As a journalism and new media major, she was connected with Brigid Sullivan, a 1970 graduate of Fordham’s Thomas More College and vice president for children’s media and educational programming at WGBH in Boston.

Sullivan provided Conde feedback on her resume and networking. For Conde, it was invaluable knowledge. 

“Having this amazing person in the media industry with me made me feel a little bit less lonely,” said Conde, a native of Venezuela native who won an Emmy for her work on the Univision program Despierta America.

Sullivan said she wanted to pay forward the knowledge she gained from the late John D. Boyd, S.J., her Fordham professor and mentor.

‘With Valeria, I saw a great talent, and I encouraged her to pursue it,” she said.

RamConnect: How to Sign Up

Jerry Goldstein, alumni relations specialist at Fordham’s Career Center, said the Fordham Mentoring program is still accepting applications for both mentors and mentees through Sept. 30. Alumni and students can sign up and list their interests, professional goals, availability, and how much time they can commit. He said it’s constantly evolving to meet the expectations of students.

“Mentorship can mean many different things to many different people. With all of the pressures and time constraints that students face, they really want flexibility,” he said, noting that the Fordham Mentoring Program is one of several programs offered through RamConnect, the University’s online community for professional development. 

When students are matched with mentors, they’re not tied down to rigid schedules focused on a formal set of goals. Rather, mentors and students are encouraged to focus on what works best for them individually.

The program has been growing 5 to 10% a year, and this year, Goldstein is hopeful that in October, the center will pair up 330 students with mentors, a 40% increase over last year. They’re especially interested in signing up students who are interested in health sciences and finance, as well as mentors who can share expertise in the arts.

Goldstein said they generally pair mentors and students from similar fields, but common interests or hobbies that are revealed through questionnaires will also result in successful pairings. Ultimately, he said, it’s part of a larger effort to make RamConnect a community of alumni. 

“In addition to formal mentoring like this, you can choose an informal approach and do flash mentoring, which is just contacting alumni and asking one or two questions or dealing with one issue,” he said.

“Between these programs, we hope that students, soon-to-be alumni, and current alumni will give back to each other and network with each other for the rest of their lives.”

“[It] makes me feel free,” said Marcelus “Maco” Dacanay, a music major who has played the guitar for more than a decade. “Practice is what makes you a better musician—and these spaces give that to us.” 

The music rooms are part of a revamped music and art suite that opened for the start of the academic year, generously funded by donors and named in honor of the college’s dean emeritus, Robert R. Grimes, S.J.

“For the music students, having a space that they know is theirs … [means]  they can feel comfortable and safe, collaborating and meeting with new people, experimenting with music, and exercising their creativity,” said Matthew Buttermann, Ed.D., director of jazz performance. “It’s going to be really great for everyone.” 

We asked DiLella, a 2006 Fordham graduate who’s also an adjunct professor at the University, for his top summer Broadway picks. He threw in an off-Broadway recommendation and even gave us an insider’s peek at what’s coming this fall.

Merrily We Roll Along

Photo by Matthew Murphy

The critically acclaimed Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along—once an infamous flop—is now the winner of four Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical. Merrily centers around the turbulent journey of three friends: Franklin, Charley, and Mary—played by Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez. Groff and Radcliffe took home the Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Musical and Best Featured Actor in a Musical, respectively, for their performances.

Hell’s Kitchen

Photo by Chelcie Pary

The Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen is loosely based on her experience of growing up in Manhattan, and features her famous tunes like “Empire State of Mind” and “If I Ain’t Got You.” The show stars Broadway regulars Brandon Victor Dixon and Shoshana Bean, alongside newcomer Maleah Joi Moon. Moon is making her professional debut as the Keys-inspired character, Ali, and recently took home the Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical.

Oh, Mary!

Photo by Emilio Madrid

Comic genius Cole Escola, widely known for playing characters in television shows like Search Party and Big Mouth, is now tackling Mary Todd Lincoln in the new play Oh, Mary! It’s opening on Broadway in July after a sold-out off-Broadway run. In the show, written by Escola and directed by Sam Pinkleton, Mary Todd Lincoln will do anything to fulfill her one big dream. The production features an ensemble cast, including Fordham Theatre grad Tony Macht, FCLC ’17.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball

Photo by Evan Zimmerman

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is now playing off-Broadway at the Perelman Performing Arts Center like you’ve never seen it before. In this new, immersive restaging of the 1982 Broadway mega-musical, audiences are welcomed into the Jellicle Ball, which is inspired by the ballroom culture that burst onto the queer, gay, and trans scene in New York City more than five decades ago. Cats: The Jellicle Ball stars Tony Award-winner André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy; ballroom icon Chasity Moore, who goes by “Tempress,” as Grizabella; and Hamilton alum Sydney James Harcourt as Rum Tum Tugger.

A Look Ahead at Broadway’s Fall Lineup

Sunset Boulevard

Photo by Marc Brenner

Nicole Sherzinger’s acclaimed performance as film diva Norma Desmond is making its way across the pond from London’s West End. Sunset Boulevard arrives on Broadway this October in a stripped-down, minimalistic version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic. The show features direction by British sensation Jamie Lloyd, known for his radical reimaginings.

Gypsy

Photo by Allison Michael Orenstein

One of Broadway’s greatest works and greatest performers join forces this fall when Audra McDonald stars in Gypsy at the historic Majestic Theatre. Widely considered one of the best musicals of all time, Gypsy is the story of how far a determined stage mom will go to turn her daughter into a star. The show features a legendary creative team with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by the late Stephen Sondheim.

Photos by Argenis Apolinario

Graduating seniors celebrated their heritage and culture at four diversity graduation ceremonies held from April 30 to May 6.

“I am so proud of what each and every one of you has achieved,” Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham, said in a video message to students. 

“Take a moment to give yourself a hug and to revel in everything that you’ve achieved because it is an extraordinary thing, these years of hard work and determination and talent, and glorious love of learning.”

In total, more than 300 students were recognized at the Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi American (APIDA); Black; Latine; and Lavender (LGBTQ+) graduation celebrations. 

Held at both the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses, the celebrations were sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, Office of the President, and the 2024 Senior Week committees. 

Remember, on the evening of May 18, New York’s Empire State Building will be illuminated in Fordham maroon for our graduates.

Below are the award winners for each graduation.

Lavender Graduation

George Takei Arts & Media Award – LC Recipient: Maura Johnston

George Takei Arts & Media Award – RH Recipient: Julia Patterson

Marsha P. Johnson & Sylvia Rivera LGBTQ+ Activism Award – RH Recipient: Dorothy Bogen

Marsha P. Johnson & Sylvia Rivera LGBTQ+ Activism Award – LC Recipient: Kenneth Tang

Audre Lorde LGBTQ+ Research Award – RH Recipients: Fareea Khan and Tarchithaa Chandra Sekharan

Fr. Bryan N. Massingale Faculty/Staff LGBTQ+ Award – LC Recipient: Joe Corcoran

Fr. Bryan N. Massingale Faculty/Staff LGBTQ+ Award – RH Recipient: Juan Carlos Matos

Award of Excellence for Outstanding Contributions to the Office of Multicultural Affairs: Dorothy Bogen

Latine Graduation

Sonrisa Award – LC Recipient: Katelyn Figueroa

Sonrisa Award – RH Recipient: Alan Ventura

Estrella Award – LC Recipient: Ernesto Perez

Estrella Award – RH Recipient: Caitlin Asper

Pa’Lante Award – LC Recipient: Andy Cuzco

Pa’Lante Award – RH Recipient: Hector Cruz

Black Graduation

Black Leadership Award – RH Recipients: Tamia Chaney, Chelsea Usiomwanta, Alan Ventura

Black Leadership Award – LC Recipients: Katelyn Figueroa, Rebecca Richmond, Mary Bookman

Black Leadership Award in Athletics – RH Recipient: Skylar Harris

Black Leadership Award in the Fine Arts – LC Recipient: Kierstin Oliver

Black Leadership Award in the Fine Arts – RH Recipient: Zhane Coleman

Black Excellence in STEM Award – RH Recipients: Kennedy Jeter and Kiara Pile

Black Excellence in Business Award – RH Recipient: Janel Codjoe

APIDA (Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi American) Graduation

Lotus Leadership Award – RH Recipients: Tarchithaa Chandra Sekharan and Elena Roden

Lotus Leadership Award – LC Recipient: Kenneth Tang

Most Likely to Sell Out a Lincoln Center Concert: Marie Isabelle Antendido

Most Likely to be on the Cover of Vogue, GQ, Elle, and/or Harper’s Bazaar: Meilin Renee Morefield

Most Likely to Start a Successful Youtube Channel: Julie Kae Trohan

Most Likely to Become Tik Tok Famous: Genesis Yi

Most Likely to Survive the Last of Us: Stacey Dana Zaragoza Cajita

Most Likely to Win Physical: 100: Alexander Joel Lang Hom

Most Likely to be the CEO/Director of their own Company: Yoshimi Pualani Eder

Award of Excellence for Outstanding Contributions to the Office of Multicultural Affairs: Kenneth Tang

But just as important was a gut feeling.

“There was this moment when I visited Fordham after I had gotten accepted, and I was going down the escalator” in the Lowenstein Center, Liu says. “There was the ‘New York is my campus, Fordham is my school’ sign, and I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, okay, I think I can spend four years here.’ It was very clear to me that this was the place I belonged.”

Liu not only got the dance training that prepared her for her current role in the national touring production of Funny Girl, but she became an orientation leader on campus—in part to help students find their own “escalator moment.”  

“I loved the fact that everything was in its own little radius,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I feel like there’s a little community for me here. Even if I am in this huge city where there’s a million things to do, I know I have this little pocket.’ I wanted other people to have that experience.”

Finding Structure—and a Spiritual Connection—Through Art

Growing up in San Francisco, Liu knew she wanted to attend college in New York City.

“For me, it felt like a mecca,” Liu says. “This is where art is. This is where art flourishes. This is where art is appreciated. This is where we feel like we can be fully who we are and not have to hide anything, and just be allowed to be in community with the people who are the best at this in the world. There’s just really no other place like it.”

As she settled into the BFA program, she decided to pursue a minor in business administration “to have skills to bring to the table if I own a small business or help someone else with their business,” she says. And the first-year course Faith and Critical Reasoning was a formative one for her.

“Seeing how people create structure in their lives around religion almost reminded me of how I create structure in my life around art,” she says. “Regardless of what religion it is, it all comes down to the same thing: wanting to feel alive, wanting to feel appreciated, wanting to feel love, wanting to give love. I think that is my philosophy around art as well. It’s just sharing human experience.”

Since graduating from Fordham in 2019, she’s been sharing that experience with audiences as a dancer, actress, and model at places like the J Chen Project dance company, on Apple TV’s Dickinson, and as a cast member of Cabaret at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House. Now, she’s bringing her talents across the United States on the Funny Girl national tour, a yearlong job that began last August and will take her through this summer—and that has brought her to some new favorite cities, like Des Moines and Memphis, and to San Francisco for a hometown run. She says the Funny Girl tour feels like a culmination of what she’s been building toward. “I remember just crying, being like, ‘Okay, everything that I’ve been working toward and wanting and manifesting is finally coming to fruition,’” she says of finding out she landed a role in the tap-heavy musical. “It feels like a step in the right direction toward the rest of my goals.”

Creating Community on Campus

While dance and academic studies keep BFA students plenty busy, Liu also wanted to get more involved on the Fordham campus outside the classroom. She gave campus tours for prospective students, was an orientation leader, and served on the Senior Week Committee, which planned events and celebrations for her class’s upcoming final year—from a boat cruise and Dave & Buster’s night to information sessions on housing and personal finance workshops.

“It was community building and preparing yourself to be an adult and spending time with friends,” Liu says of her experience on the Senior Week Committee. “I just wanted to take advantage of all the opportunities that I had to connect with people and create relationships that were not solely focused on dance.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Sharing my art and being accessible to people who feel like I can be of help to them.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Two: It’s not all about you, and everything happens for a reason.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
Oh, that’s such a hard question! I have to say Sheep Meadow in Central Park. It’s a little cheesy and basic, but it’s real. New York is my favorite place in the world. Once you leave New York, you’re like, ‘Oh, thank God I left,’ but then you’re like two, three days out and you’re like, ‘Wait, now I miss it!’”

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. I did my senior choreography thesis based on it. It’s this somewhat fictional, somewhat based-on-fact short story collection. He theorizes how Einstein was imagining how time moves. It is so much about questioning reality and questioning your perspective on things. That’s been a basis for how I take things in and how I see the world, for sure.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I loved Dean Milton Javier Bravo, who taught Faith and Critical Reasoning. I appreciated that he didn’t just see me as a student, he saw me as a human. He was like, “Okay, you’re on your own journey and this is my class, but what you bring to the class is more important than you just showing up and sitting here.” He was always trying to get everyone else involved in the class. On the Ailey side, the one who’s closest to my heart is one of my ballet teachers, Caridad Martinez. She’s a former Cuban ballerina, incredible technician. I loved her class so much. It was always the hardest class. I would make sure in my schedule that I could get into her classes, because she knew the way I worked. She was able to push me and be like, “Kathy, is that really your best? I don’t think you’re giving me your best today. I know you can do better than this.” I hope she knows that she’s been a big influence.

An actor finds his footing in film and TV

Miles Gutierrez-Riley says it was at Fordham College at Lincoln Center that he truly grasped how to be a well-rounded actor and person—although the California native has charm and charisma that can’t be taught in the classroom.

Set to appear as Hulkling in the forthcoming Marvel Studios and Disney+ series Agatha: Coven of Chaos, Gutierrez-Riley has already starred in a coming-of-age feature film, The Moon & Back (2022), and the Amazon Studios series The Wilds since graduating from the Fordham Theatre program in 2020.

Amid this year’s historic strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the 25-year-old rising star has been auditioning for theater productions.

“My heart really does lie in theater, and I also love making TV and movies,” he says. “I want the flexibility and the reputation to have a name in all three of those.”

The Collaborative Spirit of Fordham Theatre

Gutierrez-Riley says he chose Fordham Theatre for the individualized attention it offers students and for Fordham’s interdisciplinary core curriculum, including courses in science and theology. He took advantage of the Lincoln Center campus’s proximity to the Broadway theater district. Seeing shows after classes and seeing what he and his classmates could create on a regular basis made the dream feel within reach, he says.

He humbly recalls acting in 10 shows at Fordham, directing one, and being involved in small ways with as many projects as he could. He says his favorite classes, Collaboration I and II, helped him learn to take constructive criticism, creatively engage with others, and garner a deep appreciation for critical communication.

This collaborative spirit lies at the core of the Fordham Theatre program, says Gutierrez-Riley, who credits a former professor, Stephanie DiMaggio, FCLC ’04, with encouraging him to be “a really alive being.”

“She told me things like, ‘When you’re at the deli, talk to the people and say thank you,’ and ‘Take your headphones out on the subway.’ I really didn’t understand this until I was out in the world,” he says. “Having so many different experiences with so many different people is what’s going to make you a strong actor.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

An investor provides capital for overlooked communities

From the South Side of Chicago to New York City investment banks, Capitol Hill, and Mexico City startups, Israel Muñoz has been all over the map working to change the distribution of capital.

“Even within venture capital, less than two or three percent goes to women, less than two percent goes to people of color,” he says, “and capital is the tool for building the future.”

As a first-generation Mexican American in Chicago, Muñoz became involved in grassroots organizing and activism surrounding public education when he noticed his high school struggling to provide viable resources to students. He earned a scholarship to attend Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he intended to major in political science but quickly switched to economics—a subject that was “an abstraction” to him until he took an introductory macroeconomics course taught by Michael Buckley, Ph.D.

Attending Fordham at the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Muñoz became interested in understanding wealth and income inequality and how economic forces shape the world at large. That curiosity was nourished by his time in the Matteo Ricci seminar, an honors course for students interested in connecting research with community engagement. For Muñoz, the experience deepened his political consciousness and planted the seeds for him to apply for a Fulbright scholarship.

“We spoke about economic inequality and we read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The thoughts about the one percent and power and wealth were really swimming in my head. I think Matteo Ricci just made me a more informed citizen,” says Muñoz, who also earned a Campion fellowship from Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships that took him to Chile to research education inequality.

Increasingly interested in finance, he interned at UBS, JPMorgan Chase, and in the offices of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin before a Fulbright scholarship took him to Mexico City, where he gained exposure to the Latin American tech ecosystem.

He credits Anna Beskin, Ph.D., then an advisor in Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships, for her constructive help with his Fulbright essay. “If Anna wasn’t there, I probably wouldn’t have gotten [the opportunity] and become a venture capital investor,” he says.

Since returning from his Fulbright experience Mexico, Muñoz has worked as an investment analyst for the Illinois state treasurer and as an associate at Acrew Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund. He also helped start Angeles Investors, a Hispanic- and Latinx-focused angel investor group.

“I think it’s really important that capital be distributed in a different way,” he says, “so that more of us have a shot at creating the future.”

An award-winning filmmaker blends horror and sci-fi

When it was time to apply to college, Luke Momo took one tip in particular to heart: Don’t major in film. A close, older friend suggested he pick one of the humanities—English, history, philosophy—and instead explore the ways a particular subject intersects with film.

Now, with an award-winning debut feature under his belt and a trove of ideas to pursue, Momo has been reflecting on his time at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in philosophy, dove into filmmaking as a visual arts minor, and forged connections that proved invaluable when it came time to cast his movie, Capsules. 

A Princeton, New Jersey, native, Momo was drawn across the river to the University for its “intellectual rigor,” originally choosing to major in classics. He did veer from his friend’s advice a bit by minoring in visual arts with a concentration in film. But a philosophical ethics class he took with professor Janna van Grunsven, Ph.D., during his sophomore year made him reconsider. 

“After I took that class, I realized that [it was]what I’d want to do my major in [and explore]the intersection between philosophy and film,” he says. The professor “was able to share with me a higher level of some of the things I was interested in at that time—and I still am. She was very supportive in that way.”

Creating a Cinema Community on Campus

Outside of class, Momo founded Fordham’s Filmmaking Club in 2016, a kind of film study group for students interested in viewing and discussing movies, as well as pursuing projects together.

“We could help each other make our films and collaborate,” he says. “We’d have very memorable screenings of all kinds of different movies that you otherwise wouldn’t see, and you could watch them in a group and discuss them afterward.”

The club continues today, with students collaborating on film projects, sharing them, and hosting film festivals. “It seems to be fulfilling its original purpose and also growing—becoming more and encompassing more ideas and progressing,” Momo says.

He also completed two internships, one at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative—an artist-run nonprofit—and one at Le Cinéma Club, a curated streaming platform featuring one free film each week. 

“It was just really cool because week after week, we were researching, writing about, discovering, and highlighting works of film art,” he says, including a number of international films to which he wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed. 

From Campus Collaboration to Award-Winning Feature

Capsules, which Momo wrote with Davis Browne, FCLC ’19, features more than half a dozen Fordham graduates in starring and behind-the-scenes roles. 

The film blends sci-fi and horror, focusing on four chemistry students who experiment with mysterious substances and find themselves struggling with addiction in an unexpected way: They’ll die unless they take more.

“I just basically pursued an emotional feeling … the fear of letting one’s life slip away and a sadness over mistakes,” says Momo, who directed the film. The premise came after the pandemic, when “we had been through so many traumas personally, in our communities, and on a global level. All these things came together, and the idea for Capsules just sort of emerged.”

The film earned the Best Feature award at the 2022 Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York City. Momo later sold the film to a distributor, and it’s available to watch on Tubi and Vudu.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

A U.N. communications officer and analyst helps farmers adapt to climate change

Chicago native Ian Muir Smith got his first meaningful exposure to the effects of climate change in 2021, as a Fordham College at Lincoln Center student majoring in international studies.

He earned a summer research grant to travel to Kenya, where he spent three months studying how farmers are using technology to mobilize resources and “guide their own development,” he says. He lived in an adobe hut with no running water and watched his hosts’ water reserves run out because of a drought.

“That was the context of everything that was happening in people’s lives,” he says.

Toward a More Just Model of Agricultural Development

The farmers Smith lived with in Kenya are among nearly 4.5 billion people who rely on food systems for their livelihood, according to the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs. It’s a statistic that lies at the heart of Smith’s work as a consultant for the U.N.’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and as a research fellow for the nonprofit Food Tank.

“In order for countries to ‘develop,’ agriculture is the first thing that has to change,” Smith says, noting that agriculture is also responsible for one third of global greenhouse gasses contributing to climate change. “And whether they get to determine how to do it, or whether other countries and companies are determining how they do it, is up in the air. I want to make agriculture and agricultural development more just and more democratic.”

As a communications and knowledge management consultant with IFAD, which is an international financial institution and specialized United Nations agency, Smith looks over data from the portfolio of grants that the agency sends to research institutions to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change. He then writes reports and blog posts on the effects those grants had. These are made available in the agency’s “knowledge base,” a database that is publicly available and sent to partners and donors.

Working to Ensure That Climate Debt Gets Paid

By the time his final semester rolled around, he had the opportunity to take a communications internship with the United Nations in Rome, where IFAD is headquartered, beginning his professional relationship with the agency and furthering his passion for steering developmental resources to those most impacted by industrialization and climate change.

“The reason that I want to do what I want to do,” he explains, “is that I truly believe the U.S. and Europe owe a debt to the billions of people who are suffering because of the climate crisis and neo-imperialism. And I want to spend my life making sure that debt is paid.”

Since graduating, Smith has helped organize several youth climate actions and is currently working to start a microfinancing social enterprise to invest in women’s communal banking groups in Kenya. And while food system and climate issues can often result in a sort of “doom and gloom” feeling, Smith says that his work has made him feel more optimistic about meeting the challenge.

“Every day I learn about new organizations doing new work that is changing people’s lives,” he says. “There are millions and millions of people who are working on food systems and are determined to make the world better.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

That’s why the 2020 Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate has made it her mission to support women. She co-founded Aara Health, a health-tech platform and line of products focused on “stigmatized women’s-related issues, like menstruation,” she says.

“I think for me, as a woman, it is really important to stand up for the wrongs that women face—whether that’s silence or accessibility to health care,” she says.

Nanda also launched the nonprofit Project Naveli, which aims to provide women with access to resources and opportunities that promote education, legal awareness, and both economic and social development.

“I think that the way in which the Indian social impact ecosystem is growing—we have a lot of young people coming up with a lot of innovative ways to give back to society,” she says. “I want Project Naveli to be one of those organizations that sets an example for how we can do social work that goes beyond just a financial exchange to help support and build ecosystems.”

From Mumbai to NYC and Back

Nanda says that attending Fordham in New York City helped inspire her creatively.

“I think just the experience of living in a city that is so full of different kinds of people, different cultures, different ideas was really good for me at that age, when I was still exploring what I wanted to do professionally,” she says. “I think it kind of pushed me to work a lot harder and be a bit more independent.”

Nanda, who majored in digital technology and emerging media, recently launched a podcast, What the Hell Navya, with her grandmother and mother to discuss topics like financial security, friendship, and health. She also uses her social media presence (including 1 million followers on Instagram) to generate awareness of women’s issues and her own work.

“I’ve always tried to use it to highlight and talk about some very serious causes and things that I work on—issues that are important to me,” she says. “And that’s also a trend that I see, at least with young people in India today, is that they’re using their platforms to talk about things that we really want to fix or we want to change.”

It’s that youthful energy that Nanda said makes her hopeful for the future.

“I come from a country where we have a very large youth population, and I think that will really bring India to the forefront of a lot of decision-making, a lot of policymaking,” she says. “I’m just excited to see what the youth in India does in the next 10 to 15 years.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

“I thought it was very cool and current and wanted to be part of it,” said Skillin, a sophomore environmental studies student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

He and Dickantone are among eight Fordham students hoping to find answers to several questions about the bugs that no one seems to know yet: How often do they mate? Are squirrels making meals out of them? Why are they attracted to certain types of city buildings and not others?

These answers could help point to ways to control the invasive species, their professor said.

Ellen van Wilgenburg, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in the Department of Natural Sciences at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is spearheading the research and teaching the students scientific methods to collect data that can be used in larger studies of the lanternflies. So far, existing research has focused more on the agricultural impact than the behavior of the species. 

“It’s pest management and applied research, which is very important work,” she said. “But I think behavioral ecology is also important and can help with pest management, too.”

Dickantone, a senior neuroscience major, and Skillin have now begun dissecting the insects under the microscope to see how many spermatophores, or sperm packets, the female insects have in their abdomens to determine how many times they have mated. They also have recorded videos of the courtship process showing the males vibrating their wings rapidly and stroking the females in an effort to attract them. 

Each female lays 30 to 50 eggs in masses on trees. They are currently at that egg-laying phase of their life cycle; they will die off in November and December. 

“You would expect species that are introduced and encounter a novel environment would mate [more than once],“ to help the species survive, van Wilgenburg said, and the students are trying to determine if that is the case with the lanternflies.

Little Calorie Bombs

Another team of students has been collecting squirrel feces and looking for molecular markers that would indicate a developing taste for lanternflies. They have witnessed squirrels eating the insects in the park. This is significant because the species has few known predators, most likely helping its rapid population explosion.

“Actually they are not very tasty,” van Wilgenburg said. “Supposedly they are very bitter.” She said the trees the lanternflies prefer contain quassinoids, compounds that make them unpalatable to most insect-eating animals. “Squirrels eat acorns, which are also bitter, so maybe.”

Van Wilgenburg added, “Females, especially when full of eggs, must be little calorie bombs and full of nutrition.”

How High?

Another group of students in her Global Ecology Lab looked at what features on buildings attract lanternflies. There have not been any published studies looking into this, but several researchers have speculated that the lanternflies confuse tall buildings for trees. Van Wilgenburg said her students’ data showed height doesn’t matter. What they found does matter is if a building has a lot of glass on its lower floors.

She said she wants to look at it further, perhaps next year, and collect more data. “Could it be UV light wavelengths? Maybe we could find something that could work as traps.”

Spotted lanternflies are native to China, where they are kept in check by a parasitic wasp. In the U.S., they were first detected in Pennsylvania in September 2014 while they were mostly feasting on another invasive species, the Tree of Heaven. They have caused a great deal of alarm among state agriculture departments. 

But since then, as they have multiplied and migrated and developed a taste for other plants, scientists are realizing the bugs don’t do a terrible amount of harm other than being an annoyance, van Wilgenburg said, noting that fruit trees and vineyards are the only agricultural species of concern.

To Stomp or Not to Stomp?

So what about the trending effort to try stomping them out?

Thirty-five percent of them at relevant life stages—mainly egg masses—would need to be killed to start lowering the population growth, van Wilgenburg said, citing a study from 2021. 

“Stomping on them is not going to help.”