion in conjunction with the Fordham Science Council.

“Palliative care, in my opinion, has been the first group that has really tried to look at healthcare in an integrated way,” he said, noting that the Affordable Care Act has given providers some options through which they can include palliative care. He cited new accountable care organizations that accept a total fee for the care and well-being of Medicare patients rather than a traditional fee-for-service arrangement.

Sen said his center, part of the Gabelli School of Business, aims to build on Fordham’s collaborations with Calvary Hospital to explore programs based on these new provisions. He hopes to expand the University’s certificate program in palliative care—which includes Calvary medical staff as instructors—to offer “more skill-based” programs. The University’s Graduate School of Social Service also offers an increasingly popular palliative care program, which has MSW students completing fieldwork at Calvary. And Sen anticipates Fordham faculty from several disciplines wanting to make a difference in the way care is delivered.

“We’ve got to move out of the purely medical care model on palliative care. It’s not just a question of managing pain through medication,” he said. “Pain is something that is so complicated … and it requires care and consideration on so many levels.”

Listen to Dr. Pizzo discuss palliative care and his work at the Distinguished Careers Institute on WFUV’s Fordham Conversations.