“We hope to create a platform that will allow scholars and the general public to access data across museums through a simple and visually appealing online interface,” said Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, a co-principal investigator for the project.

Several representatives from major museums and libraries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress, were present at an October project workshop at Fordham. Joining them were scholars from Fordham, Harvard University, MIT, the New School, Sciences Po of Paris, and University of Potsdam in Germany. The group has been collaborating continually to produce a final report for the NEH in March, after which they’ll seek additional funding for the project.

Connecting Museums and Their Data

Auricchio said that the project is similar to how museums are connected in the physical realm through the exchange of traveling works of art, but instead of art they would be exchanging research data, or metadata, spawned by their collections. Auricchio distinguished the two data sets by using museum “tombstones” as an example. Tombstones are the placards one sees beside a painting in a museum. The metadata would be the boldfaced information found at the top of the placard: the name of the artists, the years the artist lived, the name of the work of art, and the medium. The research data would be the paragraph below the metadata, which would include more nuanced and detailed information about the painting: its history, influences, and place within art history. Also included in the research data would be essays from exhibition catalogs.

“Only a fraction of a museum’s holdings are photographed for catalogs, the rest is represented through this research data and metadata,” she said.

This new platform would help foster “a new kind of knowledge production for scholars, artists, curators, educators, and an interested public,” she said.

Anne Luther, Ph.D., a co-principal investigator on the project, said that one of the primary challenges is that museums publish their data in silos, and even within institutions the internal databases don’t necessarily follow the same protocol. Luther, along with Auricchio, brought the NEH-funded project to Fordham.

“A museum may have one database system they are using, but from department to department they are using it differently,” Luther said at the October workshop. “The goal is to make this data available as a public good, but at the moment they’re [the data]  not speaking to each other.”

The challenge in dealing with large institutions is that the computer science protocols have already been established, in many cases over the course of years. Luther said there have been long-standing efforts that try to connect museum data internationally, but projects that have tried to impose new standards and new protocols have failed.

“We’re not trying to bring new standards to describing metadata, but rather we want to build, on one side, a protocol that would allow us to connect them,” she said. “We want to allow for the diversity of metadata on object descriptions within the museums to remain the same. We’re not asking the museum to rewrite. We’ll fish that out.”

Speaking the Same Language

Of course, “fishing” for common phases that describe a period, or a work of art, is also one of the great challenges for the project.

Sarah Schwettmann, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, said a protocol layer that aligns metadata from museums’ digital collections could be the best route.  She noted that with machine learning, which is akin to artificial intelligence, there are increasingly more tools that allow computer scientists to work with and analyze metadata. She said the resulting platform needn’t be a simple search engine or website, but could be something more.

“We could build a protocol that actually asks, ‘Can we compare how different museums talk about items in their collection?’” Schwettmann said at the workshop. “This interface would allow one to interoperate specific terms and cultural language that the various museums have developed over time. This is important because each museum develops bodies of scholarship that are specific to that institution.”

“We want a protocol layer that points back to how individual museums talk about their objects and allows users to interact with and see the diversity in terminology,” she said.

One-Stop Research

Matthew Battles, associate director, metaLAB at Harvard University, noted that today art historians will often need to travel from several galleries, museums, and archives in order to gather the strands of a story about a particular artist, particular genre, and particular period.

“We want to facilitate the research activity of a scholar who wants to tell those stories across an institutional context so that rather than spending five years visiting 25 institutions, they could have access to the data of those various institutions in one place,” he said.

He noted that while diverse institutions feature objects from similar periods in history, they may interpret that history differently. As an example, he noted that all institutions agree there was a Byzantine era, though not all agree on a start date or end date. Where one researcher might want to have a numerically specific date, another might be interested in how various institutions have defined Byzantine.

He said that rather than proposing yet one more system to bring all of the museum systems into alignment, which hasn’t worked anyway, it would be better to provide a “roadmap” of how you can bring the various data into agreement or, if one chooses, eliminate the distinctions.

Battles said the NEH seed money—known as a discovery grant—was key, since the resulting research would be a public good that could impact the way stories are told at exhibitions, in elementary school classrooms, and in higher education, all of which would be “more richly informed by a broader array of resources.”

Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and co-founder of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium, organized the conference with department chair Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D.

Instead of paying a fee, conference-goers were asked to send donations to Goddard Riverside at Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center, which offers services to the Amsterdam Houses across the street from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Digital mapping is a process that merges data with maps to create a virtual online image that can be static or interactive. Donovan said focusing on social justice issues through the lens of digital mapping allowed for a cross-disciplinary approach that wouldn’t ordinarily be found at a typical geography conference. Professors came from a variety of disciplines, including history, art history, urban planning, Latinx studies, psychology, social work, and education.

“Spatial media have politics, these are not neutral things,” said Donovan, who teaches a course of the same name as the conference for the Masters in Public Media.  “We need to look at how our subjects are using digital mapping in their own lives and not just use this technology to study them from afar, like a scientist with a clipboard.”

In panel titled “Mapping the Local: A Focus on New York,” Jennifer Pipitone, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at the College of Mount St. Vincent, and Svetlana Jović, Ph.D., assistant professor of developmental psychology at SUNY Old Westbury, presented research that essentially handed the digital “clipboard” over to the Bronx Community College students they were teaching —and studying. At the time, the two were writing fellows at the college.

In an effort to map what “community” meant to the students, the researchers used geo-locations of photos taken by the participants “in order to illustrate and make sense of their experience of belonging in the city,” they wrote in the abstract. The maps revealed that students restricted their movements to above Central Park, “delineating participants’ lived boundary of race and class.” The method is referred to as “participatory action research.”

Throughout the conference, dozens of examples were given on how mapping technology can be used to heighten consciousness and problem solve. Adam Arenson, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Manhattan College, also on the Focus on New York panel, talked about how he worked with his students to help map slave burial sites in the Bronx, many of which sit unmarked on New York City parkland.

“These are all ways to memorialize the injustices of the past, to map them in the landscape and to be aware of them,” he said. “Though the information is incomplete, and we must do what we can to fill out the map, make the connections, and demonstrate how the injustices of slavery still shape New York City today.”

In her keynote address later that day, Sarah Elwood, Ph.D., professor and chair of geography at the University of Washington, took a theoretical look at how mapping with communities through participatory methods helps “unprivilege the map,” thereby making it less of a colonial process.

As one of the early theoretical thinkers in the field of geographic information systems, known as GIS, she said she is still learning how to infuse her work with “critical race thought” that has surged in academia over the past five years. After the lecture, she recalled a moment at a mapping justice conference in Baltimore when she noticed the diversity of the participants.

“I looked around the room and I realized that it was a different room than one that I had ever been in, in this critical mapping world,” she said. “It was full of activists and young scholars and people of color, queer folks, thinking and theorizing in ways that were not part of my first 20 years in this field.”

She called the moment an “epiphany.” She said while she continues to incorporate Marxist critique that allows her “to get at some structural processes of inequality” in mapping, her work is now heavily informed by black feminism, queer theory, and Latinx studies.

“Once you’ve had an epiphany like that, it’s like, ‘Well, duh, obvious!’ but yet, you’re also embarrassed that it’s taken so long for this epiphany to happen,” she said. “I always think, in those moments, ‘Thank God we have our whole life to become ourselves.’”

The injustices of offshore tax evasion. The relationship between Sigmund Freud and his mentor Jean-Martin Charcot. The connection between stress responses and glucose-sensing neurons in the brain. The power of dance to promote social-emotional learning.

These topics sparked the interest of three recent Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduates whose research papers were honored by the Global Undergraduate Awards, a Dublin-based program that recognizes top undergraduate work and seeks to connect students across cultures and disciplines.

Examining the Injustice of Tax Crimes

Public awareness of offshore financial crimes has risen since the publication of the Panama and Paradise Papers in 2015 and 2017, respectively, but Briana Boland, FCLC ’19 was left wondering whether the attention has resulted in increased regulation.

For her foreign service seminar, the international studies major looked at the tax governance policies of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Group of 20, the international body composed of leaders from nearly two dozen of the world’s largest economies.

What she found is that while public scrutiny of offshore finance has increased, there has been little progress toward better international tax governance.

“Global governance mechanisms have failed to effectively regulate tax avoidance,” Boland writes in “Tax Injustice: The Failure of Public Scrutiny to Translate into Global Tax Governance.”

She does express optimism about the potential for increased public attention to lead to better regulation, stating in the paper’s conclusion that “[p]ublic engagement and activism to hold states and intergovernmental organizations accountable … is critically important to ensuring any future justice and equality in the international economy.”

Boland’s paper was recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards as a Highly Commended entry in the political science and international relations category—a designation given to the top 10% of papers submitted in each subject area. It later was named a Regional Winner, meaning it was deemed the best paper in that category in the United States and Canada.

Boland described the recognition as “a tangible result of hard work and scholarship,” and expressed gratitude to her faculty mentor, adjunct instructor Anna Levy, “for encouraging me to pursue my research interest in the topic and for continuing to work with me even after our class had ended.”

Since graduating from Fordham last May, Boland spent the summer in Dalian, China, studying Chinese as a recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department. Now she’s back in New York City interning for U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on immigration and foreign affairs issues.

Freud as a Mentee—and the Amygdala’s Role in Eating Behavior

Kaetlyn Conner, FCLC ’19, who majored in integrative neuroscience, produced two award-winning papers.

In “Charcot: The Catalyst of Freudian Psychoanalysis,”—which received the Global Undergraduate Awards’ Highly Commended designation in history—she focused on the relationship between Sigmund Freud and one of his mentors, Jean-Martin Charcot. Conner decided to write about Freud and Charcot as a final assignment for her interdisciplinary capstone course, Hysteria/Sexuality/Unconscious, taught by professors Doron Ben-Atar and Anne Hoffman, because they were both prominent figures in the study of hysteria and sexuality.

Freud worked under Charcot, a prominent neurologist, at Paris’s La Salpêtrière hospital in 1885 and 1886, an experience that gave Freud the tools to invent the practice of psychoanalysis, Conner wrote.

“Freud’s ideas about trauma, sexuality, and hypnosis, that were formed and shaped by his early exposure to male hysteric patients and Charcot’s therapeutic methodologies, went on to have significant impacts on Freud’s way of thinking,” she wrote.

“By studying the works of both men, I was able to draw parallels between the two and infer some of the effects that Charcot’s work may have had on Freud’s career.”

Conner’s second paper earned the Highly Commended honor in psychology.

In “Glucose-Sensing Neurons in the Medial Amygdala and their Role in Glucose Homeostasis,” she investigated the way the medial amygdala portion of the brain responds to glucose levels, and how that affects subjects’ eating behaviors.

While most studies on glucose-sensing in the brain have focused on similar neurons in the hypothalamus and brain stem, Conner finds that the medial amygdala, which is central to reproductive, sexual, emotional, and defensive responses, may also have a role in feeding behaviors or glucose regulation.

“As obesity rates in America continue to rise at alarming rates,” Conner writes, “research investigating the neuronal processes and mechanisms behind feeding behavior will continue to be of the utmost importance.”

The paper came out of an independent research project Conner conducted under the supervision of Sarah Stanley, Ph.D., at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. Conner continued to working in the Stanley Laboratory after graduating from Fordham, thanks to a grant from the American Heart Association that allowed her to extend her work there through the summer. More recently, she moved back to her hometown of Pittsburgh for a job as a research specialist in the CARE Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which studies how parental care is related to how children learn to express and regulate their emotions using brain and behavioral methods.

Conner says that her research and professional success reaffirm that she chose the right school.

“Fordham’s unique mixture of supportive peers and engaging professors really challenged me and gave me the space to explore new areas of research that I had not previously considered,” she said.

Dance Education as an Agent for Change

Caroline Shriver, FCLC ’19, double majored in dance and Latin American and Latino studies, and she brought both of those subjects to bear in her award-winning research, which was recognized in the anthropology and cultural studies category.

In “Becoming an Agent for Positive Change: Youth Development of Self Efficacy and Agency through Social and Emotional Dance Education in Aguas Frías, Colombia,” Shriver sought to demonstrate how Colombia’s tumultuous history and identity of conflict pervade the country to this day, and how students would benefit from an emphasis on social-emotional learning.

After teaching dance-based social-emotional learning classes in the rural community of Aguas Frías and conducting interviews with a number of her students, she found that “a physicalized form of social-emotional learning gave students the opportunity to develop a degree of self-efficacy.”

In these classes, she had students take part in physical trust-building exercises, and she asked them to teach a dance move to their peers to build a collaborative choreography.

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Employing her research and that of others, she concluded that physicalized social-emotional education “offers an effective strategy to combat Colombia’s social order of conflict and provides a vehicle for young people to develop personal and cultural agency.”

Since graduating from Fordham, Shriver traveled to Spain, Berlin, and Panama, where she participated in dance workshops and taught dance. She also led a group of 13 undergraduate dancers from the U.S. on a dance outreach trip to Colombia. After returning from these travels, she has been freelancing as both a dancer and dance teacher. She said she plans on continuing to pursue a career as an artist and social activist.

“This award reminds me that arts education can have a positive impact on young people around the world, and it inspires me to further develop and share my passion for dance education,” Shriver said.

Boland, Conner, and Shriver are not the first Fordham students to be recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards. In 2018, Joshua Anthony, FCLC ’19, was named a Global Winner for his paper on the morphing historical perceptions of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who was the chief translator to Hernán Cortés.

“The range of the majors and minors of these winners captures just some of the breadth of the many academic and research opportunities offered at Fordham University,” said Josie Grégoire, J.D., assistant dean for seniors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “We are delighted with their success.”

In a recent conversation, Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., spoke about the science that has been taking place in his lab since he became the first Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in Chemistry last fall. His research blends three scientific branches: quantum mechanics, chemistry, and computational science. This month, his research on biases in chemical reaction data was published in the journal Nature. Fordham News spoke to him about his work.

The Bepler endowed chair has allowed you more time to tackle research projects. That includes your $7.4 million project, “Discovering reactions and uncovering mechanisms of perovskite [mineral]  formation,” funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Tell me about this project. 

Most experiments are designed, conducted, and interpreted by humans. The goal of this project is to create the capability of having machine-specified experiments so that computer algorithms can select new experiments to perform that accelerate the scientific discovery process.

What does “machine-specified” mean? 

We want to give computer algorithms the ability to perform experiments in the real world. But to do this, we need to make sure that the specifications of what to do are completely unambiguous. Humans are pretty good about working with imprecise instructions about what to do. If I say, “Hey, let’s go to the zoo,” you would infer it’s the Bronx Zoo and that “us” includes you and I and other individuals within earshot. But a computer is not going to know what I meant: What zoo? What entrance? How do we get there? Who should go? We are working to develop software that allows people (or computers) to specify the experiments they want to be performed. The software turns that into a set of instructions in an unambiguous way. This might include a mixture of instructions for human operators and for machines—just like the way that specifying where you want to go in an Uber ride fills in the details of how to get there. Finally, we want to make it easy to collect all of the things that happen during the process so that we can learn from that data.

Like programming a self-driving car, but for science experiments? 

Yeah. That’s the high-level goal: a “self-driving” or autonomous laboratory. Just like a self-driving car, we have to be able to “steer” the experiments (specify what to do) and “see” the world. So we are also collecting as much information about everything that happens in the laboratory so that the algorithms can make sense of what is happening when devising new experiment plans. Experiment specifications are the steering wheel, so to speak. As new experiments are performed, machine-learning models get trained on the new data. This is a general problem across many areas of science—how do we use data to more efficiently get scientific insight? Because of the scale of the data, we use algorithms to sift through the data and identify anomalies, and use the insights latent in that data to devise the next round of experiment plans. 

There’s another part to your project: using this “self-driving laboratory” to develop as many different types of perovskites—minerals that help create solar cells—as possible, and then identify the most useful perovskites. 

Yes. Essentially, what we’ve cooked up—in collaboration with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Haverford College—is a way to do these types of [perovskite]syntheses using commercially-available laboratory robots. More specifically, organohalide perovskite materials are hybrid materials that have both organic and inorganic building units—and changing these changes their electronic and optical properties. As a result, there is a general interest in using perovskites for high performance, low-cost solar cells. We are using the robotic system [called RAPID]to try to discover new materials that will have higher performance. But just to be clear, our focus for now is on discovering new compounds. We don’t yet build devices from these discoveries, although we are expanding work in that direction [in collaboration with researchers from MIT]. It would be neat if we also found some really great high-performance perovskites—but even if we do not, we’ll still be able to learn rules about how they form, and demonstrate this toolbox which can be applied to other scientific problems.

Another ongoing research project is the National Science Foundation-funded “Dark Reaction Project.” What is that about?

“Dark reactions” sounds mysterious, right? But it’s a simple idea. Most of the experiments performed in laboratories are never reported. Journals tend to publish only a single example of “success.” So this vast, unreported collection of marginal successes and failures never gets exposed to the world. So by analogy to the astronomer’s “dark matter,” we like to think of “dark reactions” as this vast majority of scientific experiments that aren’t seen directly [in journal articles], but yet influences scientists’ decisions in a non-obvious way.

The good news is that scientists keep good laboratory notebooks, so the “dark reactions” are in principle available. This project is an initiative to harness the unpublished failures and marginal successes [dark reactions]in laboratory notebooks, turn them into digital data, and use that to advance hydrothermal synthesis of oxides. Once you digitize the results, you can use that database to build a machine-learning model. With that machine-learning model, you can recommend reactions to perform in the laboratory. 

So the machine-learning model is learning from “dark reactions,” or our mistakes—what not to do? 

Correct. And you can only do this if you’ve got the complete record of success and failures. 

If you look at all the published scientific literature, all you see are successes. You never see any of the failures. So if you’re trying to identify a mathematical function that divides success and failure—and that’s really all that you’re doing with machine-learning, is finding the mathematical function—then your algorithm is going to look at all of these examples in the published literature and say, “Oh, good news, everything is successful.” Because all the examples that it sees are only examples of success. 

Lastly, you have a paper that was recently published by Nature: “Anthropogenic biases in chemical reaction data hinder exploratory inorganic synthesis.” How does it relate to dark reactions? 

This work is supported by the same project from the National Science Foundation, and is a natural continuation. “Dark reactions” are the experiments that have been tried in the laboratory, but not reported because they are “failures” or marginal successes. But what about the “extra dark” reactions that don’t even get attempted? In practice, chemical experiments are planned by human scientists and thus are subject to a variety of human cognitive biases, heuristics, and social influences that might lead to some reactions being systematically excluded. What we were able to show in this study is that such biases are present in the chemical reaction literature, and that the underrepresented reactions are not being excluded for any “good” reason—it’s not because they are more expensive, or more difficult, or more prone to failure, but rather simply because humans tend to get stuck in a rut when planning reactions. This might just be a curiosity, except for the fact that these anthropogenic (human-generated) data are now being widely used to train machine-learning models to predict chemical syntheses. The hazard is that we end up making the machine in our own image, so to speak, rather than letting it perform as well as it could. We were able to show that indeed, human-selected experiments were inferior to randomly-generated experiments for building machine learning models, even if you gave the humans many more reaction data.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hein, a Princeton-educated mathematician who moved to the U.S. from his native Germany more than a decade ago, is the first Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in Mathematics at Fordham University. Since his appointment last fall, he’s had more time to pursue his research in differential geometry, or geometry in any dimension. 

On a daily basis, he develops methods and equations that lead to new shapes. These shapes can surpass three-dimensional space. It’s impossible to sketch some of them. But the point of his papers, often with titles as abstract as “A Liouville Theorem for the Complex Monge-Ampere Equation on Product Manifolds,” is to explore uncharted territory in the realm of mathematics and develop new ways of thinking that can describe complex phenomena like black holes, though perhaps only decades or centuries from now. 

“[Mathematicians] try to figure out patterns, describe certain things that they observe, purely within math,” Hein said. “These methods and equations have a life of their own. They exist abstractly, without any specific application. And then 20, 30, 50 years later, it may turn out that this is exactly the right kind of math that you need to describe something that actually exists in the real world—like gravitational waves or black holes.” 

How did your love for math begin? 

There used to be these TV programs in Germany for people who didn’t finish high school or wanted to brush up on high school material before they went to college. I started watching the trigonometry program, just out of curiosity, when I was 9 or 10. I liked the shapes. They were explaining how to graph sin and cosine. I sat down after the lesson and tried to recreate that on paper on my own. And I got a shape that looked like the thing that I saw on TV. 

How do you define mathematics? 

Simple ideas that solve problems, that, in the end, are correct. It doesn’t depend on anybody’s opinion. It’s some pattern or idea that’s going to be correct a thousand years from now, if humanity still exists. 

Your branch of math is differential geometry. What does that mean? 

There’s the more elementary stuff, like basic differential geometry that actually happens in three-dimensional space, that actually exists in the real world, that engineers and physicists use all the time. Then there’s my work—the rarified, cutting-edge stuff in theoretical math.

What does it look like for you to do research? It’s obvious for chemists and biologists. They have microscopes, petri dishes, beakers—things like that. But for you, a mathematician, how does that work? 

I lie on the couch all day. I imagine shapes and connections between shapes and quantities and try to figure out if some quantity is going to be large or small—how different quantities interact with each other. It’s a little bit like art in the sense that you create shapes and patterns. And then if I have the complete picture in my mind, I’m usually able to see the solution.

My wife is a mathematician, too, so at least it’s not weird for her. She knows what’s going on … that I’m actually working. 

When you’re brainstorming, do you map out your thoughts on a blackboard? 

No. It’s just in my head. If I’ve really thought something through, I can just go to my laptop and write like 10 pages of equations and formulas and arguments and reasoning, based on what I have been imagining. Sometimes I have to do some calculations on paper, but that usually comes later.

What’s the most difficult part of your research?

That you’re stuck constantly. You don’t know what you’re doing most of the time. It’s not like you’re applying some method that you learned in grad school, and you’re trying to use that to create something new. I mean, sometimes it’s like that. But more often, you’re working on some problem that nobody’s really thought about before—that certainly no one has ever solved before. What that usually means is that the methods that exist aren’t sufficient enough to solve that problem. 

So you have to come up with new methods? 

Right. Usually it’s a tweak on some method that you learned in grad school or from somebody else’s paper. But, you know, once in a while, you have to create something completely new. 

To a non-mathematician, how do you explain the importance of your work? 

This kind of math that I do is incredibly abstract. Right now, nobody knows if it’s ever going to have an application to anything real. Much of the math is developed completely independently of any applications to physics [for example]. We often create new ideas for their own sake. And then [decades or even centuries later]it turns out to be exactly the right math that’s needed to make sense of things like quantum mechanics. 

You discover these new beasts, specimens. You can see them in your head. Somehow, they’re out there.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Since she became the first Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in Biology last fall, she has used her new position to pursue new or previously underfunded research projects and dedicate more time toward her student mentees in her Larkin Hall retina cell biology laboratory. And soon, she’ll be showcasing her research to scientists in Japan. 

Your lab specializes in retinal neurobiology. What does that mean? 

We study the long-term maintenance of the retina, the neural tissue in our eyes that allows us to see. How does our retina manage to function for life? What are the cellular and tissue mechanisms that are responsible for life-long visual function? 

What made you interested in studying the human eye? 

The eye is a particularly beautifully organized organ. Also, our visual sense is enormously important to most of us. If you ask people what they are afraid of when it comes to their health, they say cancer and blindness. To this day, even in developed countries, the risk of having visual impairment with age is very high. Diseases are not necessarily hereditary, and they affect a very large percentage of the elderly—age-related macular degeneration is diagnosed in about 25 percent of the U.S. population over 75. So there is a medical need. 

As a scientist, I also like the eye because unlike the brain, it’s easy to access. You can look at part of the central nervous system by shining light into the eye. You can’t use eye drops on brains. The accessibility of the eye, from an experimental point of view, is a huge advantage. There’s no other part of our central nervous system—brain, neural retina, spinal cord—that you can manipulate in real time and take a look at. 

What brought you to Fordham? 

When I came to Fordham in the fall of 2008, I was already an established principal investigator. I had been Assistant and Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College for several years. The move to Fordham was really motivated by the opportunity to integrate research and science education at the immersion level, where students come into the lab, participate, and understand what professional lab research is really about. That is what makes my Fordham lab different, not only from my previous lab at the medical school but also from many other labs of my colleagues and competitors around the world.

How has the Bepler endowed chair changed your life as a scientist and professor? 

The Bepler endowment allows me to be more present in the lab and work on experiments directly on a daily basis and often with my mentees. For instance, I used to ask my students to email me their research results at night. Now I can actually be there in real time. 

I also have the opportunity to participate more often in international conferences. For instance, this fall, I’m invited to participate in a workshop called “The retina—Mechanism of photoreceptor degeneration and regeneration, and roles of immune system” hosted by the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. I will teach budding retina cell biologists and physicians about the work in my lab, possibly recruit new investigators and collaborators, and spread the word about Fordham as an institution with a vibrant Ph.D. program, where graduate students join labs like mine. The flexibility that I have, supported by the Bepler endowment, makes that a lot easier. 

With funding from the endowment, I was also able to push an important project to completion. We found that by using biosensor eye drops alone—a non-toxic, gentle procedure—we can detect early-onset retinal degeneration in experimental models at a stage where rescue, and thus prevention of vision loss, may still be possible. Using these diagnostic eye drops, we can monitor blinding disease and maybe make decisions on therapy without having to do any kind of invasive testing. 

At the moment, what’s the most exciting thing happening in your lab? 

A second, new eye drop study. Unlike the first study, these aren’t diagnostic eye drops. This time, we’re actually providing therapy. We’re delaying blindness in an animal model that carries a mutation also found in human patients. The animal we are studying for this particular project is called the Royal College of Surgeons rat. It’s a very well characterized, classic animal model for retinitis pigmentosa, which is a hereditary form of blindness that is very frequent in the human population. The idea is that anything we give to the animal that is actually working will then be picked up by physicians and used to delay blindness in human patients.

What is the most rewarding part of working with young scientists? 

The students, for the very first time in their lives, are realizing how it feels to perform an experiment to the best of their abilities and to obtain a result that nobody else in the whole world has ever seen before. To make scientific progress means discovery at a very fundamental level. And that is a thrill—the thrill of discovery in and of itself. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

But give her the right documents, and Green, an assistant professor of accounting and taxation at the Gabelli School of Business since 2015, can do something akin to it.

Green’s expertise is in accounting for income taxes and the lengths that corporations go to reduce the taxes they pay to the government.

In an ongoing research study titled, “Can Financial Statement Information Predict Taxable Income? Evidence from the Valuation Allowance,” Green and her co-authors examine how one can predict a firm’s privately reported taxable income by examining publicly available financial statements.

This is possible because in the United States, all publicly traded companies are required to file a financial statement—specifically Form 10-K—with the Securities and Exchange Commission and share both the current and future tax effects of the economic transactions that they engage in.

Losses as Assets

Those future effects result in either a future expense, which is called a deferred tax liability, or a future benefit, which is called a deferred tax asset. Somewhat counterintuitively, a firm’s net operating loss is classified as a deferred tax asset, because how losses are treated for financial reporting purposes differ from how they’re treated for tax purposes.

“As a business, if I prepare my financial statements and I have a loss, I just report that loss in the financial statements. When I prepare my tax return, my taxable income is bounded at zero. I can’t report negative taxable income on my tax return,” Green said.

“In that scenario, I’ll actually report lower financial statement income compared to my taxable income. What the IRS does is it allows firms to take that loss and either carry it forward or, before the law changed last year, carry it back, and use it to offset taxable income in either of those two periods. It’s reported as an asset on the financial statements, because in the future, I’ll be able to use it to reduce my taxable income.”

When a business reports a deferred tax asset, it is also obligated to report whether it’ll recognize it in the future. The catch? One can only claim it if one has had or expects to have taxable income. If the business does not expect to have taxable income in the future, the value of that asset is worth less, and must be reported as such.

Green’s research shows that the “valuation allowance,” as it’s known, is what allows one to get a glimpse into a firm’s otherwise private financial machinations.

“Say I had a deferred tax asset of $100, but I only think I’ll be able to utilize $30 of it. Then I would record it as a valuation allowance of $70 against the asset. That would reduce the net value of the asset down to $30. In order to determine whether or not I need that valuation allowance, I have to consider sources of future taxable income,” she said.

“As a manager, I have to essentially forecast what I think my taxable income will be into the future. When I put a valuation allowance on this deferred tax asset, I’m essentially saying, ‘I don’t think that I’m going to have sufficient taxable income in the future to offset.’ ”

Changes enacted to the tax code by Congress last year have changed some ways the valuation allowance can be used, but Green said it’s too soon to see the effects of the change because of a lack of available data. The law also addressed tax avoidance, another area that Green has written on, in papers such as “The Influence of a Firm’s Business Strategy on its Tax Aggressiveness,” which she co-wrote in 2016.

Innovative for Business Purposes, Innovative for Tax Purposes

“Tax avoidance is anything that a firm does to reduce its effective tax rate. It’s anything that a firm does, from something as benign as investing in municipal bonds to something more egregious, like participating in tax shelters,” she said.

“What we find is that firms that are innovative for business purposes are also innovative for tax purposes, and as a result they tend to take more risk. Firms that tend to be less risky tend to have higher tax rates, but their rates tend to be more consistent over time.”

Like death, taxes are said to be one of the few things certain in life, and the never-ending areas of life they can affect are a source of fascination for Green.

“I tell my students that the universe of tax is huge, and I only know a small part of it, and when they start my class, they know a tiny dot of it. By the end of it, it’s going to expand a little bit,” she said.

“It’s important to know that they can’t know everything, just like I can’t know everything, but you should always be willing to learn.”

Last fall, she and her valuation paper co-authors attended in a roundtable at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C., to help develop a business tax model to predict corporate tax revenues using publicly available data.

“The thing I found interesting was that everybody in that room was generally interested in learning about how this information could predict future taxable income. For certain governmental organizations, it may help them determine what revenues are going to be that feed into the budget, or for other organizations or agencies, it can help them determine what the revenue impact of a change in tax law will actually be,” she said.

“That is useful, so I like being able to say what I’m working on matters beyond the ivory towers, if you will.”

The International Symposium on Digital Scholarship took place from June 3 to 5 at Birkbeck College and Fordham’s London Centre. Sponsored by the University’s Office of Research, it featured a mix of lectures, workshops, and formal and informal gatherings geared toward furthering research opportunities and international collaborations.

If last year’s gathering illustrated how cross-border collaboration is key to tackling vexing challenges of our time, the London gathering showed how, in the digital realm, no one discipline can go it alone.

Bringing Technology and Scholarship Together

“Digital scholarship is notable for its interdisciplinary nature, since it involves not only IT and computer science, but also the humanities, social sciences, and schools of education,” said Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., the academic coordinator for the digital symposium.

The Joseph Fitzpatrick S.J. Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies and curator of Fordham’s Medieval Sources Bibliography, Kowaleski has deep connections to both London and the digital humanities.

In London, she delivered a keynote address, “Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: Acknowledging Collaborative Work in Digital Scholarship Projects.” She also presented a research project that touches on both London and the digital realm, titled “Prosopography, Database Design, and Linked Data in the Medieval Londoners Project.”

The project is a collaboration with Katherina Fostano, visual resources coordinator in the department of Art History, and Kowaleski said it was notable that Fostano presented at the conference, as did Elizabeth Cornell, Ph.D., director of communications at Fordham’s department of information technology. Adding professional staff such as librarians and graduate students to the mix, was key to the conference’s success, she said.

“One of the things that my research shows, and that I have experienced, is how crucial librarians are to digital efforts now. I’m grateful that Fordham has included them in this program,” she said.

London and New York, Working as a Team

Representing the Graduate School of Education (GSE), Professor of Childhood Special Education Su-Je Cho, Ph.D, and doctoral student Kathleen Doyle jointly presented “Using a Digital Learning Platform to Increase Levels of Evidence-Based Practices in Global Teacher Education Programs.” It detailed Project REACH, a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative that makes widely available the best evidence-based practices for training prospective teachers.

George Magoulas, Ph.D., Alex Poulovassilis, Ph.D., and Andrea Cali, Ph.D., members of Birkbeck College’s Knowledge Lab, helped them collect and analyze data through the website.

Working with a partner in London made sense for this project, Cho said, because one of her goals is for Project REACH to get more use internationally. She, Doyle, and the GSE’s Alesia Moldavan, Ph.D., assistant professor of mathematics education, will collaborate with Christine Edwards-Leis, Ph.D., associate dean of research, and enterprise and doctoral student Jennifer Murray from St. Mary’s College in London on a new endeavor geared toward student teachers’ mental health. Once finished, it will be incorporated into Project REACH.

“The student teaching experience is very stressful, because it’s not their own classroom they have to student teach in. It’s someone else’s classroom. By providing this kind of platform, they can also share their concerns and knowledge and frustrations with the students overseas,” she said.

For Doyle, the trip was an opportunity to see how colleagues from other disciplines assemble collaborative teams.

“I really appreciated learning across the fields. Being in the Graduate School of Education, I’ve been mainly focused on that field. It was refreshing to hear about the other ways digital scholarship is utilized in other disciplines,” she said.

Urban Challenges That Cross Borders

Gregory T. Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies, presented “Keeping Place in ‘Smart’ Cities: Situating the Settlement House as a Means of Knowing and Belonging in the Informational City.” The project, which he is developing with the assistance of Melissa Butcher, Ph.D., reader in social and cultural geography at Birkbeck College, will highlight the efforts of New York City’s Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center and London’s Toynbee Hall.

The project will focus on the “settlement house” model of community center that was founded a century ago to confront segregation and displacement and promote belonging.

“New York City and London are examples of global cities that are going through significant technological change, both in terms of the cities themselves becoming more digitized as well as the economy and the kinds of jobs and the kinds of education that’s being elevated. With that comes all kinds of difficult changes and gentrification that causes displacement,” said Donovan, who is also organizing November symposium at Fordham called Mapping (in)justice.

“We’re going to look at how we might network [Lincoln Square and Toynbee] through digital technology and think about how they’re managing to keep pace in these communities that are often being displaced in this kind of digital gentrification.”

Her latest research looks at what happens when we face discrimination in our daily lives and whether having a strong sense of racial and ethnic identity better protects us from the effects of discrimination—or makes us feel worse.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What inspired you to research the relationship between discrimination and racial and ethnic identity?

There was a growing literature that found really negative effects of discrimination on how kids feel about themselves: their physical health, their mental health, their academic well-being. In the adult literature, discrimination is connected with things like obesity, blood pressure, breast cancer, and mortality. That literature is quite robust—meaning there’s been a lot of studies that find these very consistent effects.

So then I started putting these three pieces together: discrimination, health outcomes, and identity. If discrimination is so bad for outcomes, how might identity play a role in this? My hunch was … it’s good for kids to feel good about their racial identity. But I wanted to see where the data fell. It was really important to find the evidence and the data to support it, rather than just conjuring up ideas that made sense in our heads.  

How did your new study compare to similar research conducted in the past?

There was very mixed literature [in the past]. Some studies found that having a strong sense of ethnic identity helped buffer the effects of discrimination. And then other research found if you have a really strong sense of identity, it actually makes you feel worse. It impacts you more because it’s an important part of who you are. We were finding mixed results in our own data, too. And so that’s why we set out to do this meta-analysis.

What my students and I did is we went through all of the published research, unpublished research, dissertations, raw data that people were willing to share with us. And we came up with this meta-analysis to see once and for all, is identity good or bad for discrimination?

You and your students pored through data from 18,000 teenagers and adults across the world. After completing your meta-analysis, what did you find?

The overall take-home is that having a strong sense of ethnic identity does mitigate the effects of discrimination.

One of the main dimensions of identity that we looked at was a sense of commitment—how strongly connected you feel to your group. You know you’re a member of this group, and it’s integral to who you are. The other dimension we looked at was how active you are in exploring the meaning of your identity. You’re still thinking about it, trying to figure out the role of race and ethnicity in your identity.

What we found was that people who are sure and committed and clear about their sense of identity … that’s where you see the benefits. If you’ve decided that’s an important part of who you are, you have a toolbox for how to deal with it. One, you’ve probably dealt with it before. Two, you probably have a community of people. You can say, hey, this happened to me today. And they can say, oh, that happened to me too. Or they can help you process it. And three, just having a sense of … I know who I am. When you have clarity around it, you can say, oh, the issue isn’t about me—that’s about you.

But for people who are still not sure, it has a worse impact on them. If you are, let’s say African-American, and you’re not quite sure what that means yet, and people discriminate against you for that, it has a much worse impact because you’re not even sure how you feel about being a member of a group, and still people are treating you unfairly because of it.

Did you find any differences among racial groups?

Yes. Having a strong sense of commitment to your identity was actually stronger for Latinx than for Asian American individuals. We can speculate, but we don’t really know why that is. These processes and dynamics are so different for various groups in the United States and even abroad just because their histories and social positioning are so different. Immigration histories, language, acculturation—all of that.

How can we encourage people, especially children and adolescents, to embrace their racial and ethnic identity?

Research on racial socialization with families—how parents talk to their kids about race—suggests that parents who instill feelings of pride in their racial and ethnic group can help kids develop a sense of identity, which would then help buffer discrimination. There’s also some research looking at peer socialization. So how do peers talk to kids about their race and identity? Having those messages, either from friend groups or parents or maybe even the media, can encourage students to embrace diversity, individuality, and differences across racial and ethnic groups.

So it seems like it really starts at home, with parents fostering a sense of pride in their children.

I also think community matters. For example, if your parents are telling you it’s great to be Latinx and you go to school with kids where there are no people like you, or you live in a neighborhood where there are no other Latinx families, that message only goes so far.

I think children are more impacted by their parents at a younger age. But once they move into middle and high school, I think peers have a much stronger socializing effect.

“My research goal was to take this socially charged debate and recognize there’s not enough data for either side of the issue, so we need to provide some empirical data that can be a starting point for some for these discussions,” said Jordan DeVylder, Ph.D.

In a paper released late last year on JAMA Network, DeVylder, associate professor of social work at the Graduate School of Social Service, found police violence posed a significant risk to public mental health in communities where such violence was prevalent.

The research will be featured this May on the Academic Minute, a radio program produced by Albany-based WAMC and broadcast nationally on NPR.

DeVylder said he began the research in Baltimore soon after the death of Freddie Grey, the 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody, igniting demonstrations throughout the city. At the time, DeVylder was doing work at the University of Maryland that focused on workplace discrimination, immigration, and urban living as risk factors for psychosis.

“The uprising was all around in west Baltimore, so I did a quick literature search and found that while there are some data from criminologists, there was very little in terms of public health,” he said. “The last time someone had looked at police violence from a public health perspective was in 2004. We needed to assess it from the standpoint of the community.”

DeVylder said he is well aware that police officers may take issue with these findings. But he said the research isn’t just for the benefit of the community, but for the police as well.

“Addressing police violence is not saying there’s something wrong with the police,” he said. “My expectation is that police who don’t engage in this kind of behavior would benefit for this to be addressed. It can’t be easy to work with people who engage in abusive behavior.”

The study, conducted in 2017, was not limited to underserved communities of color that are often associated with a prevalence of police violence. Rather, it examined a cross-section of Baltimore and New York City, studying adults of the same race breakdowns, median age, and sex in the two cities as derived from the 2010 census.

It looked at past-year exposure to police violence using the Police Practices Inventory, a metric designed by DeVylder for the survey. The violence experienced was categorized by types of violence as defined by the World Health Organization, such as physical, sexual, psychological, and neglectful. While police killings get the lion’s share of media attention, DeVylder said that other the other categories can be more nuanced, such as sexual violence, which can take the form of an inappropriate strip search, or neglect, which can take the form of unanswered emergency calls.

“I looked at each of these categories separately, and it surprised me how common these things are reported,” he said.

The paper, titled, “Association of Exposure to Police Violence with Prevalence of Mental Health Symptoms among Urban Residents in the United States,” found that four mental health variables (psychological distress, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and psychotic experiences) were significantly affected by four variables of police violence (physical violence with and without a weapon, sexual violence, and neglect). This does not necessarily mean that 100 percent of those reporting mental health symptoms also reported police violence, but that people exposed to police violence were two to seven times more likely to report mental health symptoms, depending on the type of exposure.

Overall, suicidal ideation, attempts, and psychotic experiences were reported by 9.1 percent, 3.1 percent, and 20.6 percent of the sample, respectively. The prevalence of police violence was 3.2 percent for sexual violence, 7.5 percent for physical without a weapon, 4.6 percent with a weapon, 13.2 percent for psychological, and 14.9 percent for neglect. Police violence exposures were higher among men, people of color, and those identified as lesbian, gay, or transgender.

“The more assaultive forms of violence were the most psychologically impactful,” said DeVylder.  “On a more personal level, my feeling is we should look for alternatives for violence so that we’re on par with nations that are as developed as we are.”

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center welcomed 28 scholars and journalists to Fordham from March 20 to 22 for the first seminar in its five-year research initiative on Orthodox Christianity and human rights.

The meetings brought together an international group of experts in Orthodox Christianity from several disciplinary backgrounds and areas of specialization to discuss the major issues surrounding Orthodoxy’s complicated and often contentious relationship to human rights discourse.

According to center co-director George Demacopoulos, the goal of the project is to “flood the field” with publications analyzing multiple facets of Orthodoxy’s relationship to human rights: the history and theology of human rights in the Orthodox tradition, as well as current engagements with human rights among Orthodox communities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Over the next five years, the participating scholars will not only publish their research in academic books and journals but, in consultation with journalists, will disseminate their work through popular media to promote a more nuanced public understanding of Orthodoxy and human rights.

The three-day seminar, held at the Lincoln Center campus, featured sessions offering a broad overview of the current state of the field.

Kristina Stoeckl of the University of Innsbruck introduced participants to the Russian Orthodox Church’s recent statements on human rights, especially in debates in the United Nations over the family and “traditional values.” Stoeckl said that over the last decade, Russia has become the global leader in challenging Western understandings of universal human rights and has sought to transform human rights language to promote its “traditional values” agenda.

Michael Hanna of the Century Foundation led a discussion on Christians in the Arab world, where their status as religious minorities has led to a different relationship to human rights than in Orthodox-majority countries like Russia. For Middle Eastern Christians, negotiating questions of human rights is fundamentally an issue of survival, not one of values, he said.

The center also welcomed as a guest speaker Samuel Moyn, a leading historian of human rights at Yale University, who offered a historical overview of the origins of 20th-century human rights discourse through the work of Roman Catholic “personalist” philosophers like Jacques Maritain and their promotion of human dignity. Discussion turned to Maritain’s links to Russian Orthodox personalists who fled to Paris following the Bolshevik revolution, as well as to the role of Lebanese Orthodox thinker Charles Malik in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of human rights.

Major support for the project is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation with additional support provided by Leadership 100.

–Nathaniel Wood