“It’s really gratifying to see how many of the projects lean into our identity as a Jesuit institution,” said Ann Gaylin, dean of GSAS, “and strive to advance knowledge in the service of the greater good.”

Students displayed posters on topics that ranged from biology to theology to economics to psychology.

Nina Naghshineh, Ph.D. in Biological Sciences

Topic: The Role of Bacteria in Protecting Salamanders

How would you describe your research?
I study the salamander skin microbiome and how features of bacterial communities provide protection against a fungal pathogen that is decimating amphibian populations globally.

Why does this interest you?
I’m really interested in how microbes interact and function. My study system is this adorable amphibian, but the whole topic is so interesting because microbial communities are so complex and really hard to study. So the field provides many avenues for exploration. These types of associations are present in our guts and on our skin. I’m interested in going into human microbiome work after I graduate, so I have a lot of options available to me because of this research.

Nicholas McIntosh, Ph.D. in Philosophy

Topic: Using AI to Help Scholars Distill Information from a Vast Body of Texts

How would you describe your project?
It’s a digital humanities project that uses natural language processing to help read and understand many texts at once. There’s this vision we have of a really great humanities scholar who is able to know a text so well that they could almost quote it from memory. That is really difficult for us to do right now in the same way we might have when there were only a couple of touchstone classical texts.

What do you hope this will accomplish?
Scholars are scanning texts either for our classes or for our own research. So this would help us figure out, number one, how can you look at a text and be able to recognize— is this text useful for me? Number two, what are the most important concepts that we should be tracking in a text? And number three, what is the text as data telling us that maybe scholarship is overlooking or overemphasizing given traditional readings?

I would also like to show that those of us who do philosophy don’t have to be afraid of these technologies.

Angel Villamar, Siphesihle Sitole, and Virginia Scherer, M.A. in International Political and Economic Development (IPED)

Project name: Climate Mitigation: The Role of a People’s Organization in the Philippines

What were you investigating with this research?
We looked at the role of the grassroots organization Tulungan sa Kabuhayan ng Calawis in dealing with climate mitigation. It was formed after Typhoon Ketsana hit in 2009. There is an area right outside of Manila that, over the years, has been deforested, so this organization organized to help incentivize reforestation. The farmers in the area, who are mostly women, develop the seedlings, do the land preparation, and plant the trees.

What do you hope people learn from this project?
We want to think about reforestation not as a one-time thing but as a long-term sustainable way. What incentives do you need so that you can keep doing this? We are showing that you can involve ordinary individuals at the grassroots level in something that is much bigger than them.

This fall in Arizona, advocates used a research report from Alexander Meyer, a Fordham student in the international political economy and development graduate program, to get the state to change its policy around SNAP benefits for community college students.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to a food assistance benefit called SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—was expanded.

By analyzing data from the Arizona Department of Economic Security, Meyer found that during this time, there was at least a 22% increase in Arizona college students accessing this benefit.

“My primary research question was, is there a population of college students that is in need, but is cut off from accessing SNAP because of too-stringent eligibility requirements?” said Meyer, who is from Arizona.

“The answer to that question is there is indeed a large population of college students in need of SNAP.”

Expanding Access

Across the country, about one in five college students face food insecurity, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.

In order to qualify for SNAP—outside of the pandemic emergency—applicants must meet federal income guidelines. In addition, “able-bodied” adults also have a work requirement, which can include everything from having a job to being in a career training program. Being a student in traditional colleges and universities, however, usually does not make them eligible, so many students can’t access the benefits unless they also work part time.

During the pandemic, that requirement changed and college students became eligible. But when the emergency declaration ended in the spring of 2023, those expanded benefits went away, leaving many college students facing food insecurity issues again, Meyer said.

In stepped the Arizona Food Bank Network, where Meyer once worked and still maintains connections. The organization advocated for college students, or at a minimum, community college students, to maintain their access to SNAP.

“Hunger and food insecurity on college campuses is a growing issue across the nation,” a memo from the Food Bank Network, which cited Meyer’s paper, read. “Increased food insecurity and decreased education levels can have detrimental and long-lasting effects not only to individuals but also to the health and economic well-being of communities as a whole.”

Their work, backed up by Meyer’s paper, helped convince Arizona’s Department of Economic Security to count community college as a career training program, which allows students at those schools to satisfy the work requirement.

Next Steps

For Andrew Simons, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, seeing his student’s work—which started in his applied econometrics course last fall—be used to change state policy is a huge achievement.

“Some part of me wants to say this is the goal, but this is far exceeding the expectation,” he said. “You always want your research to be influencing the world.”

Simons and Meyer are doing a bit more analysis and work on the paper with a goal of getting it officially published in an academic journal. They’re also continuing the research, with a plan to look at the next set of data from 2023.

“We can analyze what that drop-off looks like and use that to further bolster our findings, saying, ‘You allowed this temporary exemption to allow more students to qualify for SNAP. Participation went up, and then you took it away, and participation went back down,’” Meyer said.

Meyer said he’s proud that his work had an impact, and that he hopes his research can be used to expand eligibility for all college students in Arizona and support similar policy changes in other states.

“Frankly it’s a dream—who doesn’t want to contribute via their research to expanding policy that in a very real way will touch tens of thousands of college students, making sure they have food to eat, and via that food, that they can thrive in their studies,” Meyer said.

At Fordham, students can participate in the meal swipe donation program, where students with extra meal swipes can donate them and students who are facing food insecurity issues can access additional meal swipes through campus ministry. In addition, students facing food insecurity-related challenges can reach out to staff in student affairs, campus ministry, financial aid, or their dean’s office for additional resources.

An alumnus of the program, he had traveled to the U.S. in the summer of 2010 with nine other South African students for six weeks, studying alongside students in Fordham’s graduate program in International Political and Economic Development (IPED), part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS).

“There is something about having that program on my resume that I think has certainly made a difference and was a signal to potential employers,” said Venter, who is now an economics consultant in Pretoria and who joined the nearly 100 participants at an Aug. 19 celebration.

“Now that I’m doing the hiring, I tend to look twice to see if they did attend these sort of summer classes.”

The Emerging Markets program, which began in 2008 and continues today, is open to all IPED students and students from South Africa’s University of Pretoria. Students learn about monetary and fiscal policies and explore issues of economic partnership between South Africa and the United States.

In addition to classes, in both locations, they visit businesses as well as labor and government representatives. Each year, about 15 South African students visit New York in June, and an equal number of Fordham students visit South Africa in August.

When Venter’s cohort came to New York City in 2010, they attended classes on political risk analysis and finance and visited Washington D.C., Broadway, and the U.S. Stock Exchange.

A Promise Fulfilled

The Emerging Markets program originated with a conversation between Fordham President Emeritus Joseph McShane, S.J., and Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who visited Fordham in 2005 to accept an honorary doctorate.

Booi Themeli, Ph.D., a senior lecturer of economics and a native of South Africa, said Father McShane told him the archbishop had joked that in return for his visit, the University would have to do something for South Africans.

Three years later, the first cohort of Fordham students traveled to South Africa, and five years later, Venter’s cohort traveled to the U.S. To date, 208 Fordham students have visited South Africa, while 213 South African Students have visited Fordham.

Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., director of the IPED program, said the goal was to create an opportunity for South Africans who traditionally weren’t part of the educational system to get an advanced degree.

“It really tied in with the end of Apartheid, the establishment of a wider democracy, and Fordham making a contribution to empowering the people who were left out,” he said.

A Transatlantic Romance Blossoms

Elena Konopelko, GSAS ’13, came to the Bronx in 2011 from St. Petersburg, Russia, on a Fulbright scholarship to study with the IPED program.

She joined the Emerging Markets program and visited South Africa in the summer of 2012. There, she met Sokhana Caza, GSAS ’13, an alumnus of the program who was now a program assistant.

The following fall, he returned to the Rose Hill campus to earn an IPED master’s, and the two reunited. They married in 2016, and today, they share a home in Johannesburg with three children.

Konopelko said living in three different countries has opened her eyes to different approaches to business and academia.

“There are so many different options in how to conduct yourself professionally and how best to learn that you can make your own path forward,” she said.

Fireflies and Real-World Lessons

Studying in New York City was life-changing for Caza. Times Square and the subway were new to him, but there were also smaller, unexpected moments—like seeing fireflies on a warm July evening at Rose Hill.

“I’d never seen them in my whole life. Just watching them at night, it was probably one of the most memorable moments of my time,” he said.

After nine years working for BP and Bloomberg, Caza now works for a financial technology firm affiliated with the Singapore Stock Exchange.

“The thing that I really liked when I got [to Fordham IPED]was that most of the professors had experience working for a corporate or financial institution,” he said.

“When they taught, it wasn’t all theory; it was always related to the real world.”

Changing Lives, Changing Families, Changing the World

Ann Gaylin, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said the August reunion was one of the most moving experiences she’s had in her career.

“There was such a sense of joy and energy in the students. It wasn’t just about changing lives but changing families and changing the world,” she said.

Margaret Chitiga-Mabugu, Ph.D., dean of the faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at the University of Pretoria, credited the program with creating global leaders.

“I have seen first-hand how the program enriches the student’s academic knowledge and provides a platform to interact with influential business leaders and policymakers,” she said.

“It not only benefits the students who participate; it has created opportunities for staff members at the University of Pretoria to enlarge their networks and has created prospects for future collaboration.”

Watch students from the 2023 cohort visit New York City last summer below:

For Priya Ravindran, who met her Ukrainian husband at Fordham and later adopted his country as her own, reporting on the war and sharing her young family’s story is an act of resistance.

When Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, Priya Ravindran was living in Kyiv with her Ukrainian husband and their 2-year-old son, Neil. The couple met in 2010 as graduate students at Fordham and were married in Kyiv four years later.

“We led fairly normal lives. We worked, traveled within Ukraine and internationally, went out on the weekends, went out to eat, met with friends,” said Ravindran, who was an editor at the Ukrainian state-run news station UATV English before going on maternity leave in 2019. “It wasn’t until February 24 that our lives changed forever.”

Two days later, amid reports of military and civilian casualties near Kyiv, they fled, joining more than 12 million people who would leave their homes following the Russian invasion.

‘Trying to Play My Part’

As they drove away, “Alex asked me in the car, ‘Do you realize you are now officially a mother fleeing war with an almost-3-year-old?’” Ravindran wrote on February 26.

“We always knew this was a possibility. Even before I got pregnant, I asked Alex many times, ‘What if we have a child and full-out war breaks out?’ … Like with everything in life, you try to put those thoughts at the back of your mind, but here we are.”

They headed west with a friend and his mom, driving through numerous Ukrainian military checkpoints. “We are surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains, vast snow-covered fields, and heaps and heaps of trees with just the perfect amount of snow,” she wrote. “Seeing the pristine beauty of nature, I almost think to myself, ‘This is all a dream, right? It has to be.’ But no, this isn’t a dream. … Ukraine is still fighting for its existence.”

On February 28, they arrived at their destination: a friend’s home in Ivano-Frankivsk.

“I have a lot of guilt that I’m not doing enough, not helping enough,” Ravindran wrote that day. “But I’m trying to play my part in letting people know what’s happening, as best as I can, in the best way I know how: through my love of writing.”

Since late February, Ravindran has been posting daily accounts of the war. In each post on her public Facebook page, she typically mixes news and analysis with a firsthand account by another writer as well as personal stories of her family’s experiences and emotions. (To protect her husband’s identity, she uses the pseudonym Alex to refer to him.)

Her posts have reached a broad audience. On March 3, one day before Neil’s third birthday, she was interviewed by Indian TV journalist Barkha Dutt, “whose reporting in the 1990s on the India-Pakistan war convinced me as a 12-year-old to be a journalist,” Ravindran wrote.

From Mumbai to Kyiv via Rose Hill

Born in Mumbai, Ravindran was 17 years old when she moved from India to the U.S. to attend college. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism and international relations at the State University of New York at Oswego, she enrolled at Fordham to pursue a master’s degree in political science.

The day before her classes started in fall 2010, she left her walk-up apartment on Arthur Avenue to buy groceries. “When I returned, I was holding the door to the building open with one leg while pushing all my bags in,” she said. “At the same time, Alex exited his apartment on the first floor, stopped, and asked me if I needed help. I told him I could manage, but he insisted, so he carried all my bags upstairs and started to run away. I screamed ‘Priya!’ after him, and he said, ‘Alex!’”

Alex had arrived at Fordham on a Fulbright Fellowship, and he was enrolled in Fordham’s International Political Economy and Development program. The two saw each other in class the next day, Ravindran said, but it wasn’t until the end of the semester that she learned that they share a love of trance music. “I invited him and his roommates to a concert by a famous German duo,” she said. “He asked me out the next day, and the rest is history, as they say.” They were married in Kyiv on June 26, 2014.

A Rousing Song for the Motherland

In her daily posts on Facebook, Ravindran has covered numerous aspects of the war. In early July, she published transcripts of phone conversations intercepted by the Ukrainian Security Service in which Russian soldiers discuss the killing of civilians. In mid-May, she shared the results of a Kyiv School of Economics study indicating that, as of May 10, the war had caused an estimated $600 billion in economic losses in the country. And in June, she covered a nightly address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he said that at least 828 children had been affected by the war—446 injured, 243 killed, and 139 missing.

“We talk about war and its impact in numbers, and as jarring as they may be,” Ravindran wrote, “they don’t always convey the full story. … They don’t tell us about the trauma parents and their children are dealing with. We remember so many wars in numbers, but we forget about the stories.”

Amid the fear and anxiety of the war, and the near-constant threat of air raids, she has found moments to celebrate: the “happiness on Neil’s face” when he gets a couple of “siren-free” hours to play in a local park, for example, and the “immense joy” of seeing the Ukrainian rap and folk band Kalush Orchestra win the annual Eurovision Song Contest in mid-May.

“It doesn’t mean anything for the war,” she wrote at the time, “but it was a small relief for the psyche.” She noted that the band’s lead singer, Oleh Psiuk, wrote the winning song, “Stefania,” as an ode to his own mother. But since the Russian invasion, the song has taken on new meaning.

“People have been using the song to symbolize Ukraine—the yearning of children who have been separated from their mothers because they are serving in the military; the emotions of sons who are missing their mothers who crossed the border to bring their other siblings to safety; the pain of children who have lost their mothers to the war,” Ravindran wrote.

And with lyrics like, “I’ll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed,” she added: “Some are reminded of the motherland itself.”

Read Priya Ravindran’s Ukraine war journal on Facebook at @pravindran1.

Fifteen students, alumni, and friends of the University of Pretoria lived at the Rose Hill campus for five weeks. In the evening, they took business classes taught by Fordham faculty. During the day, they visited prestigious companies in guided tours led by Fordham alumni who now work at those companies, including Jason Caldwell, GABELLI ’10,’17, GSAS ’11, who serves as a vice president of private wealth management at Goldman Sachs; Darlene Checo-Nuñez, FCRH ’17, an account manager at Bloomberg LP; and Brian Joyce, GABELLI ’98, a managing director at Nasdaq. 

“This program far transcends the traditional classroom pedagogy,” Vusi Maupa, a 33-year-old senior policy analyst at the National Treasury of South Africa, wrote in an email. “We had immeasurable privileges of interacting with senior executives and gained tremendous insight into [their work].” 

Maupa, who graduated from the University of Pretoria with his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, said that he participated in the exchange program to learn how to manage financial and economic risks and opportunities in his country and beyond. He said those lessons will help him at his job, where he works in the fiscal policy unit.

“Before the program, I had limited knowledge of strategic financial management and political risk analysis. I am now confident with my understanding and knowledge of these subjects. I will be using the knowledge and skills gained in my professional work,” said Maupa. 

Yuvana Jaichand, a 22-year-old graduate student who is studying econometrics, said that the most interesting part of the program was visiting top companies in the business sector. 

“It is interesting to see how they manage to maneuver through challenges and how they come up with various creative solutions to market gaps,” she wrote in an email. “It was surprising to see how big firms/companies don’t have it figured out all the time and how they learn as they progress.” 

Jaichand, who never visited the U.S. before this summer, said that the program has expanded her perspective on the world. 

“I saw this program as an opportunity to experience the world in a new light and to broaden my knowledge beyond an academic environment,” said Jaichand, who is working toward becoming an econometrician or data scientist. “Fordham has provided the opportunity to experience New York, which is known by many as the financial hub of the world, firsthand.” 

Besides learning about the American business world, the South African students used their first trip to the United States to explore New York City. 

Booi Themeli, Ph.D., director of the exchange program and an associate professor of economics at Fordham, said they were invited to watch the annual Macy’s Fourth of July fireworks show by Gregory Stewart, a deputy inspector for the New York City Police Department.

Shortly before the show began, they met the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. They also saw The Lion King on Broadway, where original cast member Ron Kunene, a friend of Themeli’s, introduced them to some of the main performers, including the actor who plays Mufasa. In addition, the students visited Boston for a weekend, where they toured Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston College. 

The Fordham-University of Pretoria student exchange program was launched in 2007 by the Most Reverend Desmond Mpilo Tutu—archbishop emeritus of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa and a 1984 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who was awarded an honorary doctorate from Fordham in 2005—who aimed to empower the next generation of leaders, said Themeli. 

During past visits, graduate students from South Africa have taken classes at several Fordham schools, such as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Social Service, and participated in on-campus festivities like the annual Dagger John Day pie-eating contest. Outside the classroom, the students have met people who run world-famous companies and gained a firsthand look at the American way of doing business. The partnership between Fordham and the University of Pretoria has also expanded to include the Ubuntu program, a semester-long student exchange program for undergraduates.

In turn, Fordham graduate students have studied in South Africa, where they engaged with foreign political advisers and policymakers and conducted data analyses with students from across the world. In addition, they attended social events where they met a former South African first lady and CEOs of major banks in South Africa. In August, 12 IPED students will visit the University of Pretoria and take business classes with some of the same students who visited Fordham this summer.

“This program represents one of the focal points of Fordham’s internationalization efforts,” Themeli wrote in an email. “It continues to provide opportunities to South African and Fordham students to study in South Africa and the U.S, thus enabling them to gain an understanding of other cultures that are important in their chosen fields of study. In addition, the program is in line with Fordham’s mission to contribute to economic development and social transformation of South Africa and the rest of the African continent.”

“We Fordham students have a privilege and also a responsibility to work with community-based organizations to help make the Bronx a better place—and that’s true of any community you live in,” said Medeiros.

Nutrition and Affordable Housing for Families

When Ellie Bauer walks across the commencement stage this spring, she’ll have earned two master’s degrees: one in economics and another in international political economy and development (IPED).

In 2020, she entered Fordham as a Peace Corps Coverdell Fellow, a fellowship for recently returned Peace Corps volunteers. She had volunteered in Ethiopia, where she taught nutrition classes to middle school students and helped families reach their nutritional goals. As part of her fellowship at Fordham, she served as a volunteer coordinator at the University Neighborhood Housing Program (UNHP), a nonprofit that creates and improves affordable housing for residents in the Northwest Bronx. Over the past two years, she managed volunteers and interns and helped clients complete their affordable housing applications. She also worked with a team to implement a new virtual tax assistance program for low-income residents. 

“I grew up in a town of 2,000 people, where we all knew each other and shared a certain culture. Moving somewhere for a job or school provides you with a different community to live with, and it’s important to learn more about that community,” Bauer said.  

Thanks to her Presidential Management Fellowship—a program that matches outstanding graduate students with federal opportunities—she will move to Chicago and become a program specialist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, where she will support WIC, a supplemental nutrition program for low- to middle-income families.

Bauer said she is grateful for her mentors in Fordham’s IPED program, who ensured that Bauer and her classmates got to know each other during the pandemic and secured funding for their unpaid internships and language training. 

“I feel very lucky to have found the IPED program and the directors who make it so great,” she said. 

Listening to Men Experiencing Homelessness

Benjamin Medeiros is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Fordham College at Rose Hill. In his first year at Fordham, he tutored elementary students and tended to a community garden in the Bronx. Over the past year, he has worked to dismantle stereotypes about the homeless population with his classmates through Fordham’s Engaged Leaders Fellowship, offered by the Center for Community Engaged Learning. His team interviewed men living at a Manhattan shelter about their lives and surveyed more than 100 Fordham students about their perceptions of the homeless community. 

At the end of May, he will fly to Mississippi through Global Outreach, a Fordham service and cultural immersion program. For one week, Medeiros will serve as a counselor at a sleepaway camp for foster children from low-income backgrounds. This fall, he will return to Fordham to pursue his Ph.D. in counseling psychology. 

“Being a counseling psychologist is essentially being a community-engaged learner. You interact with a community and learn from the people that you work with,” said Medeiros, who hopes to someday counsel clients at a correctional facility in New York. 

“My experiences at Fordham have taught me how to appreciate the people in the larger community, especially in marginalized corners of that community,” said Medeiros, “and how to use my skill set and voice to make that community better.”

The index was developed by IPED students to help the public understand the plight of the poor on a global scale. 

On his return from Rome, Schwalbenberg stopped by the Catholic University of America to present the results of the poverty index and meet with IPED alumni in the Washington, D.C., area.

“In addressing us, Pope Francis encouraged us all ‘to sow many small seeds that can bear fruit in an economy that is equitable and beneficial, humane and people centered,’” Schwalbenberg wrote in an e-mail.

Through Fordham’s Pope Francis poverty index and the training of professions to work in agencies like Catholic Relief Services, he wrote, “this is what we are trying to do.”

“Economists are usually more concerned with money, wealth, and income, not so much with health. But health should come before money,” Deaton said at the Lincoln Center campus on Sept. 24—his first “non-Zoom” presentation in 18 months. “Money and health means very little if you’re not alive to enjoy it.” 

Deaton was the keynote speaker at the fourth event of the biennial conference “The Health of Nations: Pope Francis’ Call for Inclusion,” co-hosted by Fordham’s Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED) and the U.S. affiliate of the Vatican foundation Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice. The goal of the conference is to bring together international experts to address poverty and development issues raised by Pope Francis through the lens of Catholic social teaching. Deaton was joined by several speakers, including Frank J. Caggiano, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and award-winning economist and University of Notre Dame professor Joseph P. Kaboski for a moderated discussion. 

Deaton’s work is a critical part of Fordham’s IPED curriculum, said Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., program director and associate professor of economics. 

“His work on measuring poverty guides our stuents in preparing our annual publication of Fordham’s Pope Francis’ global poverty index, and his writing on deaths in the tropics is at the core of how we teach our students about public health issues in the developing world,” Schwalbenberg said at the conference. “Because of Professor Deaton’s exceptional writings as well as the outstanding professional field experiences provided by Catholic Relief Services, our students are that much more prepared to understand and contribute to international efforts to reduce—hopefully, reduce—global poverty.” 

Many global health inequalities are driven by low infant and child mortality rates in poor countries, said Deaton. The U.S. can help them by requesting that organizations like the National Institutes of Health research more diseases that greatly impact poorer countries, he said. The U.S. government can also increase the distribution of global public goods, like the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, to countries that desperately need them. In addition, the U.S. can reduce arms sales, he said. 

“America makes huge amounts of money through exporting arms. I don’t know what we think we’re doing when we’re sending aid to countries at the same time we’re selling arms to them,” Deaton said. “When my students come to me and say, ‘What should we do to help people in poor countries?’ … I say, ‘The country you should go to is Washington, D.C. and you should tell people to stop harming people in poor countries.’ We can do a tremendous amount of that without actually going there and pretending to help or trying to help.” 

What doesn’t work very well, he said, is transferring monetary funds from rich to poor countries, what we commonly view as “aid.” What those countries need more than money is an “internal social contract” between the government and its people, he said. 

“We complain about our government, but we mostly pay our taxes … and in exchange, they give us all these things—police, defense, roads, laws, health, pensions and education—and that’s because we’re organized in a way that in exchange for our taxes, the government can give us these things back,” Deaton explained. It is the lack of this “contract” that is characteristic of poor countries. In other words, he said, financial aid from rich countries often prevents the governments of poorer countries from being held accountable for their people. 

“The governments don’t bother to look after their people because they don’t need to. Most African countries get more than 70% of the government budget from aid … You cannot get development without an internal social contract, without an internal community first. Whatever we do, we should try not to destroy that,” Deaton said. 

But the U.S. has its own problems to deal with as well, he said. Since 1980, adult life expectancy has steadily risen in rich countries across the world, but the U.S. is an exemption, said Deaton. Many Americans are dying “deaths of despair,” including accidental drug overdose and suicide. A large part of that population lacks a four-year college degree. They have been facing a declining labor market thanks to robots, globalization, and the increasing costs of health care. This loss of jobs has had negative ripple effects across their financial, social, and mental well-being, he said. 

“The key takeaway is that [in]the labor market, jobs for people without a four-year college degree have been vanishing … jobs that really gave meaning to people’s lives, gave them a chance at promotion,” Deaton said. “This failing labor market has brought social dysfunction in many forms and in many communities across America.”

In the pandemic, the less-educated and minorities have continued to suffer, while the rich and those with pensions in the market have increased their wealth. This division is troubling, said Deaton.  

“We really have built ourselves a two-class society in which the happy few are doing well, and the two-thirds are increasingly not being recognized as full citizens,” Deaton said. “One of the issues about inequality that I think is the key one is equality of moral standing within society. We want not equality of opportunity—we want equality of outcome … We’re all moral individuals within equal dignity, and that’s failing in America.”   

Watch a full recording of the conference below:

On Nov. 28, Silvano Maria Tomasi, C.S., and 12 others will join the College of Cardinals, a group of principal assistants and advisers to the pope. Pope Francis recently gave the archbishop another role as well: On Nov. 1, he named Tomasi his special delegate to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a lay religious order doing service work in 120 countries.

Archbishop Tomasi, 80, and three other cardinals-elect are above the cutoff age for taking part in the conclave that selects the next pope, the Vatican noted in its Oct. 25 announcement. Only cardinals younger than 80 can participate.

The archbishop is a “missionary scholar true to his order’s charism to work with immigrants,” said Gerald Cattaro, Ed.D., executive director of Fordham’s Center for Catholic School Leadership, who most recently saw Tomasi in Rome in December 2019 at a meeting of NGOs associated with the Holy See.

Archbishop Tomasi belongs to the Scalabrinian order, devoted to serving migrants and refugees. A naturalized American citizen, he earned his doctorate in sociology from Fordham in 1972, and is a co-founder of the Center for Migration Studies of New York, which has collaborated with Fordham on migration studies in the past.

He originally came from Italy to the U.S. to work among Italian immigrants, “and never forgot his call to work with those on the periphery,” Cattaro said. “His life’s work has been on behalf of the marginalized, in particular immigrants and refugees. That is, perhaps, why I believe [Pope Francis] chose to honor him with the ‘red hat,’” Cattaro said, referring to a cardinal’s traditional headpiece.

In the 1980s, Tomasi served as the first director of the Office for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He has held high-level Vatican posts including secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples.

From 2003 to 2016, he served as permanent observer of the Holy See to the U.N. in Geneva. He has worked on human rights issues and also led the Vatican’s efforts toward nuclear arms control in recent years.

A Friend to Fordham

Archbishop Tomasi has helped Fordham build closer ties with the Mission of the Holy See to the U.N. and create opportunities for students in the International Political Economy and Development (IPED) program, such as serving the mission as diplomatic fellows at the U.N. in New York, said the program’s director, Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D.

Also, interest in Tomasi’s work at the U.N. contributed to IPED founding its annual Pope Francis Global Poverty Index in response to the pope’s call for a broad but simple measure of global poverty and well-being, Schwalbenberg said.

He said he thinks Tomasi’s appointment reflects the pope’s concern with the suffering of migrants. In public statements, Francis has sounded the alarm about the urgent needs of people being displaced around the world.

“Situations of conflict and humanitarian emergencies, aggravated by climate change, are  increasing the numbers of displaced persons and affecting people already living in a state of dire poverty,” he said in a January address to members of the diplomatic corps accredited by the Holy See. “Many of the countries experiencing these situations lack adequate structures for meeting the needs of the displaced.”

In his message for the 106th World Day of Migrants and Refugees in September, he noted the new troubles brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The precariousness that we have come to experience as a result of this pandemic is a constant in the lives of displaced people,” he said.

“This year’s report will give us a baseline to document the extent of extreme poverty in our world prior to the pandemic,” Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., director of IPED, wrote in the introduction to the document. “Our mission in future reports will be to document the immediate and lasting effects of the pandemic on the world’s most vulnerable people.”

The students’ work was spotlighted in a virtual program produced by America Media and the Sovereign Order of Malta’s Mission to the United States and released on YouTube on Nov. 12. The program featured several prominent speakers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof; Donna Markham, O.P., Ph.D., the first female president to lead Catholic Charities USA in the organization’s 105-year history; and Maria-Francesa Spatolisano, assistant secretary general for policy coordination and inter-agency affairs at the United Nations. The event was co-sponsored by the Holy See, two United Nations missions, and other Catholic organizations. 

The annual report was inspired by Pope Francis’ address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. Over the past five years, IPED students have researched and published a new annual index that explores statistics and trends related to seven factors that the Pope identified as poverty indicators: water, housing, employment, food, gender equality, religious freedom, and education. Unlike many poverty indexes, IPED’s index has a strong emphasis on basic human needs and outcomes that can benefit the poor and the marginalized, said Schwalbenberg. The report also includes indicators of spiritual freedom like gender equity. 

“Newly developed indexes are adding a multidimensional definition of poverty,” Schwalbenberg explained in a 2016 Fordham News story. “We’re hoping that [our index]will empower civil societies … We want groups around the world to use this simple measure to hold their governments and other administrations accountable for the state of their society.”

Their fifth annual index builds on global data that is released every year. In the 2020 index, IPED students graphed global trends from 2013 to 2017, mapped the 2017 data to better visualize geographical disparities worldwide, and identified the 10 countries that most lacked each basic human need. (Last year, the students mapped data from 2016.) They found some improvement in water, employment, and education, but deterioration in food, housing, and religious freedom indicators across the world. The gender indicator has stayed stagnant. In addition, the students found that material deprivation is highly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, while spiritual deprivation is more predominant in Asia. 

The 64-page report was not only highlighted at the virtual event but also distributed to event registrants across the world, including members from the United Nations and the Vatican. It was also featured on America Magazine’s website. 

It’s not the first time the index has received prominent attention. Last year, Schwalbenberg and IPED students presented their index to His Eminence Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state for the Vatican. In 2017, they introduced their findings to Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, secretary of relations with states in the Holy See’s Secretariat of State. 

At a certain point though, he realized he needed more training if he was going to continue with the type of work he was called to. He found what he wanted in Fordham’s Graduate Program in International Political and Economy and Development (IPED), which is administered by the Graduate School in Arts and Sciences. This year, he will earn two masters degrees, in IPED, and economics.

“I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to move forward in this field and I wasn’t able to contribute as much as I had wanted to,” said Ferraro, a native of Armonk, New York.

“The IPED program really seemed like the best of all worlds in terms of practicality and theory.”

While pursuing his master’s, Ferraro conducted research on a little-understood but potentially large problem: cattle lead poisoning in India. After traveling to India and Bangladesh in the summer on a GSAS-funded fellowship he began working on a project titled Lead and Livestock: Estimating India’s Bovine Lead Exposure. The paper for the project, which he will present at the Northeast Agriculture and Resource Economics Association’s conference this June, uses Indian government data from 2010 to create a machine-learning model that tries to predict the total livestock fatalities due to lead exposure there.

“When I was at the site, people kept talking about how their livestock had been perishing very quickly with these very severe symptoms. After further research, I came to realize that it is a phenomenon, but it’s something that’s not really well-documented,” he said.

The problem stems from two realities of contemporary life in rural India. Livestock, which are in many cases the only form of capital poor families possess, are free to roam as they please, while lead battery recycling plants are poorly regulated. No one knows exactly how big the problem is though; Ferraro hopes that his paper can get the issue on the radar of the Indian government.

“I’m estimating that just due to car battery recycling, India lost millions of dollars in livestock assets, and the people who are most affected are poor rural farmers,” he said.

Ferraro is also the co-author of a meta-analysis study of all the research that’s been done on lead exposure in low and middle-income countries. The purpose of the study is to try to develop a “background,” or baseline level of lead exposure that a person can expect to have based on where they live. The study is being conducted in partnership with Pure Earth, an environmental research organization where Ferraro has been a research assistant since January 2019.

“It’s been a really great experience, and I think the meta-analysis especially is going to be meaningful when it comes out. It was nice to work with a team, and I gained a lot of the statistics knowledge,” he said.

Andrew Simons, Ph.D., an assistant professor of economics who taught Ferraro in his Econometrics and Agriculture and Development classes and supervised his research for the India lead study, said his dedication to a cause like this isn’t surprising, given his drive and initiative.

“Very often Greg would hang around after class and have some question that was probably a little bit more advanced than what we were talking about in class, and I would give him some answer about that and then the next week, he would have gone and read about it or thought more about it,” he said.

“Professors really appreciate that kind of self-driven inquiry and self-driven initiative, which he definitely has a lot of.”

Upon graduation, Ferraro will be traveling to Cote d’Ivoire on a Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship. Working with the country’s agriculture ministry, he hopes to use his expertise on data collection to help officials use low-cost, open-source software to create computer models for problems such as child labor and deforestation.

“There’s a lot of money that gets invested into trying to reduce child labor, and we’re not even sure if it’s effective or not. Obviously, I’m not going to resolve this issue on my own, but I think that even governments with low budgets should be able to start their own data management collection,” he said.

“Just being there and starting it, I think could have an impact.”

The trip has been delayed until January 1 due to the coronavirus pandemic. But as an Ironman Triathlete, Ferraro is used to taking the long view.

“I grew up in a more privileged background, and I had a lot at my disposal and was never in need. So, I’ve been motivated to perform work that I know has a positive social effect,” he said.

He’s also motivated by past failures, including times when he didn’t have the skills he needed.

“For all the things I have done well, I’ve had projects blow up,” he said, noting that past plans for both law school and doctoral studies have both fallen through.

“These are just some examples just to press the point that it’s not exactly a linear path, and I think I actually enjoyed that. Because for every step of the way, I’ve learned something, and it forces me to really sit down and work hard to get whatever it is. At the end of the day, I think I’m better for it.”