Fordham hosted a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary conference on May 1 and 2 at the Lincoln Center campus that addressed the sources of environmental degradation, racism, ableism, and rising inequality with regard to access to resources and information around the world.

In her welcoming remarks at the International Conference on Social and Environmental Justice, Fordham President Tania Tetlow noted that the conference’s goals were perfectly in sync with the four apostolic preferences of the Society of Jesus.

They are “walking with the excluded,” “caring for our common home,” “journeying with youth,” and committing to discernment, or “doing it all with openness and humility by listening and learning,” she said.

“My hope is that you will energize and inspire each other, that we will come up with the sorts of solutions that lie in the complexity, ” she said.

“And that we do it in a way that models that for our students because that is all about where we can locate the hope.”

The conference, which was organized by Fordham’s Office of the Provost, Office of Research, and Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, was supported by Fordham, Columbia University, Georgetown University, and New York University. Additional funding was provided by Fordham’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.

Ten-panel discussions followed two keynote addresses by Molly Doane, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Alex Gil, Ph.D., senior lecturer II and associate research faculty at Yale University.

Community Gardens and Food Justice

Doane shared stories of working with three community gardens on the west, north, and south sides of Chicago, in a lecture titled “Climate Stories: Gardening at the City’s Edge in Chicago.” Far from simply being spots for food production, she said the gardens are beacons of hope for marginalized communities, including refugees from Iraq.

The Hello Howard Community Garden, where she is a member, contributes produce to a local food bank, even though yields can be uncertain.

“We gardeners donate to refugee programs for the same reason we flew to Lesbos to sort donated clothing in a warehouse after seeing a picture of that sweet little boy washed up on the shore there, the same reason we hang the ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ signs and the reason we flocked to O’Hare after refugees were detained after Trump signed the Muslim ban,” she said.

“I work in food not because it’s the be-all, end-all. It’s because it’s a tool to dismantle racism and create some racial equity and create living, thriving economies that people can control and have some sovereignty”

Minimal Computing and Access to Technology

In “Minimal Computing and Environmental Justice: A Humble Offering,” Gil shared the ways in which digital projects such as Open Syllabus, which has collected and analyzed 7.2 million college syllabi, and WAX, which helps researchers create digital archives, are making it easier to empower people who don’t have the same access to technology that is common in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Minimal computing, which is a way of developing technology that can be used in the absence of hardware, software, network capacity, technical education, or even a reliable power grid, is one option.

“How do we do design if we don’t take for granted that everyone has fast, free internet, no censorship, and electricity all the time?” he said.

“Minimal computing tries to imagine constraints all over the world and designs for it.”

Environmental Economics, Justice, and Policy

In the panel Environmental Economics, Justice, and Policy, R. Jisung Park, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, showed how the increase in 90-degree days presents a greater risk of heat-related injuries than previously thought to those who work in jobs outside, as well as some who work in manufacturing.

Beia Spiller, director of the Transportation Program at Resources for the Future, made the case for greater public funding for electric vehicle charge stations in the Bronx.

And Marc N. Conte, Ph.D., a professor of economics at Fordham, shared the findings of a forthcoming paper, “Observational studies generate misleading results about health effects of air pollution: evidence from chronic air quality conditions and COVID-19 outcomes”. His study aimed to address the fact that in New York City, Black residents succumbed to COVID-19 in greater numbers than white residents.

Since the areas of the city where they live feature high ambient concentrations of air pollution, Conte wanted to see whether the two facts were connected. He concluded they are not, in part by analyzing phone data that showed that white, wealthy residents of the Upper East Side, which has similar levels of air pollution, may have been spared because they simply left the city during the pandemic.

“I’m not saying that Black and brown communities were not adversely affected by COVID. What I’m saying is, it wasn’t because they lived necessarily in areas with worse air quality,” he said.

“[P]eople in these communities had jobs that forced them to work in person. So they were actually here and present and exposed to this virus in a way that people in wealthier, whiter communities were not. I think that’s actually a larger systemic racism problem than an air quality issue.”

In the closing session, George Hong, Ph.D., Chief Research Officer and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fordham, hailed the gathering for bringing together perspectives from 13 different countries, representing nonprofit government organizations, academia, community groups, and private industry. Fordham has also been invited to publish the research presented in an upcoming issue of the academic journal Social Sciences.

The final session also featured remarks from Fordham professors Steven Franks, Ph.D., Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., Aseel Sawalha, Ph.D., and Sophie Mitra, Ph.D.

Franks highlighted the fact that so many participants conducted research in partnership with community organizations.

“This is getting out of the colonialist, or post-colonial mindset of sort of sweeping in to solve the problems of those people, and really just working with local communities to find out how we can all benefit from each other and solve problems together,” he said.

“I haven’t pinpointed what I specifically want to work on, but I’m eager to do research that has some kind of positive impact on the world, whether that’s helping people or the environment,” Bonanni said. “I want my research to have a bigger purpose.”

Some student researchers focus on a single topic, but Bonanni has dabbled in several—and because of this, she sees the world differently, said a Fordham professor. 

“Her experience has given her a good view of different topics. She can ask questions that other people might not be thinking about,” said her academic advisor Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences. “This will benefit her when it comes to asking the next interesting or necessary question in science.” 

‘A Whole New World Opened Up’ 

Bonanni was born to a family of scientists in Niskayuna, New York. Her father is an electrical engineer at General Electric. Her mother, a longtime optometrist, pursued her career when there were few women in her field. Both inspired their daughter to become a researcher. 

Bonanni had always been fascinated by the natural world. In elementary school, she drew three-page pictures of different landscapes and the flora and fauna that lived within them. But in high school, Bonanni realized that science was more than a childhood interest. 

“When I took a biology course, it was like a whole new world opened up. I learned how the natural world works, how everything fits together in ecosystems, and how life functions. Once I knew that was a field, I was like, ‘Wow—that’s the one for me,’” she said. 

Growing as a Biologist at Fordham

In 2020, she enrolled at Fordham. She wanted to attend school in New York City, and she was drawn to Fordham’s Jesuit ideals.

“I knew that I could find a Catholic community at other colleges, but I liked how Fordham implements the Jesuit values in their course philosophy,” she said. 

Bonanni spent her first year on Zoom due to the pandemic. The following summer, she took two tuition-free classes. Among them was a genetics course with biology professor Edward Dubrovsky, Ph.D., whose work she loved so much that she asked if she could work in his lab. 

Throughout her sophomore year, they examined the genetic mutations responsible for cardiomyopathy, a disease that thickens heart tissue and can lead to death. Using fruit flies as a model for the human body, they explored a question: Where do the mutated genes that cause cardiomyopathy need to be located in order for symptoms to develop? Any cell in the body or specifically in the heart? (They later learned that the latter was correct.) 

Under Dubrovsky, Bonanni learned what it’s like to work in a real lab, versus a classroom. 

“When you’re in a research lab, you don’t know what the answer is. Sometimes things don’t go right the first time, but that’s just part of the research process,” Bonanni said. “That uncertainty is where discoveries are made.” 

The following summer, she studied in Australia through Fordham’s partnership with the School for Field Studies. For one month, she lived in the rainforest and conducted fieldwork on marsupials. 

“It was really cool to learn about how they came to be in Australia and set up field cameras to take pictures of marsupials passing by, like pademelons,” Bonanni said. 

Exploring Bronx Plant Life

She loved working with animals, but she also wanted to try working with plants. She had always enjoyed tending to her family’s vegetable garden, where they raised tomatoes, lettuce, squash, and beans. 

Last fall, she studied the spread of Japanese knotweed, an invasive species that has spread to the Bronx, in the lab of biology professor Steven J. Franks, Ph.D. She enjoyed the experience, but realized she preferred working with animal cells. 

Keeping the Earth Safe for Turtles

This semester, Bonanni started working on a project that combines her interests in cell and molecular biology and ecology. 

In the lab of Evon Hekkala, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences, Bonanni is studying green sea turtles, the largest hard-shelled sea turtle on Earth. Every year, these turtles return to the same beach to lay their eggs. The problem is only some areas are protected from poaching and other activities that prevent babies from hatching and safely making their way to the ocean. 

“If only specific areas are protected, then only specific turtle genes might be protected. That means you’re limiting the genetic diversity of the population,” Bonanni said. “A less genetically diverse population is less likely to survive diseases,” said Bonanni, who is now analyzing DNA from hatched turtle shells to assess their genetic diversity. 

The Wonder of the Natural World 

Bonanni wants to become a biologist. No matter what she focuses on, she says she wants to hold onto something that we often forget as adults—the wonder of the natural world. 

“Growing plants is so exciting when you really think about it,” said Bonanni, who once worked as a summer camp counselor who taught children how to water seeds into sunflowers. “The fact that a beautiful, green, lush thing can come out of a small seed is so cool. As adults, we sometimes lose the wonder associated with that. But when you look at a kid experiencing it for the first time, you remember how exciting it really is.”   

Photos by Bruce Gilbert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a recent study by Fordham scientists has found that plants that adapt to wild swings in precipitation still suffer adverse effects, including a reduction of seed production.

For the study, Elena Hamann, Ph.D., a biological sciences post-doctoral researcher, and Steven Franks, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences, harvested seeds from two collections of Brassica rapa plants in Orange County, California, that had experienced two decades of dramatic precipitation fluctuations, including increasingly severe droughts.

Hamann then grew four generations of plants in September 2016 under both drought and normal conditions in a greenhouse at the Calder Biological Field Station in Armonk, New York, and compared how the two different sets fared.

Franks had confirmed the ability of Brassica rapa to evolve rapidly in earlier studies, but this study took it one step further: The plants that had evolved to cope with drought by doing things like flowering earlier in the growing season, then had evolved to cope with heavy rainfall, then had evolved again to cope with more drought, showed signs that the constant changes were taking a toll.

“In the long term, the droughts are becoming more and more severe, and we’ve also seen that in more recent generations, the plants are not able to maintain fitness as well, so they produce less seeds,” said Hamann, who was the study’s principal investigator.

“So, we think that even though they adapt to drought by advancing flowering time and changing other specific traits, they are starting to suffer from the severity of drought. What they’re doing is basically not enough anymore.”

One of the most significant findings of the study is that paradoxically, rainy seasons actually hurt the plants’ ability to evolve in ways to cope with drought.

“After just two wet years, they flowered much later, but then there was another severe drought, so they then had to sort of evolve into earlier flowering again,” said Franks.

“But there’s a delay and they have less fitness, and produce fewer seeds. So they get fewer seeds into the seed bank for the next generation.”

The ability of a plant like Brassica rapa, which is closely related to turnips and bok choy, to weather droughts and rainy spells is important because wild swings in precipitation are the result of climate change that is likely to continue. In the area of California where Hamann and Franks harvested the plants, for instance, the most severe level of drought in 100 years happened only once between 1977 and 2004. But since then, the area has experienced several droughts that are equally severe or worse.

“The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that climate is changing even more than we thought,” said Franks.

“We’re seeing all these really substantial changes in this California system. Plant populations are responding, but there’s good evidence from this study that they may not be able to keep up with the severity of these changes.”

The results of the study, Two decades of evolutionary changes in Brassica rapa in response to fluctuations in precipitation and severe drought, was published this month in the journal Evolution.

At the Louis Calder Center, scientists explore ecological mysteries and study society’s impact on the natural world.

To the casual observer, Fordham’s Louis Calder Center might seem to be just another quiet tract of Hudson River Valley forest. But for natural scientists, it abounds with opportunity. Explore the 113-acre biological field station in Armonk, New York, and you’ll find a bounty of ecosystems and animals, from the four-legged to the microscopic. At the heart of the preserve is a 10-acre temperate lake teeming with a diversity of aquatic life. Go high enough and, way off in the distance, you can see another big player in the preserve’s ecology: New York City, which begins only 16 miles away.

Its proximity has never been more relevant. “Humans and our cities are the most dominant forces of contemporary evolution now,” says Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., a Calder-based biology professor who recently co-authored a paper in the journal Science on how species are evolving within cities. Other scientists at Calder study invasive species that arrive via big-city commerce. And they tackle many other mysteries: why some animals survive new threats while others don’t, how nutrients flow beneath the soil, or how insects transmit disease.

The center was born 50 years ago when the land was given to Fordham by the Louis Calder Foundation, named for the paper and pulp magnate who maintained a summer home on the property. Today, that home is Calder Hall, one of several buildings in which students and professors analyze DNA samples, inspect plant and animal specimens, hold classes, and generate knowledge.

Among many other public services, the Calder Center supports the nation’s longest-running study of ticks and Lyme disease, and its scientists work to illuminate society’s impact on nature at a time of growing concern about biodiversity and climate change.

It is also a crucial training ground: “The most important thing we do here is make scientists,” says Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., an expert in tick- and mosquito-borne diseases who has served as the center’s director since 2014.

On a sparkling autumn day late last October, FORDHAM magazine tagged along as undergraduates, graduate students, professors, and visiting scientists went about their work—gently probing, collecting samples, and explaining the science behind their work and its potential impact.

Evolution in the Big City

In recent years, Fordham biologist Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., and his team of graduate and undergraduate students have become known for their studies of urban wildlife and pest species, most notably rats.

“The initial idea was to understand what a New York City rat is, from all ecological and evolutionary angles,” he says of one project, which grew to a global scale and has public health implications. “We’re using DNA to understand how they move around the city and how they’re related to other rat populations.”

In a first-floor lab in Calder Hall, doctoral student Carol Henger uses similar methods to study coyotes, animals that only recently moved into the city for the first time, Munshi-South says. She’s looking at DNA markers from coyote scat collected in Pelham Bay Park and elsewhere to infer how individual coyotes are related, what they’re eating, and how they’re dispersing.

Meanwhile, Nicole Fusco, another doctoral student in Munshi-South’s lab, sequences DNA to study gene flow among populations of salamanders.

Biodiversity and Climate Change

In the Calder Center’s Lord & Burnham greenhouse, constructed on the property nearly a century ago, doctoral student Stephen Kutos has been growing pairs of potted trees and studying how they pass water and nutrients back and forth via subsoil networks of fungus.

“Tree stumps have been found that are still alive hundreds of years after the tree was cut down, quite possibly because surrounding trees send them nutrients,” he says. With further study, he adds, it may be possible to restore the wild population of one type of tree he’s growing, the American chestnut, which was eradicated from the wild 100 years ago by blight.

Restoring the tree could help combat climate change, scientists believe, because the American chestnut can absorb and store carbon quickly.

In an adjacent greenhouse, several researchers work on an evolutionary study initiated by Fordham biologist Steven Franks, Ph.D., and focused on Brassica rapa (field mustard). As Franks demonstrated in an earlier study, the annual plant evolved earlier flowering within just five years to cope with drought conditions in California.

The Mystery of the Red-Backed Salamander’s Survival

Late in the morning, undergrads Dan Khieninson and Erin Carter and doctoral student Elle Barnes enter Calder forest in search of red-backed salamanders.

“You can find them anywhere in the forest as long as the soil’s moist,” Barnes says before the group navigates a steep decline to the forest floor.

She indicates several flat, weathered pieces of wood she’s left behind. “You’re more likely to find them under here.” The three researchers crouch down and soon locate several specimens.

They’re trying to discover why red-backed salamanders are not affected by the chytrid fungus that is devastating other amphibian populations.

“It’s not enough to just study the ones that are going extinct,” Barnes says. “There are solutions in the ones that will survive. What do they have that other amphibians are lacking?”

The answer lies in their microbiome, Barnes says. She, Carter, and Khieninson use cotton swabs on the salamanders’ bodies to collect samples of microorganisms that they can test against chytrid fungus in the lab. The impact of their research could extend beyond conservation biology, Barnes says: “The discoveries we make about disease and microbiomes can be applied to multiple systems, including humans’.”

A Closer Look at a Ubiquitious, Ecologically Valuable Species

Michael Kausch, a doctoral student in aquatic ecology, rows a boat out on Calder Lake to take some water samples he can later test for cyanobacteria at the lakefront McCarthy Laboratories. Meanwhile, inside the lab, his fellow doctoral student Stephen Gottschalk is working with their Fordham supervisor, John Wehr, Ph.D. Gottschalk is studying green algae in the Characeae family.

“They’re an important food source for birds, a habitat for insects, and they support fisheries,” he says.

So far Gottschalk has collected samples in nine U.S. states, and he’s been working at the New York Botanical Garden under the supervision of Kenneth Karol, Ph.D., to examine his samples on a molecular level.

He’s finding that what scientists once thought were just subtle differences among green algae are in fact ecologically important distinctions. “They’re designated as one species,” Gottschalk says, “but what it looks like to me so far is these are very regionally distinct.”

Mosquitoes, Ticks, and the Pathogens They Carry

Insect-borne diseases are a big part of the research focus at Routh House, the vector ecology lab at the Calder Center that’s jointly run by Fordham and the New York state health department. Inside the lab, scientists study samples of various species, such as the aggressive and potentially disease-carrying Asian tiger mosquito. Outside, they collect specimens and conduct surveillance projects.

“We set up mosquito traps all around the lower Hudson Valley,” says Marly Katz, a state employee and Fordham doctoral student. “All the mosquitoes end up here, where I identify them, and then we send a bunch [to the state health department]for disease testing.” She and her colleagues are also collaborating with Columbia University scientists to “map the Asian tiger mosquito,” she says, and determine if changes in climate are affecting its migration patterns.

While Katz checks a mosquito trap, research technician Richard Rizzitello collects ticks by dragging a white cloth across the ground and then pulling them off with forceps (he uses a lint roller to collect any larvae).

One Calder scientist, Nicholas Piedmonte, displays egg-to-adult samples of the blacklegged tick, which can carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

“These are great for education and outreach,” he says, particularly in central New York, “where ticks are kind of a new problem.”

View a timeline of the Calder Center’s history. And watch a July 2017 video celebrating the center’s recent golden anniversary.

The changes came in just seven years, according to the study published this week in the journal Molecular Ecology and led by Fordham biology professor Steven Franks, PhD. It’s just the latest example of how organisms can evolve more quickly than was generally thought possible, he said.

“Previously, people generally thought that evolution was always a really slow process, but more and more lately over the past decade or so, there’s been a lot of examples of evolution happening really rapidly,” he said. “[It] can happen while we study it.”

The study builds on Franks’ earlier study that he said was the first documented example of a natural plant population rapidly evolving in response to a natural change in the climate. The study found that field mustard plants in Southern California evolved to flower earlier in response to a drought that lasted from 1997 to 2004.

For the latest study, the researchers sequenced the genomes of pre-drought and post-drought plants from the first study to see how the post-drought generation was genetically different. They found hundreds of genes had rapidly evolved in response to the drought, many of them involved in traits like flowering time and stress response. The plants that flowered earlier were either more likely to survive the drought or to have a greater number of offspring, Franks said.

The study shows the value of comparing generations of species over a shorter time to study changes that are genetically based, he said.

“If you just watch the populations over time, then the traits might be changing, but maybe the organisms are just changing the traits themselves in response to the environment; [maybe]it’s not an evolutionary change that’s passed on from ancestors to descendants,” he said.

“This study allowed us to show that there really were genetic changes and we could see what they were,” he said. “By putting those ancestors and descendants in common conditions we could have more direct evidence that it was an evolutionary change.”

They also carried out a “heritability” calculation to see the degree to which traits were passed on.

He noted other studies showing rapid evolution, like one from decades ago that focused on Galapagos finches. There has always been rapid evolution of species, he said, but it could be happening more often because of a changing climate. “Conditions are changing so fast there’s a mismatch between organisms and their environment,” he said.

The study also shows how climate change can either quickly drive genetic changes in species or imperil other species that can’t evolve as quickly, he said. He added that fragmentation of plant habitats resulting from greater urbanization could impair evolution, since smaller plant populations have less of the genetic variation that allows hardier members of the species to emerge.

“Even though we can see some evolution, even rapid evolution, we need to aim for greater sustainability and lower environmental impact to protect species from extinction,” he said.