This fall, she began a master’s degree program in higher education and student affairs at the New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Along with her coursework, she was matched with a graduate assistantship at Columbia University’s Office of Student Life. “Everybody in the Office for Student Involvement [at Fordham]helped me cultivate my own understanding of what student affairs means and find my passion,” Peay says.

What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
One of the things that really resonated with me were the Jesuit tenets of education and what it meant to be part of a Jesuit community. I had the opportunity to come with both of my parents. My mom and I are sitting next to each other listening to [former Fordham College at Lincoln Center dean]Father Grimes speak about what it meant to have a Jesuit education and what it meant to be involved at Fordham and what it meant to just generally be a student of New York City. He is a wonderful speaker and just really blew us both away. So it was kind of a combination, I guess, of Jesuit education, being in the city, knowing that [Fordham offers] a lot of different majors, knowing that I could be part of a small community, and really just some of the things that Father Grimes said about the power of the Fordham community at Lincoln Center, specifically.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you maybe would not have gotten elsewhere?
I think the biggest thing that I got out of Fordham that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else was just the breadth of mentorship network. I got the best of both worlds knowing and participating in academics and student involvement at both Lincoln Center and Rose Hill, and a lot of people were really invested in me as a student and invested in my academic career. I am still in touch with a lot of the administrators I worked with in the Office for Student Involvement. We chat about grad school and classes and all of these things. That’s one of the things that I think I cherish the most out of my Fordham experience: the number of people I met who genuinely care about students.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
I would probably say Zein Murib in political science. I had four classes with them [Murib]—American Social Movements, Interest Group Politics, Judicial Politics, and Politics of Sex and Sexuality in the United States—and they were all very, very interesting classes. I think I learned the most in those classes because of the ways the topics were so far-reaching and applicable to so many different things. They really gave me a deeper appreciation of living in New York.

Was there one particular moment when you realized you had a certain talent for student affairs work, and how did that feel?
It took me sitting back and thinking about the things that really did bring me joy and what I was really interested in and excited about at Fordham. Under the guidance of some of the people from the Office for Student Involvement, I started exploring the idea of getting a master’s in student affairs in higher education, because I realized that the things that I was most passionate about were giving back to the community and helping students find their place at Fordham and build their own community. It was something that I had struggled with freshman year, so I wanted to be a vehicle and vessel of knowledge for them at Fordham rather than just kind of move on.

What are you optimistic about?
I would say the thing that I’m most optimistic about is kind of personal; it’s more the possibilities of community building in the time of COVID, because we’re in a time where so many people are remote and so many people are digital, and not everybody is in the place that they feel most comfortable or the place that they call home. I’ve really found that, especially with my friends who are still juniors or seniors at Fordham or who have just graduated, we all are really looking for community and time to spend with each other. I think coming out of this time, we will all be a lot closer.

I would say I’m also optimistic about the state of New York City as a whole. I love being able to go outside and see people dressed up in their COVID getups, and they’re really taking it seriously, just remembering that we are part of a community as a city that is handling this all together and working together to make it better. I feel so much better and happier about being in New York than I did when I was in California, because you can feel that energy and feel the community support that is here.

This January, he will become a visiting scholar at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where he will collaborate on a project that combats similar hate speech.

Only this time, Anderson is dealing with religious nationalists: those who use religion as an excuse to advance their own non-religious purposes—often involving hateful actions and language—in their native countries.

He calls Poland, a country where the majority of the population is Roman Catholic, a severe example. Many Catholic Poles claim that because immigrants and refugees are neither Catholic nor Polish, they can’t be true members of their country, he explained. Anderson argues that not only is their rhetoric is inherently wrong, these false statements also undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church and, he added, negate the church’s overall goal: commitment to the common good of humanity worldwide.

“The declaration of human rights, the United Nations—Catholic churches adopted that, which means that all of this nationalist kind of language is contrary to what the church believes,” he said. “Catholics are not called to identify themselves with any particular nation or with any particular culture. Catholics are supposed to see themselves as belonging to a heavenly kingdom.”

As a young boy, Anderson lived in a Catholic household that embodied those beliefs. His father was a news cameraman who covered the career of Martin Luther King Jr., the deadly 1958 bombing of a black Birmingham church, and civil rights activities; his mother was a progressive Catholic and social worker who worked with “the poorest of the poor,” he said.

“The environment I grew up in was one where Catholics were really encouraged to see African Americans as our brothers and sisters,” he said, “and really push back on the language of exclusivism and denial of people’s rights.”

By finding ways that Fordham can collaborate with NYU, Anderson hopes to develop educational programs for religious leaders that explain why religion and nationalism are unrelated. He says it’s important to train leaders—pastors, bishops, religion teachers—on how to train people to respond to religious nationalism. He added that it’s also critical to show religious leaders how to illustrate the flaws with religious nationalism, and explain to everyday people how it cannot be legitimately claimed as a religious movement. Anderson, who is exploring various foundations and other granting agencies that would fund these programs, aims to apply for three or four grants. He says securing a grant related to Catholic nationalism is especially critical.

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian church—home to more than one billion members. Catholic nationalism is popping up in multiple places across Europe, including Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, France, and Austria, he added.

“There are priests and bishops in Poland and elsewhere who are presenting Catholic nationalism as a real option, and they’re not being disciplined at all. They’re being allowed to act more or less as independent operators,” he said. “I’m hoping to motivate the bishops to see that this is a real significant problem. It’s going to undermine how people see the credibility of the church, even more than we’re dealing with already.”

This is the second project he has conducted with NYU. In the first partnership, Anderson developed educational programs for seminarians that provided strategies they could use to promote civil discourse in politics. 

“If we can teach people, hopefully in the Catholic schools and in other institutions on the ground, then when they get older and they’re approached by these religious nationalists,” he said, “they will see the problems with it. Or at least they’ll be prepared to respond.”

What started as an innovative idea of Fordham Law professor Susan Scafidi—to create a special field of law for those working within a distinct industry—has gained respect within academia and is establishing a long-term direction for the industry. Since its launch in September of 2010, in fact, similar programs and courses have been launched at other institutions, including Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and New York University. (That irony is not lost on Scafidi, who is a pro at spotting a designer knockoff and who blogs at a site called counterfeitchic.com.)

“It’s been a real supernova,” said Scafidi, who also acts as the institute’s academic director. “We just keep managing to break new ground.”

Created in 2010, the nonprofit not only serves as a center to educate lawyers with a focus on fashion, but is “about something more,” Scafidi says—providing the fashion community with legal advice, training programs, and information about industry issues.

But it wasn’t an easy walk in this lawyer’s Manolos. Nearly 10 years ago, Scafidi’s idea to found the institute and the field of fashion law was ridiculed, with endless comparisons to Elle Woods in Legally Blonde.

“When I started this, people laughed. They said, ‘Really? It’s too girly, too frivolous. No one will take you seriously.’ It was like fashion law had a question mark after it,” she said. “But it is a multibillion-dollar industry… one that touches all of us, quite literally.”

In 2006, Scafidi convinced Fordham Law School to offer the first-ever fashion law seminar, under the condition that at least three students register. Much to everyone’s surprise, students frantically signed up.

“But we always realized it was more than just a class,” said Scafidi.

In just one year, enrollment doubled. It also became apparent to Scafidi that those outside of law school also needed services and that the industry needed legal protection and education.

Thanks to backing from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and the support of CFDA president and iconic designer Diane von Furstenberg, the center became a reality on the same day in September 2010 that New York Fashion Week moved to its new home at Lincoln Center, just across the street from Fordham.

Since then, the institute has continued to expand, solidifying a permanent track at Fordham Law, now with seven classes ranging from Fashion Ethics, Sustainability & Development to Fashion Law & Finance, and bridging the gap between the fashion and legal communities.
“Everything happened because there was a need,” said Scafidi.

The nonprofit institute has now extended beyond Fordham, evolving into a fashion law epicenter with a monthly legal advice clinic called a “pop-up”—a nod to retail pop-up stores—where designers are paired with volunteer lawyers who are assisted by law students. There’s a summer Fashion Law Bootcamp (now in East and West coast editions thanks to a partnership with Levi’s®) and countless symposia open to lawyers and fashion professionals. The institute’s next daylong event is slated for this April 4.

“It’s like a foreign exchange program,” Scafidi said. “The lawyers have to learn to speak fashion and the fashionistas have to learn to speak law.”

The institute has become a regular fixture on the semiannual Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week calendar, where it offers students more than just a look at the business of fashion law—that is, real-life experience working with production legalities. At last September’s Fashion Week, the institute celebrated its third anniversary with a fashion show to showcase designers who participated in its clinics. One of the clinic’s designers, Eden Miller of Cabiria, made international headlines by showing the first-ever plus-size line under the tents.

During this spring’s Fashion Week, which runs from Feb. 6 through 13, the institute will host a Feb. 7 discussion of the latest fashion trend: wearable technology.

Scafidi has inspired fashion law committees at several New York bar associations and encouraged the establishment of three specialty law firms by program participants—one each in New York, London, and Paris. She helped found the Model Alliance and create a monumental state law protecting underage models, a law that took effect last November and which requires better adult supervision of child models on the job.

“I’m so proud of getting that law passed,” she said. “It’s wonderful to be able to help models who are the faces of the industry actually have a voice in the industry.”

With New York conquered, Scafidi is taking her idea global, having attracted students and program attendees “from every continent except Antarctica.”

“We’ve done a lot, but we’re not done yet,” she said, adding that she hopes to “continue establishing fashion law around the world”—with Milan, Hong Kong, and Dubai next up

Last year, Stephen Holler, Ph.D., and Professor Stephen Arnold’s research team at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and City University of New York, successfully detected the smallest RNA virus (MS2) through their newly developed and patented plasmonic hybrid whispering gallery mode sensor.

At that time the researchers predicted that the sensor might be successful in detecting particles even smaller than the RNA virus, which measured a mass of 6 attograms (1 attogram is a millionth of a billionth of a milligram).  Subsequent tests were done on a single thyroid cancer marker protein (Thyroglobulin) with a mass of 1 attogram, and an even smaller, standard assay protein (BSA) with a mass of 0.11 attogram.

The researchers’ whispering gallery mode sensor detected both proteins’ presence, smashing the detection limit previously reported for the virus and setting a new benchmark. The thyroid cancer protein is one-sixth the size of the smallest virus.

“Our limit of detection is now approaching a zeptogram—a sextillionth of a gram,” said Holler. “This is remarkable. What it means for cancer screening is that we have the sensitivity to easily detect the presence of a host of protein cancer markers. If someone undergoes a cancer treatment, this method can pinpoint following surgery whether some of the cells have been missed.”

The sensor works by drawing the bio-nano-particle to a nanoplasmonic “hot spot” and then measuring its presence through a shift in the wavelength of the resonance, i.e., light, of the whispering gallery’s sensor, a glass bead. Researchers said both the thyroid cancer and BSA proteins showed surprising sensitivity to the nanotechnology, which means that the whispering gallery mode sensor should easily be able to detect single-protein markers in breast, lung, liver, and ovarian cancers.

Holler has recently teamed up with Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., associate professor of biology at Fordham, to apply the whispering gallery sensor technology to look at HPV, or human papillomavirus, which is responsible for 99 percent of cervical cancers.

Single-protein (molecule) detection is fundamental to biochemical and biomedical research, Holler said, but is traditionally done through a more complex process using fluorescence microscopy and a dye-labeling process that can potentially alter the molecule’s function. The whispering gallery mode sensor uses “label-free” detection, which means that particles can be detected in their native state, with interactions potentially able to be followed in real time.

The research, “Label-Free Detection of Single Protein Using a Nanoplasmonic-Photonic Hybrid Microcavity,” appears in the June 18 online issue of the American Chemical Society’s NanoLetters and was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

For more on Holler’s research visit Fordham’s Laboratory for Micro-optics and Biophotonics.

GRAPHIC: Rendition of a BSA protein detected through hybrid whispering gallery sensor. The greater response to the nanotechnology was attributed to the proteins finding their way to the individual bumps of the nanoplasmonic particle, which are visible under a transmission electron microscope.
Courtesy American Chemical Society

For Stephen Holler, Ph.D., finding the utility of physics beyond the classroom is a cornerstone of his teaching technique and, indeed, his entire career.

The assistant professor of physics wants students to understand how physics works in the real world and to be able to communicate those complex ideas to anyone.

“There’s more to it than going into a lab, turning a knob, and getting some data,” he said. “You have to be able to convey that experiment in a way that’s nontechnical.”

Besides teaching physics to pre-med students, Holler also teaches an advanced course in engineering physics that can be relevant in fields such as medicine or patent law. Regardless, communication remains key, he said.

Before coming to Fordham, Holler was well practiced in communicating with a wide variety of audiences. In graduate school he worked with the U.S. Army on biological aerosol detection. He later went on to work as a staff scientist at Sandia National Laboratories before joining a startup, NovaWave Technologies. NovaWave specialized in laser-based sensors that detect chemical and biological agents and eventually specialized in greenhouse gas monitoring. In 2010, Holler and his partners sold the company, and a year later he joined Fordham’s faculty.

It is that sensor technology expertise he brings to Fordham as he and his students build a lab that expands on groundbreaking work he completed last year with researchers from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU Poly) and the City University of New York (CUNY). That research detected the smallest known aqueous-borne RNA virus by using a device called a whispering gallery mode biosensor.

To explain by way of an anecdote, Holler said the concept of a whispering gallery is familiar to anyone who has ever been to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal. At a precise spot outside of the restaurant, if one whispers down toward the terrazzo floor, the whisper ricochets up onto the arched ceiling and into the ear of the listener standing about 20 feet away. To the listener, it sounds as though the whisperer were standing right beside him or her.

The whispering gallery biosensor operates in much the same way, Holler said. But instead of sound waves, light of different colors are “listened” to and the “speaker” is a laser. It’s a tunable laser, so the frequency (i.e., color) of the light can be controlled.

The system employs two fiber optics to harness and measure the light. One fiber is formed into a very small glass ball that is about a hundred microns in diameter, about the same as a strand of hair. This ball becomes the biosensor, aka the whispering gallery. Another smaller fiber measuring about five microns, or one-twentieth of a strand of hair, runs very close to the sphere but doesn’t touch it. It acts as a light guide. As a laser shoots through one end of the fiber, a sensor measures the amount of light that comes out at the other end.

And, as the laser is tunable, the frequency can be adjusted so as to allow just enough light to fall off into the biosensor, where its ricochet movements throughout the sphere can be measured.

When the sphere is coated with a virus or antibody, it creates a further change in the measurement. The process suggests another anecdote.

“Think of it as, if you ring a bell and then you add chewing gum to the bell, it’s going to change the resonance of that bell,” said Holler. “In this case the virus that you put onto the sphere is the chewing gum and the sphere is the bell.”

Last summer, Holler and the NYU Poly/CUNY team added gold nanoparticles to the sphere to create even smaller “hot spots.” It further increased the sphere’s sensitivity and enabled them to measure a single sample of the world’s smallest known RNA virus. The breakthrough was published in the July 30 issue of Applied Physics Letters.

Holler expects further breakthroughs, including a method of detecting protein that appears concurrent with certain cancers. Because of the sphere’s hypersensitivity, his hope is that it will be able to detect cancers earlier than current methods can.

Holler said that Fordham’s own whispering gallery biosensor should be completed later this summer, after which he plans to team up with Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, who has spent the last decade working on the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

“I have been working in this area for 10 years, so in about five years it would be nice to see the research commercialized, and of some benefit to those health professionals doing medical diagnostics,” said Holler.